The articles that appear in this part issue focus on disparate topics, from rumours of electoral fraud to the production of art, and span the African continent from Guinea and Ghana in the west to Zimbabwe in the south. Despite their evident differences, the contributors see their pieces as united by a common theme: emergence. Elaborating on Simone's influential exploration of the intertwined concepts of emergence and emergency (2004), as well as prior research in Africa on informal economic practices (the exchange of goods and services unregulated by states) (Hart 1973; Piot 2010; Roitman 2004; Weiss 2009), we consider emergence to be the process by which new social formations become thinkable, repeatable, and even – at times – habitual. Although conditions of crisis or precarity or even revolutionary upheaval might be fertile ground for emergence, insofar as these social conditions represent ‘rupture[s] in the organization of the present’ (Simone 2004: 4), the articles here also show that new social practices do not emerge out of nowhere. Rather, these articles demonstrate that attention to quotidian encounters can illuminate how citizens mobilize previously existing norms and patterns of behaviour in response to social change or economic crisis.

African women are frequently portrayed as a subaltern group in need of external support, used as property in forging social relations, producing wealth in people and doing most of the agricultural work to feed household members in societies where ‘modernization’ does not always seem to change their unfortunate predicament. This article destabilizes such narratives by showing the complexities of marriage practices and the difficult dialectics between freedom and subjugation in one West African agrarian society – the Brasa-speaking people of Guinea-Bissau. Among this patrilineal and virilocal group, marriage was usually arranged at birth or when girls were still small children. However, after marriage, women enjoyed great freedom of movement to have distant sexual partners and to pursue private profit-making activities. Paradoxically, while at present most young women are allowed to marry a young husband of their choice, having lost the support of their descent groups they are becoming more subjected to their husbands’ power and control.

In recent years, all kinds of African photographies, both on the continent and in the diaspora, have undergone a digital ‘revolution’ (Ekine and Manji 2012). Without doubt, the key driver of this trend has been the rapid, and massive, influx to practically all African countries of ever more affordable third generation/advanced mobile phone handsets, or smartphones. Even compared with earlier technological revolutions on the continent, both the speed and the scale of this spread have been simply breathtaking. For example, the establishment of transistor radio sets – the process through which personal radios became ubiquitous across Africa – occurred over the period of at least a decade and a half (between roughly the late 1950s and the early 1970s). Similarly, the original mobile phone revolution – i.e. the process through which early generation/low functionality mobile phones went from being a source of novelty, to a domain for experimentation, to technologies that were routinized in everyday life, throughout the continent – took more than a decade to unfold (the crucial years being those between roughly 1999 and 2010) (Vokes 2018b). Against both of those earlier processes, the emergence of smartphones occurred over a much shorter timeframe. Between 2011 and mid-2015 alone, the number of smartphones being imported into Africa – the majority of them sub-US$100 Android-based systems – jumped from around 10 million units per annum to almost 100 million (Tshabalala 2015), as a result of which these devices became quickly established as a common feature of everyday life. Today, more than one-third of all mobile phones in Africa are smartphones, and this percentage is set to rise to two-thirds by 2020 (GSMA Intelligence 2017).

Ngazidja Island in the Comoros archipelago (in the south-western region of the Indian Ocean) is an example of a matrilineal and matrilocal Muslim society. This article addresses the various ways in which the Ngazidja people negotiate gender and family relations by referring to matrilineal or Islamic norms and values, and the influence of Islamic reforms and Western norms. Matriliny is linked to a local political organization based on an age system and a male political assembly. This link explains the specific way in which matrilineal and Islamic ideologies are linked. Marriage is ruled by Islamic law, but alliances between matrilineal descent groups follow other rationales. The existence of two matrimonial regimes illustrates this distinction. The conceptions of fatherhood produced in Ngazidja shed light on the key issue of male authority in matrilineal and Muslim contexts.

The coming of the mobile phone camera has transformed photography. This article explores this transformation through a case study of photography in Eastleigh, a Nairobi estate that is home to many thousand Somalis, both Kenyan Somalis and refugees from Somalia. It is a trade hub for East Africa, a social and economic hub for the global Somali diaspora, and a place regarded as suspect in a country where Somalis have long been marginalized. This article examines Eastleigh as photographic subject and setting, comparing the ubiquity of mobile phone photography there with seldom-practised more traditional forms of photography that are often treated with suspicion in an estate subject to securitized government policy and negative press. It shows how mobile phone photography helps people in the estate communicate visually with the wider Somali diaspora through social media, and how it helps people sell their goods, using as a case study a particular archive of images sent through WhatsApp to the author by Mohaa, a friend of his and a trader in the estate. The article also adds a political dimension to recent anthropological theorizing on mobile photography, showing how, in Eastleigh, Somalis have used photography and social media to take control of the way in which the estate is represented visually, and to demand from the state better services and better treatment.

This article examines Patrice Lumumba's afterlife among Congolese students in the 1960s. Mobilizing oral histories, it also interrogates the stakes of remembering Lumumba at different moments in Congo's postcolonial history. It shows how Lumumba's assassination became a collective and personal landmark in the biographies of a generation of student activists and clearly helped facilitate a turn towards the left in 1961 and in the years that followed. Overlooked by Cold War histories, this political process was nonetheless also a by-product of the internationalization of the Congo crisis and proved central to the historical imagination of a generation of educated Congolese. The dead Lumumba pushed young educated Congolese to revisit the meaning of decolonization. The article argues that the students’ extroverted political imagination was an important explanation for Lumumba's posthumous popularity in Congolese universities. Through their affiliation with the figure of Lumumba, young Congolese could expect to receive support and attention from real and imagined allies around the world. The international communion around Lumumba's name was sometimes the result of productive misunderstandings; nonetheless, his legacy played a crucial role in transnational mediation throughout the 1960s and made possible the circulation of new political repertoires among Congolese students.

Recent studies on Chinese investment in Africa have particularly focused on the hardware of development – infrastructure – and its impact. China's vision to forge a new global order was made explicit when Xi declared his ‘One Belt, One Road’ policy in 2013. Underlying the grand infrastructural schemes and political posturing are hidden financial manoeuvres, the soft side of power, unspoken sociality and value contestations. This article focuses on the variegated landscape of China–Africa trade/finance infrastructure centring on Hong Kong. It highlights top-down state orchestration but also explores historical contingencies that have shaped the strategies of those whose footprints unexpectedly straddle continental divides.

Fire outbreaks are common sources of anxiety and insecurity in informal settlements, but they can also provide new opportunities for claim making and governance of urban space. This article examines how a series of four fires in Accra, Ghana – three of which took place in its largest squatter settlement – offered new opportunities to experiment with governance, or a new way for residents and leaders to imagine and construct the future. Empirically, I document how, in the process of reconstruction, residents redrew property lines and reshaped social relations. They did this through the emergent political action I call building permanence, or a physical claim to the urban space one inhabits, as well as a new existential state of being and living in environs that will last and remain unharmed. The article offers a possible way towards achieving more secure tenure beyond formalization and infrastructure upgrades, and focuses attention on how institutions change in the context of daily life after a moment of crisis.

This article interrogates the introduction of special economic zones (SEZs) in Nigeria with an emphasis on the establishment of the Lekki free trade zone (FTZ) in May 2006 by the Lagos State government in partnership with a Chinese consortium, and of the Ogun-Guandong FTZ in Igbesa, Ogun State by the Ogun State government. The aim of the Lekki FTZ, Ogun-Guandong FTZ and other SEZs is to transform Lagos and Ogun states into the manufacturing hub of West Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. These economic zones in Nigeria encompass oil and gas, manufacturing, retail, real estate, and other ancillary companies. Based on interviews and participant observations, this article investigates how differing notions of land ownership circulate within communities affected by the FTZs. I ask how it is that indigenous populations, who fear displacement from their living spaces and socio-economic livelihoods, have begun to utilize claims to ancestral land ownership as symbolic expressions of cultural meanings and belonging that run counter to the property regimes associated with the FTZ project. How does the production of such cultural meanings intersect with the claims and counter-claims of indigeneity, communal ownership, and belonging to a space with a rich history that predates the postcolonial state and the inheritors of state power in Lagos? How is it that FTZs, framed as infrastructure projects designed to make life better for the people, end up displacing populations? In drawing out the connections between large-scale development and displacement, this article examines how communities employ both the tangible and intangible past to show how contestations over land ownership are reshaping new forms of community history and culture.

This article explores the ways in which families are reproduced in Botswana's time of AIDS. It argues that conjugal relationships are transformed into kin relationships through a gradual process of recognition in which they become visible, spoken about and known to ever wider spheres of kin. For women, this process is often catalysed by pregnancy; for men, by marriage negotiations – and for both, recognition is key to self-making. However, every shift in recognition is risky and tenuous, even reversible, and marked by dikgang – ‘issues’, conflicts or crises – the negotiation of which is crucial to its kin- and self-making capacity. Tswana kinship and personhood, in other words, are constituted in crisis, making them both highly fraught and highly resilient. In this context, HIV becomes one of many risks entailed in intimacy and kin-making – suggesting one explanation for persistently high rates of HIV infection in Botswana, and indicating an unexpected capacity in families to absorb crises such as the AIDS epidemic.

Since 2012, the influx of affordable smartphones to urban Nigeria has revolutionized how young people take, store and circulate photographs. Crucially, this ever-expanding digital archive provides urban youth with a means to communicate new ideas of self, allowing a marginalized group to display fortunes that often belie their difficult realities. Through gestures and poses, fashion and style, the companionship of others, or the use of particular backdrops and locations, these photographs contain certain semiotics that allude to the subject owning the means for success in urban Nigeria. Similarly, as youth constantly store photographs of themselves on their handsets alongside those of celebrities, patrons and friends, coveted commodities and aspirational memes, they construct personal narratives that place them at the centre of global flows and networks. With the ability to constantly retake, update and propagate photographs, the discrepancies between in- and off-frame identities become ambiguous. This article explores how young people in Calabar, south-eastern Nigeria, use digital photographs on their mobile phones to cultivate new visions of themselves. Arguing that these photographs not only represent superlative aspirations but are also integral to social becoming, the discussion examines how digital images allow youth to reposition themselves within (and beyond) Nigerian society. Ephemerality is central: digital photographs can be easily circulated and retain some permanence on social media, yet these immaterial objects can easily be lost from handsets. In thinking about the futures of African youth and African photography, this article therefore interrogates the tensions of private and public archives.

In Zimbabwe after 2000, ZANU(PF) leaders’ past experiences of student activism in Rhodesia were celebrated by the state-owned media as personifications of anti-colonial, nationalist leadership in the struggle to liberate the country. This article examines the history behind this narrative by exploring the entangled realities of student activism in Rhodesia throughout the 1960s and 1970s and its role as a mechanism of elite formation in ZANU(PF). Building on the historiography of African student movements, I show how the persistence of nationalist anti-colonial organizing and liberal traditions on campus made student activism in Rhodesia distinct from that in South Africa and independent African countries to its north. The article then examines how and why three former activists, who took up elite political careers in the party that they subsequently left, contested the ruling party's anti-colonial, ‘patriotic’ rendering of these experiences. These three men's stories invoked imagined and older forms of nationalism or institutional ethic that had been abandoned by the party as it turned to more authoritarian rule. Stories of Rhodesian student activism thus provided space for justifying alternative political possibilities of nationalism, which implicitly critiqued the ruling party's ‘patriotic’ narrative, as well as for nostalgic anecdotes of life on campus, their journeys into adulthood, and the excitement of being part of a dynamic, transformational political project.

This article examines conspiracy theory as an integral part of political practice. In 2010, following a tumultuous year that included a military takeover and a junta-led massacre of civilians, the Republic of Guinea held what was widely considered to be the country's first democratic presidential election since independence in 1958. During this time, many Guineans regularly exchanged information about secret intrigues at the highest levels of politics. These popular reports of powerful figures conspiring to fix the election influenced people's talk and actions, contributing to an environment in which abstract suspicions crystallized in real, and sometimes violent, events. These events in turn heightened suspicions of high-level conspiracy and, among people who identified as ethnic Fulɓe, reinforced the widespread conviction that they were being targeted. Focusing ethnographically on two episodes in which theories of conspiracy influenced how Guineans perceived and shaped the course of the 2010 elections, this article explores conspiracy theorizing as an emergent mode of politics that may have profound effects.

In May 1984, the Kenyan government of Daniel arap Moi introduced a National Youth Service pre-university training programme (NYSPUT) for prospective university students. The programme was designed to instil discipline in Kenyan university students and inculcate them with a sense of loyalty and commitment to the Moi regime prior to their arrival on campus. This article argues that, in practice, however, the scheme had unintended consequences: it served to alienate student recruits from the ruling party and helped radicalize a small but vocal group of student activists, who, when they arrived on campus, confronted the Moi state with some of its most defiant political challenges of the 1980s. Relying on extensive interviews with former student recruits and archival research, this article highlights the key role that the NYSPUT played in shaping Kenya's young generation of 1980s student activists, who represented one of the most united and militant student movements in the country's history.

The Kenyan government's long-term development strategy, Vision 2030, has emphasized infrastructural investments, which it believes will lead to sustained economic growth. The government has appealed to China to fund large-scale projects in the transport sector, and as a consequence of this, construction firms from China have emerged as significant employers in the country. While the Kenyan government contends with the ongoing burden of youth unemployment, it must also reconcile the ambiguities of China's role in Africa and its implications for the labour market. This article examines two Chinese-built infrastructure projects in Kenya and their intersection with several issues involving migrant labour and local rumours of Chinese prisoners, as well as the state's vision for industrialization and youth employment. Kenyans utilize both online and interpersonal channels of discourse to critique present-day employment practices in the transport sector, and it is argued that these counter-channels of discourse represent a particular articulation of knowledge used by Kenyans to construct meaning and interpret ambiguous situations. Through a theoretical analysis of rumour, this article illustrates how ordinary Kenyans are pooling their intellectual resources to understand Sino-Kenyan labour relations in the absence of transparency and participatory government processes in the infrastructure sector.

This article is an ethnographic investigation of the labours of making art and selling liquid petroleum gas (LPG) in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. It locates these activities within a shared social world, centred on one of Bulawayo's major art galleries, and it demonstrates that artists and LPG dealers use similar strategies to respond to the political conditions of life in the city. This article frames these conditions as unpredictable, insofar as they change frequently and crystallize in unexpected forms, and it argues that both groups are attempting to act within these conditions and shape them into emergent assemblages. In adopting this term ‘assemblage’, which has been elaborated theoretically by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and their many interlocutors, this article emphasizes both the mutability and the unpredictability of these formations. The artists who work in the gallery, for their part, make their art by assembling their chosen media. The processes by which they choose their media constitute assemblages as well, in that artists have to adapt their artistic visions to the materials that Zimbabwe's market can provide. Street dealers in gas also produce emergent assemblages against the backdrop of unpredictability. If they want to make natural gas available to consumers, dealers must shepherd their medium through an always emergent process of distribution. They participate in transnational networks of trade, but they also theorize innovative strategies of procurement, develop circuits of trust and loyalty, and conjure up visions of a predatory state. Like artists, they use their work to construct dynamic representations of the world around them. Artists may produce images, and dealers circulate gas, but this article shows that conceptualizing these practices in terms of ‘assemblages’ calls their commonalities into view. In doing so, it also demonstrates that these practices complicate easy distinctions between aesthetics, economics and politics.

Markets in Lagos, as in other parts of Yorubaland, are discursively constructed as spaces where women are in charge, perhaps based on their numbers. However, this article on the spatial relationships between women traders, the state and market institutions at Oke Arin in Lagos points to women's subordination and reflects Doreen Massey's concept of gendered spaces. Massey explains that spaces are in themselves gendered and that they also reflect and affect how gender is constructed and enforced in a specific context. The study is based on a sample of eighty Lagos (Yoruba) women traders and uses a combination of surveys, in-depth interviews, observation and secondary data to examine gendered strategies for survival and accumulation. I argue that, contrary to the perceptions of powerful Lagos market women, Massey's ‘internal structures of domination and subordination’ are evident in spatial governance, ownership and access at Oke Arin. Therefore, in response to spatial politics and the dominating structures of market and government authorities, women traders devise strategies of resistance, sometimes pushing the boundaries of legality to secure their livelihoods.

On 16 July 2013, Simone Schlindwein, a German journalist, used her mobile phone to photograph a conflict-related image in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that later contributed to local riots and to her hasty exit across the border. From the ‘front’, she uploaded the photograph to her Twitter account and caused a melee of virtual and on-the-ground controversy that at record speed came to involve the United Nations, members of the Congolese diaspora, the Congolese army, the M23 rebel army propaganda office, and the residents of the region. This article starts from her image to ethnographically examine the resulting events and responses, both online and in the city of Goma. In so doing, it engages the heated regional debate as to whether the image was objectively captured or if the violence depicted was simply ‘playing for the camera’. Addressing the simultaneous online movement of the image through social media and news sites, the article argues that the combination of the socio-political climate, conflict and the uncontrollable narrative of the image created a perfect storm in which the entangled regional politics suddenly became visible.