For the mission-educated men and women known as “New Africans” in segregationist South Africa, the pleasures and challenges of courtship and marriage were not only experienced privately. New Africans also broadcast marital narratives as political discourses of race-making and nation-building. Through close readings of neglected press sources and memoirs, this article examines this political interpolation of private life in public culture. Women’s writing about the politics of marriage provides a lens onto theorizations of their personal and political ideals in the 1930s and 1940s, a period in which the role of women in nationalist public culture has generally been dismissed as marginal by scholars.

Discussions of church weddings are not standard in accounts of African marriage in South Africa in the early twentieth century. However, from the 1890s onward, church weddings were becoming more common, and by the 1930s more Africans married in church than elsewhere. Indeed, these wedding ceremonies provide insight into how black families experienced and created their own social status in a context in which white South Africans viewed black weddings as a symbol of racial misappropriation. Via weddings and their associated commodification, families held on to and proclaimed the value of family life, and importantly, broader social networks as well as status-based associational life in an era of familial disintegration. At the same time weddings were often a double-edged indicator of status through their reference to sexual purity by means of white frocks.

This article investigates links between ilobolo (bridewealth) practices and marriage outcomes in contemporary Zulu society. It presents quantitative data showing very low marriage rates among Zulu adults, as well as interview evidence suggesting that the majority of Zulu adults identify ilobolo as a constraint to marriage. However, the interview evidence also suggests that ilobolo remains widely valued as a Zulu tradition and continues to be an integral and defining feature of a Zulu marriage. The article concludes that this tension—between the high cost of ilobolo and respect for ilobolo as a custom—contributes to the very low marriage rates observed among Zulu people today.

This article examines the gendered relationships of authority that are at the heart of the processes of customary marriage in South Africa, as well as the ways in which colonial political intervention worked to effect social change in nineteenth-century colonial Natal. This analysis reinforces the established historiographical understanding that instigating generational shifts in authority was important to Natal Native Policy, unlike customary regulation elsewhere in colonial Africa in which colonial law worked to shore up the authority of senior men. However, it seeks to underline that while negotiations of colonial power began to shift authority from older to younger men by manipulating Native marriage, and in particular the practice of lobola, the effects of such policies produced profound shifts in the experience and articulation of gendered relationships of marriage and colonial authority. The imbrication of changes in gender and generational norms ultimately reveals the contradictions in both colonial claims of liberal gender reform and African claims that colonial policy provoked the usurpation of male traditional authority.

Although scholars have noted the rising potentials for democracy in Africa as a result of increased use of digital media and mobile technologies, there seems to be a disregard or disavowal of queerness as part of that growing democratic space, as well as a related tendency to regard African culture solely in terms of mainstream writing and journalism. This article seeks to bridge this gap in the scholarship by means of a discourse analysis of comments about queer identities that can be found in the digital media (Facebook, chat rooms, blogs, YouTube comments, and online newspaper feedback) in contemporary Kenya. Following work on queer arts and “low” theory, the article explores the possibilities offered by the Internet to challenge homophobia in Kenya. While acknowledging that digital-media venues contain more homophobia than mainstream media (books, television, newspapers) in terms of intensity and quantity, the article demonstrates that they also offer a unique platform in which gay people can respond to homophobic representations of their experiences and desires.

Based on two relatively well-reported cases of homophobia in Malawi and South Africa, this article aims to show some of the ways in which hegemonic African men and masculinities are unsettled by, but also find ideological use for, the existence of homosexuality and nonheteronormative sexualities. Deploying the notion of psychopolitics, the article traces the interpenetrating psychosocial and sociopolitical aspects of homophobia. The argument is that analyses of issues of lesbian, gay, and “othered” sexualities are vital for a fuller understanding of the production of hegemonic forms of gender and masculinity in Africa. The article suggests that the threat posed by homosexuality is used as a distraction for some of the socioeconomic development-related failures of Africa’s ruling men but also, more significantly, for the impossibility of hegemonic African masculinity itself.

Sakawa indexes a cyberfraud practice in Ghana allegedly linked with occult rituals. This article examines the phenomenon as an analytically relevant example of a material understanding of religion. It then offers a critical reading of a popular sakawa video series and contrasts its thematic perspectives with the reactions of some Ghanaian political leaders to the possible motivations for the practice. This critical approach is conceived as a response to the persistent myopic view of such popular genres as irrelevant to key debates around problematic Ghanaian issues and also to calls in global media studies to de-Westernize the field.

Europe’s immigrant populations are often represented on screen by both European and immigrant filmmakers as marginalized in the violent neighborhoods of peripheral urban areas in Paris, Lyon, London, and elsewhere. The film Les Barons (Nabil Ben Yadir, 2009) seeks to counter such stereotypes. The protagonists of Les Barons are multilingual, multicultural young men with proud ties to their families and the ability, at the same time, to straddle cultural registers and global perspectives as they live their cosmopolitan Dasein, or “Being-in-the-world.”