This article explores the conceptual and practical meanings of fahafahana (‘freedom’ in Malagasy) in the Highlands of Madagascar, a context where the legacies of past forms of slavery have left deep marks both in local memories and in social and economic hierarchies. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which specific notions of freedom have been elaborated against the background of the local history of slavery and emancipation; how these concepts have been charged with different meanings in different periods of Malagasy history, becoming an arena for the elaboration of different political agendas; and how people of different status, class, gender and age reframe the concept of freedom in their everyday lives. Local notions of freedom emerge as part of the local political commentaries through which power positions are accepted, renegotiated or contested, and they intersect deeply with local notions of honour and respectability. The idea that freedom is somehow related to issues of genealogical purity and to the ability to maintain and improve the wealth and dignity of the family continues to characterize local understandings and representations of this notion, signalling that the legacies of what it meant to be ‘free’ when slavery was still a legal institution still inform and shape current power structures and local social commentaries.

Nigerian Pentecostalism continues to assume many of the externalities of popular culture in the country, creating a unique composite of spirituality and secular entertainment. In an emergent trend, church leaders invite popular entertainers into church services and other church-related events with the declared aim of energizing their congregations. Where does the imperative in Nigerian Pentecostalism to outsource the work of inspiration to performers and jesters come from? What light does the embrace of Nigerian Pentecostalism and popular culture – the theological and the theatrical – throw on both these worlds? Triggered primarily by these questions, and mobilizing insights and analogies from the economics of religion, this article analyses strategies of evangelization enacted by Pentecostal leaders in a context of religious saturation. It is argued that, given the strictures of a changing religious marketplace, the unique convergence of spirituality and entertainment, as encapsulated by this trend, is a function of spiritual entrepreneurs’ need not just to retain the patronage of existing religious consumers but also to attract new ones. Licensed by the foundational liberalism of the Nigerian Yorùbá world, a Pentecostalism that is accepting of popular culture generates new spiritual and artistic forms.

Can the African novel work as interlocutor for anthropologists studying Africa’s postcolonial politics today? Conversely, is there a role for the African literary imagination in our renewed efforts to decolonize anthropology? This article draws on Chinua Achebe’s fictional representations of the postcolony in two novels, No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People, to discuss the value of the African literary archive for an anthropological interest in elites, corruption and postcolonial decadence in the early postcolony. This African literary archive has contributed enormously to Achille Mbembe’s critique of power in the postcolony. Here, I argue that, in contrast to anthropologists of the late colonial and early postcolonial moment, African writers such as Achebe mobilized fiction as a powerful form of critique to address early signs of postcolonial despair and disillusionment in Africa.

This article analyses an episode of public anxiety when, in late 2013, word spread throughout Kenya’s rural Lunga Lunga constituency that politically connected gangs called mumiani were abducting and killing children for their eyes, tongues and genitals. The rapid spread of these rumours coincided with a regional drought, parliamentary election campaigns, and the apparent discovery of ‘devil worship paraphernalia’ inside a shipping container at the nearby port of Mombasa. I analyse the 2013 mumiani scare in relation to histories of famine survival strategies, predatory patronage and occult speculation to argue that the 2013 mumiani panic condensed and expressed these histories in figural rather than temporal form. As ‘constellations’ of coastal Kenyan historical consciousness, mumiani are (and have long been) a key feature of, and at the same time iconic of, a broader critical discourse about the dark side of political largesse – ‘politics by night’.

In ‘Provisional notes on the postcolony’, Achille Mbembe argues that obscenity and grotesquery are essential characteristics of postcolonial regimes of domination and subordination. This article attempts to extend this insight for the study of contemporary African social formations. Drawing on examples from Central, Southern and West Africa, the article reflects on Mbembe’s particular emphasis on the carnality of power, especially power’s ability to (over-)carnalize social relations, by further demonstrating why this is useful for understanding the relations of domination and subordination in Africa.

Slam poets in Africa are part of an emerging social movement. In this article, the focus is on women in this upcoming slam movement in francophone Africa. For these women, slam has meant a change in their lives as they have found words to describe difficult experiences that were previously shrouded in silence. Their words, performances and engaged actions are developing into a body of popular knowledge that questions the status quo and relates to the ‘emerging consciousness’ in many African urban societies of unequal, often gendered, power relations. The women who engage in slam have thus become a voice for the emancipation of women in general.

This article provides an account of the relationship between imperial Ethiopia and Eritrea in the realm of banking governance from the start of the federation to the last years of the imperial regime. It looks in particular at the relationship between the Ethiopian administrations and an Italian bank, Banco di Roma, which had its headquarters in Eritrea from 1948 to 1967 before moving to Addis Ababa. The struggle for control of the economic flows generated by the Italian bank is an index of the changes in centre–periphery linkages between Addis Ababa and the sub-regional centre of Asmara. Archival evidence highlights the multifaced nature of Ethiopian governance and the role performed by the Italian institution in providing alternative sources of diplomatic leverage and wealth accumulation to the Eritrean elite. It is argued that the extraterritorial status enjoyed by Banco di Roma until 1967 was actively tolerated by a section of the Ethiopian establishment, which resorted to an established pattern of imperial governance based on flexibility in return for tribute. This centre–periphery arrangement was harshly opposed by prominent Ethiopian officials from the Ministry of Finance and the National Bank of Ethiopia, who struggled to enforce tighter government control over capital flows within and across the country's borders. The National Bank's final success in the quest for financial centralization drained significant resources out of Eritrea, with adverse effects on the preservation of the pax aethiopica in the former Italian colony.

This article provides a case study of a Nigerian community day celebration as a constellation of power dynamics in which kingship, chieftaincy and local politics are intertwined. Complementing the interpretations of the community day as a festival and a community development initiative, this research approaches Oka Day as an institution of powers that is invoked by the king but also incorporates chiefs, social groups, invited guests from beyond Oka and local audiences. Indebted to geographies of powers, we take nuanced power practices seriously, illustrated as twisted spatialities of powers embodied in architecture, rituals and oral history narratives. The new framing of powers makes two contributions to the existing interpretations of chieftaincy in Africa: it sheds light on chiefs’ subtle and strategic practices in response to the ‘powers of reach’ exercised by the king and through the organizational institution of Oka Day; and it also demonstrates how actors beyond the locality, including politicians, social clubs and diasporic groups, are drawn into the institution of Oka Day while mediating the powers of reach. Drawing from an analysis of spatialities of powers, we suggest that a spatial thinking facilitates our understandings of the ‘microphysics’ of kingship and chieftaincy in contemporary Yorubaland.

Scholarship about Southern Africa registers a persistent tension between the prospect of relations created in a processual manner over time and the role of discrete ritual or lifecycle events. Marriage is one of the sites where this tension becomes particularly evident, not only in bridewealth transactions but also in an increasing prominence given to European-style ‘white weddings’. For Baptist Christians living in urban Zimbabwe, the tension raises a host of ethical considerations. This group of Christians seeks to establish and maintain social relations that they value for cultural and for religious reasons, while also facing the ethical task of moderating the degree of obligation that these relations can exert over them. They do so in order to maintain the moral autonomy necessary to live ethical Baptist lives, and attempt to achieve this goal by creating marriages according to a model of immediate transformation, rather than one of gradual unfolding. I suggest that drawing from recent discussions in the anthropological study of ethics offers a way to discuss choice and evaluation in marriage practice in ways not reducible to class interest or social and material expediency alone.

Work hard, work smart, make the right connections, get the right education, invest wisely – yet after doing all the supposedly right things, success remains elusive to many. For a few, however, who may or may not have done exactly these things, success seems to come effortlessly. Some are very fortunate and others not so much. The lack of correspondence between exertion and success or work and good fortune is an issue that confronts lay persons and professionals alike. Focusing on Yoruba people, I discursively present lay Yoruba persons’ apprehension and common-sense view of this conundrum as reflected in their contextualized language use and supported by other ‘mundane’ information from day-to-day life. By looking at their everyday language, it is possible to deduce their reality as socially constructed in their discourses and gain insight into how they reconcile individual exertions with a view that asserts determinism. Further, I will suggest that the basis of the Yoruba conventional knowledge system informing their utterances and actions pertaining specifically to people's earthly fortunes lies in their origination narrative and original life quest, the essence of which remains inarguable even if temporarily pliable. The popular saying ‘iṣẹ́ o kan oríire’, exertion does not relate to success, is used as a point of departure and sense contained in their orature – situational utterances, pithy proverbs, aphorism and anecdotes – to tease out the Yoruba ordinary meaning of success/fortune and how it is acquired, relative to individuals’ earthly journey and preoccupation. Based on the sampled day-to-day utterances, individual life, it seems, unfolds as presumably scripted, despite apparent avowal and disavowal of ordination in people's pronouncements. Orí (head) retains its position at the summit, assenting – or not – to earthly endeavours.

Under Idi Amin's government, institutions that served the public interest were dramatically under-resourced. An array of self-nominated, self-important, self-righteous people were empowered to take on administrative tasks that, in an earlier dispensation, had been the work of professionals. Businesses and institutions that had formerly been under the regulatory authority of credentialled experts were thrown open all at once for commoners to operate. Everywhere there were campaigns, as the new regime made obscure and technical issues into urgent problems demanding a resolution. Ugandans were called upon to defend cultures, to struggle against imperialism and racism, and to transform the architecture of the economy. That is how people came to see themselves as proprietors of public life. Their work allowed commoners to claim equity over resources and infrastructures. In their investments in the operations of public institutions, people became custodians, proprietors and petty authoritarians. Their proprietary sense of responsibility was a powerful inducement to self-sacrifice. It was also the fuel for demagoguery.

This article explores the history of two Tanzanian publishing houses and the remarkable life and career of Walter Bgoya, former general manager of Tanzania Publishing House (1972–90) and managing director of Mkuki na Nyota, which he founded in 1991. Using the lens of microhistory, and drawing from extensive interviews with Bgoya and conversations with two colleagues and three authors, the article first chronicles his early life and ideological formation and what influenced his career in book publishing. It then examines the key achievements and challenges faced by these publishing houses in different times of austerity (e.g. Structural Adjustment Programmes, foreign investment with conditionalities, declining state support and high printing costs), along with the complex ways in which Bgoya has navigated the shifting, often uncertain, political, financial and legislative landscapes, while retaining his intellectual freedom and core Pan-Africanist beliefs. Constraints have not hampered Bgoya's pursuit of ambitious projects or his commitment to publishing relevant and progressive books, either written by African authors or on African matters. I suggest that reducing the scale and identifying how specific conditions of austerity have affected the choices made by a publisher over time can yield insights into the ways in which cultural institutions have contributed to knowledge production and dissemination in postcolonial Africa.

This part issue of the journal Africa broadly explores the idea of frontiers and pioneers in the study of queer African lives. We envisage frontiers as exploring new openings in the study of sexuality by putting forward the practices and experiences of people across the African continent. We propose to study queerness as part of broader quotidian realities so as to further theorize the study of sexualities and queerness. We propose the term ‘pioneer’ for the interlocutors in our studies: (self-identifying) women, men and queerying persons who courageously explore contradictory paths in their various contexts. As such, we encourage an imaginative employment of queer as indicating a horizon of curiosity and imprecision. In making queerness not an object of study but rather a subject of its own theorization based on everyday experience, this special journal issue explicitly and deliberately asserts the vernacular and the mundane as a locus of knowledge. One implication is especially pertinent: knowledge on queerness cannot be prefabricated or preassembled in theoretical laboratories with the aim of merely applying it to an African context. By doing so, Africa functions – as it always has – only as a variable in the study of cultural difference, one that is different from, by implication, a Euro-American centre. ‘Or, as is happening too often, queer African voices and experiences will be absorbed as “data” or “evidence,” not as modes of theory or as challenges to the conceptual assumptions that drive queer studies’ (Macharia 2016: 185). Foregrounding the mundane rather than the urbane (as in ‘suave’, for which queer theory has a strong penchant), we are not trying to ‘define’ African queer sexualities; rather, we seek to provoke conversations about the terms and agencies of their expansion through the prism of frontiers and pioneers.

By the early 2010s, a number of Malawian poets in their twenties had begun to substitute the elliptical expression of earlier generations with a language that resonated with popular idioms. As poetry directed at ‘the people’, its medium is spoken word rather than print, performed to live audiences and distributed through CDs, radio programmes and the internet. Crafted predominantly in Chichewa, the poems also address topics of popular interest. The selection of poetry presented here comes from a female and a male poet, who, unbeknown to each other, prepared poems sharply critical of homosexuality and what they regarded as its foreign and local advocacy. The same poets have also gained success for their love poems, which have depicted intimate desires in remarkably compatible ways for both women and men. The poets who performed ‘homophobic’ verse went against popular gender stereotypes in their depictions of romantic love and female and male desires. This introductory essay, as a contribution to Africa's Local Intellectuals series, discusses the aesthetic challenges that the new poets have launched in the context of Malawi's modern poetry. With regard to gender relations in their love poems, the introduction also considers the poets’ possible countercultural contribution despite their avowed commitment to perform for ‘the people’.

Demonization is a widespread aspect of political discourse. We are familiar with the demonization of Brussels bureaucrats as a tool for pursuing the British exit from the European Union, and we take stories about the compulsory straightening of bananas with a pinch of salt, however frustrating it might be that some disaffected voters choose to accept these canards as true. But somehow, stories about the demonic in Africa have been accorded much greater ontological respect, not only by colonial powers keen to boost their own legitimacy through claims to a civilizing mission, but also by anthropologists anxious to understand their informants’ imaginative concerns, perhaps without fully appreciating the political craft or guile with which these discourses are invested. In seeking to void the charge of delusion, an empathetic reading of demonization risks missing the strategic significance of mythic interventions intended to extract political advantage. This article examines an instance of mythic creativity in the politics of late nineteenth-century interior Sierra Leone as an example of the stagecraft sometimes implicit in African public authority. The case is that of the human leopard, an avatar of commercially compromised chieftaincy. The article asks whether the alleged activities of these leopards were the straight bananas of a certain form of anti-colonial political resistance. In a concluding discussion, some consequences for understanding current forms and practices of local public authority are inferred.

This article explores the everyday lives that African migrants in Durban, South Africa share with other residents of the city. In conversation with Obvious Katsaura's work on ‘ethno-mutualism’, we use the example of ordinary greeting practices to show how Durban's urban everyday has been hijacked by xenophobic sensibilities. By demonstrating how the act of excluding migrants from these practices threatens to render the quotidian city uninhabitable for them, we shed light on the importance of mundane forms of social interaction for building a sense of identity and belonging. We then consider several ways in which African migrants develop and participate in Muslim forms of sociality that assist them in ‘disarming’ the urban everyday: from providing a platform for building solidarity with fellow migrants to mediating a ‘sense of welcome’ from the established Indian South African community. Elaborating on this, we delineate how forms of reciprocity emerge through the interactions between migrant and Indian Muslims that reproduce the ambient life of the city as a shared habitat, opening up new possibilities for entanglement. As such, our analysis contributes to emerging conversations about urban mutuality and migrant religious practices in the everyday lives of African cities.

This article introduces a personalized account of the early years of radio in Ghana based on an unpublished manuscript by one of its pioneering broadcasters – Bernard Senedzi (B. S.) Gadzekpo. An accomplished writer who produced manuscripts in both English and the Eʋe language, Gadzekpo's radio memoir is written from the vantage point of someone who worked in both the colonial and postcolonial broadcast service for nearly thirty years. It foregrounds African broadcasters in the history of radio and offers insights into the complex realities of Africa's mutable encounter with radio and the strategic role played by local intellectuals in fulfilling its modernization mission during and after the colonial period.

The Kwando Basin of north-eastern Namibia is firmly embedded in current national and international conservation agendas. It is a key part of the world's largest transboundary conservation area, the Kavango–Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area, and the home of seven community-based conservation areas (conservancies) and three smaller national parks (Mudumu, Nkasa Rupara and Bwabwata). While conservation agendas often start from the assumption that an authentic part of African nature is conserved as an assemblage of biota that has not been gravely impacted by subsistence agriculture, colonialism and global value chains, we show that environmental infrastructure along the Namibian side of the Kwando Valley has been shaped by the impact of administrative measures and the gradual decoupling of humans and wildlife in a vast wetland. The way towards today's conservation landscape was marked and marred by the enforced reordering of human–environment relations; clearing the riverine core wetlands of human habitation and concentrating communities in narrowly defined settlement zones; the suppression of specific, wetland-adapted subsistence practices; and the elimination of unwanted microbes with the help of insecticides. The interventions in the ecosystem and the construction of an environmental infrastructure have created a unique conservation landscape in the Namibian Zambezi region, which provides the foundation for its popularity and success.

Much has been said about the presence of China in Africa over the last fifteen years, with, for the most part, these discussions affirming either a ‘for’ or ‘against’ position. Working from a micro-level perspective, this ethnographic article looks at how the everyday associations of ‘China’ and ‘the Chinese’ in Kenya are increasing, engendering expansive signifiers that proliferate as Kenya's relationship with China deepens. Although I anchor this argument in the local discursive practices that shape the proposed Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA)–Westlands expressway, I trace how references to China and the Chinese expand beyond construction to take up social meanings that are continuously being assembled. Although the referents may seem unrelated in their diversity, I argue that they index wider local anxieties that de-centre China and re-centre the Kenyan government in practices that place the burdens of ‘development’ on the country's already burdened citizens.