This article contributes to the theorization of involuntary return and moral economies in the context of economic crisis and vulnerability prompted by restrictive migration regimes and conflicts. Drawing on fieldwork in a rural town in Ghana where international labour migration is an established livelihood, it analyses deportations from North Africa, Israel and Europe and emergency return from Libya following the civil war in 2011. The article argues that return to the home town, rather than being detained or stuck en route, constitutes a particular context precisely because migrants face family and community expectations upon their return. Involuntary return constitutes a disruption of migration projects when migrants return empty-handed, going from being remitters to burdens for their families. This creates conflicts and disappointments within family and the local community, especially in relation to norms of provision and gender ideals. The paper highlights three effects of the moral economy of involuntary return. First, that involuntary return does not constitute a priori termination of migration, as many involuntary return migrants migrate again, often in high-risk ways. Second, it discusses the ambivalence of reciprocity and interdependency in families. And third, it shows how involuntary return challenges dominant ideals of masculinity.

The professional ethics of biomedicine in Eastern Africa are usually sharply distinguished from the everyday moral concerns of patients, who may interpret healthcare treatment differently from their doctors. Biomedical doctors’ pronouncements adhere to the ethical demands of formal training, while ordinary people form their own moral ideas about biomedicine, with the two discourses meeting only during medical-moral crises. The voice of biomedicine, therefore, is metaphorically loud compared with that of everyday talk. This hegemonic duality of biomedicine is less evident in traditional Islamic healing, where patients sometimes negotiate the moral implications of sickness with their healers, and where Islamic medical ethics may be transmitted to younger apprentices interpersonally through life histories and narrative. The differences in volume between healers’ and patients’ moral voices are thus less pronounced, though not absent. Nevertheless, both are subject to the higher authority of Islam, whose holy texts and clerics are the final arbiters of the symptoms, cause and consequences of sickness. It is speculated that the emerging power, influence and stronger voice of radical Wahhabism could create a hegemonic medical ethical duality based more strictly than at present on religiously prescribed practice.

While the conceptual models on conflict, security and regionalism have evolved and augmented with time, East African pastoral relations remain subject to simplistic explanatory analyses that view pastoral conflicts as cross-border community conflicts and small arms as part of their cultural heritage. This article strives to find a more nuanced understanding of the relations of pastoralist communities and the role of arms in the perennial cross-border conflict. It uses a regional security complex (RSC) approach, first proposed by Barry Buzan and subsequently moulded in ‘new regionalism’ perspectives, which emphasizes the intricate web of pastoralist relations shaped by their need for security, where their identity and livelihood (cattle) remain at the centre. Taking this further, it develops the concept of a Karamoja security complex (KSC) as an appropriate explanatory framework. Through historical analysis and primary data collected among the Nyàngatom in Ethiopia, the research reveals a regular and complex pattern of conflict moulded primarily by the fundamental need for security.

As contract farming gains ground as a form of agricultural production in Southern Africa, there is growing interest in its effects on patterns of investment and production as well as in its potential to provide small farmers with access to export markets. However, the relation between contract farming and the region's long history of labour migration has largely escaped analysts and scholars working on Southern Africa. This article traces the changing livelihoods of those who experienced the demise of the migrant labour system and displacement during the civil war, and who now engage in contract farming in Angónia, a densely populated district in Tete Province, central Mozambique. In the decades since the end of the war, contract farming thrived among former migrants with access to land and few alternative sources of income and employment. If historical labour migration from Angónia involved attempts by employers to externalize the responsibility for social reproduction onto households, contract farming amounts to the internalization by households of the opportunities, risks and tensions involved in the production of high-value export commodities. By analysing farmers’ accounts of producing under contract and linking this to their households’ longer histories of labour mobilization, this article sheds light on people's experiences of working for wages, working on their own account and hiring workers, as households became the new sites of commodity production.

Studies of articulations between large- and small-scale mining have overlooked the subterranean dimension of extraction and ignored how mining companies and artisanal miners cohabit in places with long histories of small-scale mining and are affected by their different capacities to access specific mineral deposits. Drawing on a study of two gold concessions in Ghana, this article focuses on three factors that influence modalities of governing access to gold in such sites: the stage of a mining operation, the local socio-political context, and the characteristics of the subterranean structure. We call the combination and interplay of these factors ‘in-depth geopolitics’. The article shows how this interplay affects the strategies used by both large- and small-scale miners to work out arrangements of cohabitation and ways of governing access, control and maintenance to gold in spatial settings where both types of gold mining occur side by side. By tracing ethnographically the variations of ‘in-depth geopolitics’, this article critically engages with ideas of subterranean sovereignty, mining enclaves, state–company–community relations, and the socio-spatial characteristics of mining concessions.

This article explores migrant existences in the border zones around Europe. Drawing on ethnographic research in Morocco undertaken in 2012, 2013 and 2015 and in continued engagements with migrants using social media, the article analyses three extended migrant stories, detailing their experiences of uncertainty, waiting and hoping. By elucidating the objectives informing migrants’ pathways and the material and moral considerations underpinning the ways in which they navigate migrant life in Rabat, the stories unveil how different temporalities and spatialities intersect and influence their decisions and ability to endure hardship and waiting. The article argues that uncertainties and risks inherent in migration, and in irregular migration in particular, have transformed collective expectations of the migratory project as a means of upward social mobility and economic security into hope and into a mode of hoping that individualizes success and failure. Meanwhile, the rising costs of migration and structural marginalization render the opportunity to travel elsewhere contingent on assistance from transnational social networks or international institutions. Individuals’ success or failure thus comes to depend on how understandings of hardship, waiting, opportunity and moral obligation are configured and reconfigured by lived experiences in different places.

Discussing the ethical positions of politicians and public intellectuals, mostly Christians, the article analyses the emergence of ethical fields through HIV prevention in the context of Botswana's proactive HIV politics since the turn of the millennium. I discuss the interaction between everyday experiences of death and suffering, activist engagements on the part of some leading figures in prevention, and various publics. All of these voices agree that people and institutions, such as the church, need to fulfil their responsibilities. In all these situations and among the public, kinship becomes a source of identity and of positive ethics of virtue to support behavioural changes. The virtue of responsibility becomes consensual, making it possible to bridge the apparent contestation between the imperative of safe sex, launched by public health discourses, and everyday practices, highlighting childbirth and the continuity of kinship as a way to connect to life and transcend death. These various public and private ethics feed into a political imaginary, drawing on ideas of kinship as guaranteeing social stability.

As part of a growing working-class movement that sought full legal status as employees in South Africa, stable urban residence and union recognition, female African factory workers became part of a dynamic new labour movement emanating from the shop floor. At the same time, this new role allowed them to challenge patriarchal structures of authority in the factory, the community and the home. This article examines the gender dimension of a bitter inter-union rivalry that beset Durban's Frame textile complex during the early 1980s. With African unions at last recognized by the apartheid state, Frame sought to bolster the strength of a compliant company union in order to thwart the organizing drive of a more confrontational independent union, an affiliate of the newly established Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU). This union rivalry was fought out in the courts as well as inside the factory, in the streets of Durban's townships, and in an African workers’ hostel in nearby Clermont. The legal dispute generated affidavits by women workers attesting to the pressures they faced to join the company union and their reasons for preferring FOSATU. This evidence shows that African women successfully challenged the patriarchal authority of male managers, security personnel, indunas and male co-workers at Frame in order to join an independent union.

South Africa's township revolts have generated much excellent research on the central role played by rebellious, urban youth. This article explores a parallel set of intergenerational conflicts that opened up in the marginal rural districts of the Natal Midlands, which were exacerbated by apartheid's forced removals of labour tenants from commercial farming districts to crowded ‘Native Reserves’ in the 1970s. At this time of deepening poverty, elders worried about the rising incidence of juvenile petty crime, particularly amongst the teenagers who increasingly took itinerant, seasonal labour on the commercial farms. Some of these young migrants, unable to find steady factory work at a time of mounting unemployment, also played a leading role in the illicit, sometimes criminal networks of South Africa's growing popular economy. Finally, I show how some of these youths were mobilized by Inkatha during the war against the African National Congress in Johannesburg – often to the revulsion of older men who abhorred their socially harmful, thuggish violence, which spiralled uncontrollably along migrant routes. Thus the political violence was often known as the udlame: a brutal savagery that destroys households, communities and society.

In Niger, there is an increasing rejection of politik (a term with highly pejorative connotations): that is, party politics and the politics of democracy, characterized by personal rivalries and power struggles between clans and factions. But there is a direct link (albeit not a causal one) between the social perceptions of intra-familial rivalries and the social perceptions of political rivalries. The archetypical relationship among the baab-izey (children of one father but different mothers) is characterized by competition and jealousy. This is a product of the latent rivalry that pits co-wives against each other. Polygamy is clearly at odds with a number of received ideas and clichés about ‘the African family’ as primarily a locus of support and solidarity. Such formal social norms may reign in public situations, but in private de facto practical norms give rise to subtle discriminations and the omnipresence of more or less hidden conflicts within the family. The same is true for the political microcosm of Niger. While the public norm of the concern for the public good is supposed to regulate political behaviours, rivalry and jealousy are structural components of the political world. The baab-izey pattern is frequently used in reference to politicians. Political conflicts are above all personal/factional conflicts in which friends and supporters are implicated, and are rivalries of proximity. In the familial space as in the political space, ‘magico-religious entrepreneurs’ (i.e. experts in the occult) are merely an ‘accelerator’ of these conflicts: they reinforce suspicions about the familial or political entourage, which, in turn, intensify rivalries.

The Copperbelt of Congo was once the bastion of industrial development and no individual embodied its modernity as fully as the salaried industrial miner. Today, with the near collapse of the state-run mining company, Gécamines, and the liberalization of the mining industry starting in 2002, the majority of miners are no longer trained and salaried industrial workers but rather children and youth eking out a precarious living as artisanal miners or creuseurs. In Congo, artisanal mining is paradoxical, for, although it indexes a future of unskilled, untrained, flexible work in rural and peri-urban enclaves, its organization of labour and rudimentary techniques of copper extraction allude to and borrow from the colonial and precolonial past. Creuseurs mobilize the past as a strategic response to the threat of dispossession of ‘their’ land by the state and foreign investors, and they do so by laying claim to an anterior ‘sovereign’ – the ancestors – whose existence predates colonialism. This paradoxical emplacement of artisanal mining, its entanglement in time, invites interrogation of some of the ways in which scholars have understood precarity not only as a politically induced condition resulting from neoliberalism but also as an outcome of the enduring nature of the colonizing structure in Africa.

This article discusses contemporary anxieties about buda spirit attacks around a marketplace in Amhara region, Ethiopia. It asks how we get from the immediate experience of a buda attack – an emotionally intense scene of sickness, fear and uncertainty – to a reflexive situation in which buda becomes a vehicle for discussing and understanding deep historic concerns about market exchange. I make two main arguments: first, that apparent connections between spiritual attack and the spread of capitalism in fact reflect a deeper-lying opposition, on the part of landed elites, between moral hospitality and immoral exchange. Second, I show how this historical consciousness develops from processes of verification and questioning through which immediate experiences of sickness and fear become interpretable as buda attacks associated with particular human agents and historical relationships. It is only by following this local epistemological work that we can understand how spirits become identifiable as historical agents within a web of other social relations.

In contemporary Ghana, adult children are considered responsible for the care of aged parents. Within this idealized framework, two aspects of eldercare are overlooked. Firstly, such a narrative obscures the role of non-kin and extended kin in providing eldercare in southern Ghana historically and in the present. Secondly, it hides the negotiations over obligations and commitments between those who manage eldercare and those who help with an ageing person's daily activities. It is in this latter role that non-kin and extended kin are significant in eldercare, while closer kin maintain their kin roles through the management, financial support and recruitment of others. This article examines recruitment to eldercare and the role of kin and non-kin in eldercare in three historical periods: the 1860s, the 1990s and the 2000s, centred on Akuapem, in southern Ghana. In particular, I show that helping an aged person relies on previous and expected entrustments, in which more vulnerable, dependent and indebted persons are most likely to be recruited to provide care.

The way in which people approach ill health and its relief is often explained as a function of pragmatic evaluation. Through looking at a case of illness in the family of David Kaso, a Baptist pastor living in rural Malawi, this article suggests that trust or faithfulness may be more appropriate terms with which to describe people's approaches to healing and their social antecedents and outcomes. Pentecostal churches had grown in influence in the area where the churches David led were located. Pentecostal leaders often emphasized that experiencing divine healing, or successfully bringing it about, were the results of the ‘work’ that Christians did for God. David and his congregants recognized the difficult questions this perspective could raise about their status in church and emphasized instead that healing happened in God's ‘grace’, largely irrespective of the actions of the Christian. This being the case, the efficacy of prayer as a way of bringing about healing could not really be tested nor, as a corollary, could the outcome of prayer for healing stand as a proxy for evaluating the Christian. The uncertainties David and his church members admitted over healing meant that the basis of their relationships was better described in terms of trust or faithfulness than pragmatism.

Colonial rule in West Africa initiated the incorporation of mobile people, particularly pastoralists, into Western territorial states. This article reports on the early period of French colonial rule of the area that is now South-Western Niger – a strategically important area with respect to territorial competition among the French colonies of Dahomey and Soudan (later the colonies of Senegambia and Niger) as well as the British colony of Nigeria. Building from the study of contemporary patterns of livestock mobility and their logics, archival and secondary literatures are used to develop an understanding of dominant herd mobility patterns at the time (transhumance for grazing and trekking to distant markets); the importance of livestock as a source of tax revenue; colonial anxieties about the loss of livestock from within their borders; and efforts of colonial administrators to reduce the potential loss of livestock from their territories. This case illustrates the limitations of the territorial state model where the state lacks sufficient power over mobile subjects utilizing a sparse and fluctuating resource base. The actions of French administrators and Fulɓe pastoralists worked as a form of ‘hands-off’ negotiation, with each group monitoring and reacting to the actions of the other. Due to the limitations of colonial state control, the existence of boundaries elicited greater monitoring of livestock movements by colonial administrators but also increased the leverage held by mobile pastoralists as the French sought to increase the attractiveness of their territory to the principal managers of its wealth (livestock). The proximity of borders to the study area complicated the task of French colonial administrators, who necessarily became increasingly focused on monitoring the movements of their subjects (labour and capital) to avoid their possible escape as they moved within the borderlands of what is now South-Western Niger. The limits of colonial power to monitor and control these movements led administrators to initiate policies favouring pastoralists.

This article considers the reconstruction of Rwanda's post-genocide music industry through the national music competition, Primus Guma Guma Super Star. It explores local ideas about ‘playback’ and ‘live’ music, and argues that these two performative categories can be understood as wider metaphors for the relationship between the Rwandan state and its citizens, particularly Rwandan youth. On the one hand, Guma Guma aims to create the ideal post-genocide celebrity subject who will ‘play back’ a unified, de-ethnicized Rwandan identity with body and words. On the other, during the first two seasons of the competition, audiences demanded ‘live’ performance and Guma Guma prompted heated debate about ‘taboo’ topics, revealing enduring differences along socio-economic, ethnic and regional lines. Rather than affirm an inclusive Rwandan identity, Guma Guma hinted at its fragility and underscored the multiple and conflicting ways in which young people identify themselves and evaluate ‘truth’ in the post-genocide era. The article contributes not only to literature on popular culture in Africa, but also to studies that focus on mediation and changes in recording technology. Although scholars have quite rightly attempted to dissolve the boundary between the live and the mediated, I suggest that the boundary continues to do cultural and political work, particularly in developmental states.

Midwife Rokhaya Thiam joined the Fayḍa Tijāniyya Sufi Islamic movement in 2005 and soon became aware of her divine mission to found the Association Mame Astou Diankha. This organization provides free medical services to needy people and organizes economic development projects for women. Rokhaya Thiam exemplifies a broader trend of ‘hybrid’ religious subjects in the Fayḍa Tijāniyya movement who embed neoliberal notions such as ‘development’ and individual entrepreneurial initiative into mystical notions of selfhood, agency and moral order. Such charismatic disciples seem to approach discipleship in liberal fashion, pursuing an individualized mission in contrast to the classic Sufi disciple who passively follows instructions from the shaykh. However, these disciples defy reduction to individual, neoliberal subjectivity, subsuming their agency under a larger spiritual entity responsible for revealing and realizing their mission. This article asks whether such hybridities may be intrinsic to neoliberal subjecthood, which entails being shaped by neoliberal power and knowledge while domesticating them to other ends, rather than being exceptions that emerge on the still-enchanted edges of neoliberalism.

Cattle raiding is iconic of the colonial frontier in Southern African history and historiography. Incorporating settlers and Africans as aggressors and victims alike, archives and ethnohistories depict raiding as thieving, subverting authority, and inciting conflict. Despite the in-depth anthropological attention given to ‘Bushman raiding’ and frontier commandos, comparatively little work has focused on the social and cultural function of cattle raiding within chiefdoms: that is, examining cattle raiding as socially embedded rather than simply transgressing authority and property ownership. This article explores how these narratives of ‘disorder’ have been constructed, and some alternative perspectives on nineteenth-century cattle raiding as a social institution. Through vignettes drawing on archival, archaeological, ethnographic and folkloric evidence, this article offers glimpses of what narratives of the recent past could look like if views of raiding-as-disorder were revisited and revised. I draw attention to where raids were illegal versus illicit, the role of cattle as social agents, and the logic underpinning designations of raiding as resistance. Developing a view of raiding as social practice permits us to interrogate archival perceptions of raiders as outlaws and raids as analogues for warfare, thus enabling more nuanced investigations of conflict in Southern Africa's past.

In recent works on intimacy and home in South Africa, scholars question the assumptions about where ‘home’ ends, and who counts as ‘family’. In calls for curriculum change and the transformation of the university (discourses that were about access for both black students and black faculty), these questions of affiliation and ‘home’ have played a prominent role. In the student protest movement of 2015 and 2016, for example, a recurring discourse was to invoke ‘our mothers, the domestic workers’. This was partly an attempt to forge links between the students’ demands and those of casualized cleaning and catering staff on campus, but the invocation of ‘our mothers, the domestic workers’ also underlined the lineage of the university as one associated with ‘the big house’ and many black students’ feelings of being tolerated, at best, in spaces that historically did not imagine them as full citizens, but instead as marginal to the home that is South Africa.