This article offers a critique of widely disseminated portrayals of northern Malian Tuareg by outside media, which tend to portray all Tuareg as warriors and criminals and to project pseudo-scientific concepts of “race” onto relationships between Tuareg and other Malians, recalling the now discredited colonial “Hamitic Myth” in Rwanda. It also analyzes local oral historical accounts that present themes of Mali as both a protected fortress and welcoming crossroads, a country that both resists and absorbs intruders, and that also express concepts of identity based on language, culture, and flexible social affiliation. The article is based partly on interviews with internationally known local musicians who function as mediating “third voices,” and concludes with a discussion of wider implications of these findings for notions of voice, authority, and the mutual construction of ideas of Africa.

As the silence of male CRSV victims continues to be debated, some argue that gender norms and a lack of agency contribute to the silence of victims, even as others assert that victims exercise agency by speaking selectively about their experiences. In northern Nigeria, the concept of kunya—a model for appropriate behaviour rooted in the importance of secrecy and discretion—plays a role in the silencing of victims. We examine how kunya contributes to the invisibility of victims and influences their silence, as well as how victims use silence to gain social tolerability and/or protect themselves from re-victimization. We argue that an attentiveness to such community-specific cultural precepts and norms can further our understanding of the silence (and silencing) of victims and survivors.

An analysis of the African Union approach to eliminating violence against women shows that while the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa (the Maputo Protocol) refined the culture/violence nexus, the subsequent regional frameworks reverted to culture-centered explanations. Tornius’s critical analysis reveals how the relationship between culture and gender discourses has changed over time, entangled with processes of colonialism, decolonization, emergence of African socialisms, the end of the Cold War, and the advent of African feminisms. Articulating gendered violence through undefined ahistorical and apolitical notions of “culture” has real life adverse effects for women through ineffective policy and development interventions.