This article examines the cultural ambiguity of Senegalese wrestling. Certain discourses around this sport have constructed it as a nostalgic embodiment of traditional, national, or African values. At the same time, other discourses emphasize the sport’s commercialization, its embeddedness in the economics of precarity, and even its inventedness as a tradition. The case of Senegalese wrestling illustrates how traditionality is summoned and put to question in a context of socioeconomic fragmentation. Repinecz offers readings of Aminata Sow Fall’s novel L’Appel des arènes (1982), Cheikh Ndiaye’s film adaptation of the same name (2005), and Boubacar Boris Diop’s novel Doomi Golo (2003 and 2009) to illustrate this analysis.

Looking back on my incarceration in Guantánamo from the relative security of my home in Nouakchott, I now realize how significant the African presence was in the illegal detention facility. While at the time, and as my Guantánamo Diary makes clear, our captors treated us primarily as Muslims, jihadis, Arabs, and Middle Easterners, the reality was that many of us were first and foremost African. We were born in African countries, our citizenship was that of African nations, we were handed over or surrendered by our own African governments to the U.S., and we shared the common experiences of Africans. The ASA forum held in celebration of my memoir has enabled me to reflect further on this and on what happens when we rethink Gitmo as a place of African detention, created by the collaboration of independent African governments. Fewer than one hundred detainees in Guantánamo hailed from the African continent, which is 12 percent of the total population at its peak. Algeria and Morocco had the most representation, and most detainees were North African, but sub-Saharan Africans featured prominently too. In this commentary, I want to share a little bit about my experience, with a view to making Guantánamo Diary more comprehensible to an Africanist audience.

Refugees in sub-Saharan Africa residing among host communities experience the need to articulate belonging in order to generate a greater sense of security. Based on the individual life stories of Ivorian refugees in Northeastern Liberia in 2011, Bedert finds that local patterns of integration between landlords and strangers are foregone by the bureaucratic identity of refugees as imposed by the international community. In addition, local integration is not self-evident, as it entails a degree of reciprocity and mutual recognition. In the eyes of landlords, strangers are evaluated based on what they can bring to the table.

Africanists struggle with Mohamedou ould Slahi’s story for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the Saharan region is often considered a space betwixt and between. Not only does the Sahara lie between the Maghreb and the Sahel, but Slahi’s experience illustrates how the military and political histories of counterterrorism and the intellectual and social histories of Islamist calls for religious reform are imagined as occurring elsewhere. The upswing in violence in Burkina Faso and Mali, the continued disruptions of Boko Haram, and the deep military involvement and investments in the Sahara remind us that the African continent has been an important site in the global war on terror (Thurston 2017). American and European foreign assistance, often in the form of military aid, has helped expand the surveillance capacities of African states, especially after 2001. In the case of Mauritania, American counterterrorism funds contributed to the consolidation of power in the authoritarian regime of Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya, who ruled from 1984 to 2005, while the Mauritanian government ignored demands for democratization from its own citizens and instead pursued repressive policies that accused political opponents of Islamist activity, limiting their freedom of expression (Jourde 2007). Slahi’s story, then, can be seen as part of a much longer history of foreign incursion and neocolonial intrusion into African affairs, as the war on terror has led to a similar bolstering of authoritarian governments, an influx of military aid and funds that encourage corruption, and worrisome increases in weapons at the expense of other needed projects and investment, as happened during the Cold War (Schmidt 2013). Rather than promote economic development and democracy, these policies undermine Africa’s future.

Over the last two decades, witchcraft violence has emerged steadily as a “push factor” for African asylum seekers who argue that being accused of witchcraft or targeted with witchcraft renders them members of a “particular social group” (PSG), subject to persecution and eligible for refugee protection under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. This article examines the refugee status determination (RSD) processes through which immigration regimes in Canada and Australia have adjudicated allegations about witchcraft violence made by asylum seekers from across Anglophone Africa. It critiques the utility of expanding PSG along cultural lines without a commensurate expansion in adjudicators’ knowledge.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi is arguably one of the most famous contemporary Mauritanians worldwide. This is largely owed to his Guantánamo Diary, a bestseller that he penned while he was an inmate in Guantánamo prison. The memoir appeared in January of 2015, reflecting on Slahi’s plight as a wrongly incarcerated detainee in the (in)famous jail. Prosaic and sincere, the book, so far the only voice of a Guantánamo detainee, depicts the wretched life within a Kafkaesque oubliette, an impersonal, yet rationalized and inhumane, castle where legality is suspended in a state of exception. Slahi’s story is about the inside humane oscillations of a homo sacer, struggling to come to terms with his difficult situation. Ever since the book appeared, and after Slahi’s release and return to his home country of Mauritania in October 2016, Slahi’s post-Guantánamo life has attracted attention from communities of readers worldwide. This aggregate interest is now accumulating in a forthcoming Hollywood movie based on Slahi’s story. Various factors conspire to encourage this interest, much of which involves the politics of reading, imagination, and hermeneutics of the respective readers. Yet I will argue that the story should interest Africanists as well. First, Slahi’s is a Mauritanian story, telling us numerous facts about African culture and politics in the region and how they coalesce in Slahi’s story. Second, even from a theological perspective Slahi’s intellectual and personal profile reflects a story of African post-Islamism, a theology of forgiveness rarely outlined in the literature. Third, Slahi is also a public intellectual, contributing to the debates in Mauritania, which gives his story a reflexive dimension and an agency lacking in other obscure Guantánamo detainees. In short, Slahi tells a story that is distinct from the typical Guantánamo and terrorism-linked profiles, a story that is situated in a specific African context.

Anas Aremeyaw Anas has been called Africa’s “most notorious” journalist.1 He has produced documentaries extensively about human rights and corruption in Africa. As an undercover investigator, he is infamous for working in disguise. Operating under the mantra, “name, shame, and jail,” Anas describes himself as a “modern day crime fighter.” Anas has won numerous accolades, in Ghana and internationally, for work exploring illegal mining, sex work, infertility clinics, mental health care, cocoa plantations and child labor, corruption in the judiciary and international football. Anas sat down for an interview with Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann in 2018 to discuss his methods and interests.

We also have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We're going to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussions, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies if we're going to be successful.

If the unvarnished power of the state has a face, then it is the prison. When the mask of cultural hegemony slips, we encounter the walls of the penal institution, its barbed wire, and its blankly functional architecture, mute and unseeing. A prison is one of the most concentrated modalities of state power. By definition, a prison is a zone of exclusion; it defines the normal, everyday civic sphere by defining a site of exception. A prison has its own distinctive logic and temporality, in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s words, “dull, mundane, monotonous, tortuous in its intended animal rhythm of eating, defecating, sleeping, eating, defecating, sleeping” (1981:116). It is a world of boredom, isolation, and fear. Nonetheless, because of its close proximity to state power, the prison also offers a sharp-edged reflection of the operation of power in a society. As Michael Hardt observes, “Those who are free, outside of prison looking in, might imagine their own freedom defined and reinforced in opposition to prison time. When you get close to prison, however, you realize that it is not really a site of exclusion, separate from society, but rather a focal point, the site of the highest concentration of a logic of power that is generally diffused throughout the world” (1997:66). Or as Robben Island prisoner Michael Dingake remarked in his 1987 autobiography, “Prison is the heart of oppression in any oppressive society” (1987:228).