This article explores trajectories in the politics of water patronage in N’Djamena, Chad. Water appears as a malleable and elusive commodity, at once ubiquitous and somewhat overlooked. Drawing on ethnographic field research in peripheral N’Djamena, I argue that relational distance is skilfully handled by water patrons for monetary rewards and influence. Such handling swings the making of water value in contradictory directions unaccounted for in much of the existing literature on water patronage. Present or absent, hidden or on display, funders or profit makers, patrons may leverage water supply through material, symbolic or entrepreneurial labour that places them in conflicting spaces. Ultimately, these leveraging processes based on the manipulation of relational distance create a multifaceted water valuation. The various positionalities of the water patrons and their use of relational distance point to the existence of multiple water values, rather than a single one. Therefore, I argue that water may have either a ‘distant value’ or an ‘anchored value’, depending on the relational distance strategy implemented by the patron who provides it.

This article uses a micro-historical approach to examine an escape and murder among convict labourers between Cape Town and Stellenbosch in Southern Africa in the 1840s. It does so to demonstrate how imperial mobilities and legal conceptions of property crime were interconnected within settler colonial capital and the intimacies of colonial social worlds. Reforms in penal practice in the British Empire – in this instance, adopted in the Cape Colony from Tasmanian experiments in convict labour and moral improvement – formed part of post-abolition shifts in labour control and the management of the itinerant poor, increasingly guided by anxieties over race. Michael O’Brien, the murderer, was a suspected escaped convict from Australia, who claimed to have survived violent encounters in the Pacific as a missionary. His narrative contrasts with the predominantly regional mobilities and crimes of the other Cape convicts – notably stock theft and petty robbery – that occurred in the contested spaces of law, colonialism and property. This article discusses convict narratives around crime and redemption across a maritime empire, and the affective relations of coercion and care between convicts, overseers, constables and superintendents on the smaller scale of a convict station. It further contends that changes in criminal justice and governance in Southern Africa were thus contingent on the intimacies of scale and affect, on connections between the local, the global and the biographical.

This article examines the development, early operation and subsequent failure of the Tot-Kolowa Red Cross irrigation scheme in Kenya’s Kerio Valley. Initially conceived as a technical solution to address regional food insecurity, the scheme aimed to scale up food production through the implementation of a fixed pipe irrigation system and the provision of agricultural inputs for cash cropping. A series of unfolding circumstances, however, necessitated numerous modifications to the original design as the project became increasingly entangled with deep and complex histories of land use patterns, resource allocation and conflict. Failure to understand the complexity of these dynamics ultimately led to the project’s collapse as the region spiralled into a period of significant unrest. In tracing these events, we aim to foreground the lived realities of imposed development, including both positive and negative responses to the scheme’s participatory obligations and its wider impact on community resilience.

This article asks whether and how gendered violence was part of the quotidian activity of state building in German South West Africa. Investigating the intimate space of a police compound, it gives a micro-historical account of how interracial sexual relations unfolded there, and how policemen’s private, intimate affairs were subject to close scrutiny by the colonial state. Rape – as distinctively masculine violence – posed a notably delicate problem to the legitimacy of the colonial state. The white masculine prerogative needed to be affirmed as the raison d’être of the colonial regime, but disorderly, unprofessional violence had to be controlled for the same reason. The case examined in this article was a rare moment in which an African woman attempted to take part in the discussion over the meaning of sex and violence. Ultimately, her articulation of what intimate, physical interactions meant to her was ignored. Instead, policemen articulated what masculine honour and comradeship meant to them. These discussions over what individual ‘honourable’ (including violent) behaviour implied were also always negotiations over the nature of colonial power and its programme.

The ‘title deed fix’ – resurgent globally since the 1990s – is part of a wave of market-led agrarian reforms whose outcomes have been mixed. Kenya was the first African country to experiment – starting six decades ago and continuing today – with state-mandated formal land registration and private titling. Today it is among a handful to begin a transition to a digitized land registry. Behind both paper and electronic land documents, however, is a persistent temporal fiction that undergirds state-backed title registries – namely, a constructed present that is out of sync with intersecting biographical and structural temporalities, and that can efface socially recognized pasts, commitments or testimonials. We analyse some consequences of those temporal dissonances, unstable rights durations, and an ensuing limbo that can last decades, through family land stories shared with us during long-term ethnographic research in Kenya’s fertile central highlands. Especially vulnerable to temporal erasure and dispossession when title deed limbo spans decades are divorced or single women and their children, particularly as farmland and non-agricultural employment become more scarce and land markets overheat. Multitemporal family narratives powerfully illustrate why title deeds of any age are best taken as provisional truths rather than legal certainties, and why tenure security is an unstable and reversible process rather than a present or absent condition.

This article explores the intersection of labour, sexual violence and intimacy in the late nineteenth-century copper mining district of Namaqualand, focusing on the impact of male labourers’ brutalities on local Nama and Baster women. Small in scale, lacking state interference and offering vast employment opportunities to women, Namaqualand’s mines and the towns that grew around them were a key destination for local female labour migration. Due to these unique characteristics, however, women were also exposed to unwanted attention and sexual abuse by male labourers, particularly miners. Women used the Cape’s legal system to protest, but the indifference shown towards their suffering by colonial officials and the public allowed men to use violence without much restraint, rendering women’s legal efforts futile. Ultimately, sexual violence reinforced gendered and racial hierarchies, restricting women’s socio-economic agency and autonomy. The article argues that these dynamics highlight the violent (re)shaping of colonial and patriarchal power asymmetries in the north-western Cape between two major colonial wars after the stabilization of the northern frontier by means of armed conquest.

Leather markets are critical nodes in the leather industry value chain. They attract manufacturers and small and medium enterprises that facilitate social interactions and opportunities, leading to increased availability of finished leather goods. This study explores the social transformation and organization of Mushin leather market in Lagos megacity based on data collected through observation and in-depth and key informant interviews with traders, association and community members, transporters and customers in the market. Mushin leather market evolved from a shop owned by an indigenous woman known as Iya Ijebu (Ijebu woman) into a leather trading community. State and local governments intervene minimally in the market affairs through sanitation rules and revenue collection. Routes to market socialization include mentoring and apprenticeships, with visible gender disparities. Associational membership guarantees full integration to traders. Strong business, personal and group networks structure ethnic dynamics and occupational specializations. The article reveals the inherent interdependence of social institutions in understanding the organization of the leather market, particularly in terms of how capital, associational norms and networks shape the formation of a heterogeneous market in an indigenous Yoruba community. Mushin leather market is transforming the domains of ethnic trade speciality and patterning intergroup social relations in Lagos megacity.

This article explores the enduring impact of efforts by the French mandate administration and Spiritan missionaries to regulate intimate partnerships in French Cameroon between 1916 and 1956. Drawing primarily on French archival material, I show how administrators and missionaries sought to domesticate ‘modernity’ through activities targeting women’s status and roles within intimate partnerships. Spiritans promoted monogamous Christian marriage by advocating for Christian legal status and through ‘schools for fiancées’ called sixas, which often provoked violent confrontations. Despite decrying these activities as culturally disruptive, the administration passed significant marriage legislation. While these efforts are characterized as exercises of epistemic violence because of their attempted erasure of women’s and broader local perspectives, I nevertheless highlight their ambiguity. Moreover, garnering insights from history, anthropology, critical legal studies, postcolonial and feminist theory, I argue that remnants of these attempts to reshape intimacy endure as ‘imperial debris’, contributing to the impasse in reforming the Cameroonian Family Code. Further research unearthing local historical perspectives and experiences of intimate partnerships can facilitate more egalitarian family law in Cameroon.

This article considers the intimate, the violent and the psychopathological in Bukavu, an eastern Congolese border city known for rape and war. A phenomenological focus pries open tensions in this ruinous, neoliberal ‘boom town’, frictions related to mental health, patterns of resort, and derangement. Ethnographic portraits from co-produced fieldnotes reveal family and street dynamics and a few adaptive, public figures of madness. Bukavu knows unhinged, delirious, psychotic people and PTSD infrastructures in this ‘trauma zone’. Patterns of psychosis go with ‘vivacity’, a Foucauldian word. The non-scientific term madness points to politics and the everyday, with many mad persons roaming the streets with performances. Intimacy enables rethinking this city, where ways of telling and knowing madness speak to agitation, kinship, strangeness and ordinary matters of sleep, dress and faecal matter.

All archives have silences, which may come to resonate, even if they may never speak. What is unsaid or unsayable may be understood and appreciated even if never enunciated and never heard. The photographs of the Cameroonian photographer Jacques Toussele from 1960 to 1980 were taken against a background of violence: the uprising of the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), which started before Cameroonian independence and continued for the next decade. The fight against UPC ‘terrorists’ by the Cameroonian state and the French military was marked by violence on all sides. There is no evidence of this in the Toussele archive, which consists of administrative ID portraits and recreational shots depicting friends and family and various displays of intimacy. The Toussele photographic archive shows young people in Mbouda exhibiting the global tropes of modernity. Soon after independence in Ouest Cameroon, both the violence and the promises of 1960s modernity were challenges to traditional sociality. A local reading makes it clear that the violence was ever present in its absence and denial: to perform an event was no small achievement and, like the birth of a child, was to be celebrated and marked by photography. Intimacy was achieved against a background of violence and celebrated for this very reason.

This study is concerned with addressing discrimination in public spaces and interrogates the extent to which the social identity function of a local lingua franca impacted inclusion politics in leadership selections for public institutions in Africa. Guided by social identity and ethnolinguistic identity theories, selecting Ahmadu Bello University in Northern Nigeria as a case study, and using the qualitative research technique, this study found a three-level ethno-religious discriminatory categorization – Core Northerners, Peripheral Northerners and Non-Northerners – accommodated within the institution’s power hierarchy. Fluency in Hausa, the local lingua franca in Northern Nigeria, was the common factor. Although the language was not a requirement for appointment, it turned out to be the marker of social identity that positively impacted inclusion politics. With extensive linguistic acculturation, African nation states are better off investing in the propagation of the local lingua franca to address negative discrimination in public spaces.

Indigenous Yorùbá poetry is often defined by such features as context, structure, tonal quality and the performer’s identity. Early taxonomy of the poetry focused on the poetics that could be deduced from a long tradition of practice. Recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies has been more interested in showing the ways in which the poetry is being inflected by encounters with postcolonial modernity. While these recent contributions demonstrate how new forms, such as ewì, distil expressive nuances from the older forms and invent new performative practices to address new publics, such studies encourage a generalization that credits to the new forms all the modern advances recorded in the indigenous forms themselves. Looking at specific indigenous forms in terms of how postcolonial modernity has reshaped them, rather than considering them another set of additions to a new generic category, allows us a clearer view of their transition. I track the inventions and changes in the practice of two Yorùbá forms, ìjálá and Ifá chants, using the performances of Àlàbí Ògúndépò and Yẹmí Ẹlẹ́buìbọn. I rely on ethnographic data to show how mutating audiences and electronic storage and retrieval systems have continually shaped composition and performance, discuss the imperatives of modernity and economy in the performative choices of the artists, and show how the performers simultaneously manage their resistance to and adoption of the modern.

In 1937–38, the American doctoral candidate William R. Bascom conducted anthropological research in the sacred Yorùbá city of Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria. Bascom’s visit was a decisive moment in the history of African art, as, in 1938, he observed the chance discovery of unique copper and copper alloy heads, two of which he acquired and exported to the USA. Bascom’s actions in 1938, and his subsequent conflicts with British officials who demanded the return of the heads in the 1940s, have become matters of controversy and scholarly debate. Historian Robert Tignor and anthropologist Simon Ottenberg have presented contrasting arguments regarding the affair. This article draws on material from several archives to shed further light on this discussion, resolve remaining areas of dispute, and explore what the study of this controversy tells us about the nature and practice of anthropology, the impacts of Western exhibitions of African art, and early cultural preservation and repatriation efforts of the late colonial period. At a time when colonial-era collecting practices are facing increased critical re-examination, and with intensified calls for the repatriation of Nigerian cultural patrimony in Western museums, this article reflects on how the study of this controversy contributes to present restitution efforts.