Through Facebook and other social media, a growing number of well-educated women in Khartoum are marketing and selling typically female personal care and beauty items online. These ‘tajirat al-Facebook’ (or Facebook traders) are the new entrepreneurs of Sudan who work from home to run their businesses and widen their social circles. Relying on the urban infrastructure of mobile phones, delivery boys, digital connectivity and online platforms, they navigate public life from the intimate sphere of the home or harem to become successful businesswomen who continuously transcend conventional gender norms and classic divisions between public and private, online and offline, and work and family. By addressing the day-to-day socio-economic practices of these traders, this article casts innovative light upon the broader discussions surrounding the role of women in economic life in Africa. It is argued that the mobile phone, and the smartphone in particular, has opened up a range of opportunities for women to enhance their social and economic manoeuvring space and to negotiate power within, and beyond, the domestic realm. New communications technologies have paved the way for a new kind of entrepreneurship in which the commercial goals of profit making are intimately entwined with the broader practices of sociality and diversion from boredom.

This article examines the works of one of the earliest Yoruba poets, Denrele Adetimikan Ọbasa (1879–1945), a member of the local intelligentsia in colonial Nigeria. In my assessment of the poet as a culture activist and local intellectual, I draw on biographical information, extensive archival research and relevant textual illustration. The central argument of the article is that Ọbasa exploits Yoruba communal oral resources for ideas, themes and other linguistic influences in his poetry. Therefore, the essay explores the creative ability of Ọbasa to preserve different forms of oral literary material in his poetic composition and how he uses the folkloric materials as instruments for raising the social consciousness of his readers. At this level, the article argues, Ọbasa transforms oral traditions into metaphorical and symbolic language that best articulates his political or philosophical positions. Thus, orality is not static, but dynamic, flexible and adaptable to change. The main article offers translations of excerpts from Ọbasa's poetry, while the online supplementary material offers more complete samples of Ọbasa's poems.

Whereas Michael Lambek situates the exploration of the significance of ‘ordinary ethics’ in the everyday as the study of ‘the ethical in the conjunction or movement between explicit local pronouncements and implicit local practices and circumstances’, this article takes the opposite view by drawing attention to special events that appear to engage – or provide space for – extraordinary ethics. Special events and their extraordinary ethics bring into relief the implicitness of the ordinary in everyday ethics. Weddings in Botswana are moments in the social life of the individual, the family and the community that produce such event ethics. On one level, the event ethics relate to the execution of these highly stylized weddings in terms of concerns about their performance and marital arrangements. On another level, the event ethics can have tacit dimensions that belong to the special nature of the occasion. This article argues not only that ‘ordinary ethics’ may be privileged through the study of what is tacit in social interactions, but that ‘event ethics’ also demonstrate the importance of the tacit.

In recent years, settler descendants in Kenya have found their rights to hold land in Laikipia challenged by Maasai activists. Many have defended themselves by drawing on colonial-era discourses about pastoralist ecology and what constitutes good use of the land. These discourses have side-stepped ecological history and the moral problematics of colonial land seizure, while treating Maasai anger and nostalgia as manipulative and inauthentic. At the same time, new ‘community-based’ conservation movements, in conjunction with Afro-Kenyan activism, have prodded some white Kenyans into loosening their epistemology and making preliminary, partial concessions to Afro-Kenyan points of view. Yet, I suggest, these concessions themselves are part of a new, shifting model of whiteness: one that responds to new political imperatives, yet retains certain ways of justifying white advantages in landholding. I draw on these shifts to explore similarities with and disjunctures from colonial whiteness among these contemporary white Kenyans feeling the pressure to move from one historical era to another.

In this article, I explore how digital technologies in Kenya emerged as a site through which questions of citizenship were posed – if not resolved – at a moment of national crisis. I draw attention, specifically, to the ways in which developers, bloggers and state actors mobilized techno-utopian narratives about Kenya's ‘Silicon Savannah’ to advocate for what I call ‘digital citizenship’, an ethical blueprint for how best to belong to the nation. While social scientists writing about ICT in Africa have focused primarily on Africans’ novel uses of objects such as mobile phones, I contribute to this conversation by interrogating how digital technologies have been mobilized as an idiom to both challenge and perpetuate social cleavages of ethnicity and class. ‘Digital citizenship’, I suggest, compels us to revisit debates about (post)colonial history, ideologies that undergird digitality, and the formation of local, national and transnational scales of belonging.

Many words in Yoruba frustrate trans-lingual transportation by the sheer complexity of their polysemic range. Such words are so culture-bound that they do not translate easily to English, especially when their metaphysical polyvalence in Yoruba has no equivalent in English. Therefore, my translation of Ọbasa's poems in the appendices below yields place to mediation, as I am constrained to try out or devise a series of strategies of transposition and transference, which in the words of Ọṣundare leads to ‘kiss and quarrel’ between the concerned languages. According to him, when two languages meet, they achieve a tacit understanding on the common grounds of similarity and convergence, then negotiate, often through strident rivalry and self-preserving altercations, their areas of dissimilarity and divergence.

This article offers a new perspective on contemporary ‘whiteness’ in Africa by looking at the ambiguous ways in which it affects everyday life in and around the labour compounds of a multinational timber firm in the Congolese rainforest. As a foreign investment enclave, the logging concession is home to a small isolated community of European expatriate men whose ‘white’ faces evoke a set of ambivalent memories of colonial exploitation in the area. Through a carefully contextualized understanding of how these contemporary expats are perceived in the labour compounds and how they construct their own racialized male selves, this article pushes the discussion on whiteness in Africa beyond the conventional analysis of (post-)settler identities and whites of African nationalities. It argues that, as a permanent fixture in the present neoliberal moment but also as an uncanny repetition of a colonial past, the European loggers construct and embody very specific ‘expat’ masculinities whose internalized dynamics of self-exoticization make them ‘African’ in their own right. Mobilizing the problematic trope of ‘darkness’, both in expat self-making practices and in popular narratives about their presence, this article illustrates how whiteness in Africa comes in many shades.

This article examines the way young men in Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau, make sense of and engage in the transnational cocaine trade, which has established itself on the Upper Guinea coast. It describes Guinea-Bissau's emergence as a regional centre for the trafficking of cocaine from Latin America to Europe, and shows how the illegality and volatility of the commerce are socially assessed and valued. The drug connection impacts on the lives of the young men in the city in a variety of ways. While it is seen to have brought with it a range of political and societal insecurities and uncertainties, it is also perceived to offer potential livelihoods and prospects. On the one hand, cocaine is positioned as an ethically dubious commodity; on the other, its revenue and concomitant social effects are seen as morally reasonable and required. The article therefore centres on the ethical dimensions of the trade, as seen from the perspective of the youth in question, and argues that it needs to be understood in terms of situational obligations rather than abstract ideals. It approaches ethics from a relational point of view and shows how the moral evaluation and ascription of the cocaine trade are defined inter-subjectively and understood in relation to social responsibility, care and accountability.

This article explores relations between ways of experiencing socio-economic disorder, strategies on how to deal with it, and monetary classifications that symbolize these ways and strategies. It assumes that we can learn something from the fact that the concept of pesa makech (‘bitter money’) has been replaced with the much more diffuse notion of pesa marach (‘bad money’) in Western Kenya during the last twenty-five years. This shift in how ‘negative forms’ of money are discursively marked indexes a change in the way in which the people of Kaleko, a small market centre in Western Kenya, conceptualize the disorder of their surroundings. Instead of interpreting disorder as an effect of events taking place inside their sphere of influence, residents of Kaleko now predominantly situate the cause of disorder in actions of external actors that are perceived as uncontrollable: the ‘economy’, money itself, politicians, members of other ethnic groups and untrustworthy Luo. This necessarily changes the ways in which disorder is tackled: while pesa makech’s bitterness could be resolved by ‘sorting out’ (rieyo) the homestead's disorder, nowadays people employ other ways that aim at resolving disorder: upscaling rieyo’s potential to the Kenyan nation; ‘struggling’ (chandre) through disorder; and relativizing rieyo’s applicability.

This article seeks to examine the dynamic transformation in the system of labour mobilization and the consequent intermingling of peoples of diverse cultural background in northern Sidama, Ethiopia. It investigates the different labour recruitment strategies deployed in the study area at different times, ranging from traditional to hired labour. In the former case, the household plays a major role in the recruitment and supply of agricultural labour, whereas in the latter case, ‘trans-locality’ reinforced by migration becomes central to the labour history of the region. In the 1940s and 1950s, Emperor Haile Selassie I granted large estates of land in the study area to absentee landowners who started schemes of commercial coffee farming. The subsequent expansion of commercialized coffee farming in a locality called Wondo Gänät (northern Sidama) from the 1950s onwards was responsible for the introduction of agricultural wage labour into the wider region. There was no local surplus labour to satisfy the labour needs of the new coffee farms. This void was later filled by Kembata, Hadiya and Wolayita migrant labourers who flocked into the study area from regions widely noted for their scarcity of arable land. This translocal movement of workers paved the way for the beginning of wage employment and eventually the commodification of farm labour in line with capitalist agriculture. Although commercial coffee plantations provided the initial stimulus for labour commodification in the study area, sugar cane-based cash cropping has helped it flourish even further. I argue in this article that the imperial land grants of the late 1940s and 1950s were an important milestone both for the agricultural history of the study area and for the organization of farm labour. Most importantly, I also argue that some of the social tensions and conflicts that often haunt contemporary northern Sidama are legacies inherited from the labour migrations of the 1950s and 1960s and the demographic heterogeneity that ensued.

Using fieldwork data from South Africa's Eastern Cape Province, this article highlights ambiguities of volunteering as idea and practice by exploring discursive strategies used by volunteers in the field of civic crime prevention when the ethical honesty and selflessness of their commitment to volunteering is questioned by others. These ambiguities relate to asymmetries in the relationship between donors and recipients of volunteering, as well as, most importantly, the challenge to determine what constitutes the ‘common good’. This article demonstrates that these strategies entail the accommodation of contentions about: (1) the social identity of the volunteer by stressing the volunteer's commitment to abstract causes and objectives; (2) powerful asymmetries between donors and recipients of volunteering by invoking an encompassing sociality; and/or (3) the (alleged) self-interest of volunteers by defining the personal benefits achieved by volunteering not as an end in themselves but as ‘private means’ to ‘public ends’. All three strategies have in common that volunteers as ‘ethical subjects’ can here be shown to be co-produced with South African ‘communities of ethics’ on different social scales.

Whiteness has always been visible and marked in Africa. This is what makes whiteness in Africa distinct from whiteness in the West. This article explores the question of how the visibility of whiteness matters for its politics by focusing on the case of Zimbabwe. Much of the work on whiteness in this country, concentrating solely on the white farming community, presents the white population as a homogeneous group. This article uses the urban–rural divide to challenge such a portrayal and to explore the relationship in Zimbabwe between the politics of representation and the politics of whiteness in the postcolonial era. Based on four years of ethnographic research, it investigates urban and rural whiteness together because they are interrelated. We make two specific observations: first, that urban privilege has remained invisible because white Zimbabweans and white privilege are imagined to be connected to the land and to being a farmer. Urban whites have perpetuated this stereotype, which helped mask their own privileged lives. Second, we demonstrate that the defence of white privilege happens through means other than simple denial. Our interview data shows that, despite urban whites’ acknowledgement and understanding of white privilege, they still defend and try to legitimize it. Finally, we conclude that raising awareness and demanding acknowledgement of white privilege might be a necessary but insufficient condition to end it.

Mobility patterns in Africa are changing. They never were fixed, but they have been embedded for centuries in the policy regimes regulating local, regional and global economies. However, currently, the intersection of global politics of securitization and African everyday politics governed by inequality, disenchantment, survival and aspiration has accelerated changes. This themed section is concerned with the social effects of these changes as Africans struggle to attain their goals, whether they are migrants or not.

Media descriptions of the conflicts in the Eastern Congo usually depict violent events as being systematic attacks by rebels and militias (perpetrators) on the civilian population (victims). While much attention has been given to the victims of such violence, less effort has been made to understand the perspectives and underlying motives for violence of those who are actively engaged in fighting the war. Using anthropological arguments, this article argues that the use of the terms ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’ are scientifically problematic when attempting to explain contemporary conflict(s) in the Eastern Congo and other similar war situations in Africa. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), whose leadership was an orchestrating agent in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, I demonstrate that not only is the victim/perpetrator dichotomy unclear, but also that combatants may frequently regard themselves as being both victims and perpetrators at one and the same time. I argue that the main factor behind this dual identity is that, while combatants in the Congo may be under a compulsion to commit violence, they may simultaneously be fully committed to their armed group and to its collective political ideology. While our conventional understanding of the membership of armed groups tends to make a sharp distinction between compulsory participation and commitment to a cause, I show how, in the context of the Eastern Congo, these categories are not, in fact, mutually exclusive.

In the face of restrictive migration policies, migration brokers in emigration countries sell services that are meant to facilitate departure projects. Not all aspiring migrants who give money to migration brokers are able to travel. This article asks how aspiring migrants in Anglophone Cameroon understand and deal with the potential for deceit by migration brokers. The analysis is based on sixteen months of fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2013, predominantly in the town of Buea. By studying the social effects of European migration management through the lens of norms and values in a place of departure, the article argues that migration brokers cannot be understood exclusively as actors who are instrumental for the realization of migration trajectories. In a context where European migration management frustrates aspirations for global citizenship, migration brokers are also dealers in hopes for global belonging. Relations of trust between brokers and aspiring migrants are articulated through local terms such as ‘dokimen’, ‘feymen’ and ‘big men’. The article's two case studies examine relations between migration brokers and aspiring migrants within a broad social framework that includes family dynamics, as well as with a temporal perspective that stretches beyond the initial moment of failed departure.

Schools are institutionalized spaces of learning where children and young people are trained to become morally and ethically responsible members of society. Cultural ideas and values relating to friendship, social status and the nation, but also regarding one's own body, dress and emotional, verbal or gestural expression, are learned and performed by young people on an everyday basis. In this article, I build on ethnographic research on the ‘new’ generation of Christian and Muslim schools in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (2008–10), and I show that particular ways of learning and performing values can be understood as a form of embodied morality that orients students and teachers in relation to their educational and socio-urban environments. I argue that schools do not represent monolithic ethical or moral frameworks or that the actors in these educational settings learn or embody those frameworks in uniform ways. Rather, the processes of ethical and moral (self-)formation are often highly fragmented due to the diverse (social, religious and economic) backgrounds of students and teachers as well as the logics of class formation in the neoliberal market, which causes a high degree of fluctuation across the (equally fragmented) educational landscape of Dar es Salaam. I therefore define ‘embodied morality’ as a partial and discontinuous practice whose specific forms and experience are inseparably entwined with the specific ideological, social and institutional environments of particular educational settings.

Dash in pidgin English means an ancillary gift to an exchange. What happened when the dash became attached to the indentured labour contracts that the Spanish Empire brought from Cuba to their last colony, Spanish Guinea? On the island of Fernando Pó, which came to be almost wholly populated by Nigerian labour migrants, the conditional gift in the form of a large wage advance produced a particularly intense contradiction. In the historiography of unfree labour, the excess wage advance is thought to create conditions for the perpetuation of bondage through debt. However, in imperial contexts, the wage advance did not generate compliance and immobility; exactly the opposite – it produced unprecedented waves of further escalation and dispersed flight. The dash was pushed up by workers themselves and relayed by informal recruiters. Together they turned this lynchpin of indentured labour and debt peonage into a counter-practice that almost led to the collapse of the plantations in the 1950s. The trajectories of the dash led to a more pointed version of the foundational thesis of global labour history: namely, that it was actually free labour, not unfree labour, that was incompatible with labour scarcity-ridden imperial capitalism.