This article explores the innovative and hybrid intellectual project of Christopher Azaare Anabila. Since 1976, Azaare has been documenting the histories of the Gurensi and Boosi people of northern Ghana and has crafted genealogical maps of whole villages and clans. He has written manuscripts on taboos, totems, proverbs, missionary activities, cultural institutions and anti-colonial resistance. Because of this work, people have begun to refer to Azaare as Agurumyela, which in Gurene means ‘a person who digs into people's past’. Central to this lifelong endeavour is the museum of Gurensi culture that Azaare has been building in Gowrie. I present Azaare's views of this wide-ranging process of collection and re-casting and reflect on his motivation to reclaim history and curating authority from professional academics. I argue that Azaare's project allows us to recognize the ubiquitous existence of a vibrant strand of African intellectual creativity that combines multiple repertoires and draws on overlapping and diverse productions in different modes and media. Next, I turn to Azaare's manuscript on the institution of tindaanaship (earth custodians). I explore his genealogical method as an art of connection that highlights his role as an engaged community intellectual, weaving extensive networks between Gurensi communities, officials and academics.

Admittedly though the Gurensi and Boosi, and for that matter the Frafras, living in the Bolgatanga and Bongo District Council Area have flourished for nearly over five hundred (500) years, their history and traditions have for these centuries laid almost buried and forgotten. Their history has in fact been relatively neglected by comparison with the period of the Mamprusi, Gonja, and Dagomba histories. The works of early researchers, ethnologists and so forth on the Gurene and Bone speaking peoples such as Allan Wolsey Cardinall (1921), R. S. Rattray (1932), T. E. Hilton (1956, 1959) and Dr Ludwig Rapp (1967) are devoid of the oral traditions and history of these people at the local level. In the case of R. S. Rattray and A. W. Cardinall, their works are not only brief, but they appear in a rather unusual sequence.

For many decades, anthropologists have debated the question of matriliny, with some expressing concerns about its prospects of survival in a modern economy of private property and greater economic differentiation. In continuing this debate, this article provides new and contemporary evidence of the continued relevance of matriliny as a kinship practice that shapes the daily conduct of women. Using ethnographic evidence from the Asante town of Offinso in Ghana, the article demonstrates the crucial role of matrilineal kinship through the economic experiences of two market women living with their respective husbands. The evidence shows that the persistence of economic values that encourage female enterprise, norms of kinship that privilege maternal relations over paternal ones and marriage conventions that allow spouses to maintain separate economic resources create a social and economic environment in which women actively assert their independence from husbands. Women's strong allegiance to their matrilineage is mirrored in their economic conduct, further accentuating the antithesis between conjugal and lineage bonds. Put together, these factors point to greater social and economic autonomy for Asante women.

In Sierra Leone, transactional relationships – so-called agreement relationships – have a life-course dimension. Not only are they employed by young people but they are equally important among elders, and they serve different purposes as people age. Long-term ethnographic research with the elderly uncovers that they remember the past and engage with the present through agreement relationships. The elders’ love and life histories from the 1930s to today form ‘accumulated history’. They reveal a shift from kin-based rural hierarchies, where agreement relationships were carefully concealed, to larger, more dynamic urban networks that are openly held together through such relations. Leaving the former and finding one's feet in the latter become possible through transactional relationships that provide alternatives to fosterage and strategies of fictive or aspirational kin. The case of Sierra Leone invites us to rethink the focus on transactional relationships at a specific point in time for a life-course perspective that reveals the enduring nature of the phenomenon and sheds light on its changing texture in individual biographies, with the potential for capturing large-scale social trajectories within and across countries.

This article considers the role of embodied experience in promoting revolutionary ideology in Guinea. The Republic of Guinea has long held close ties with China, and in the 1960s and 1970s the country pursued its own Cultural Revolution. While Chinese songs and aesthetics had little direct artistic influence, the Guinean state embraced Maoist ideals of social and self-transformation and discipline. Such ideals were translated into daily life through the regulation of bodies, including practices of dance, movement and physical gesture that sought to create revolutionary subjects. I show here how embodied practices, including the circulation of dancers and official delegations, cultivated Guinea's relationship with China; and how practices of movement and dance were inwardly experienced within Guinea during its own Cultural Revolution. In so doing, I address some of the contradictions of the Revolution and of Guinea–China relations. While the regime pursued its goals through violence and brutality, former revolutionary subjects today remember the moment for both its pain and its pleasures – for the hardships the body had to endure and for the nationalist pride that many still feel today.

This article argues that the politics of extraterritorial jurisdiction in the 1920s reshaped relations between ethnicity and territorial sovereignty in Ethiopia's eastern borderlands. A 1925 criminal trial involving Gadabursi Somalis began as what Britons deemed a ‘tribal matter’ to be settled through customary means, but became a struggle for Ethiopia's regent, Ras Tafari, to assert Ethiopia's territorial authority and imperial sovereignty. British claims of extraterritorial jurisdiction over Somalis amidst 1920s global geopolitical shifts disrupted existing practices of governance in Ethiopia's eastern borderlands and created a dilemma for Ethiopian authorities. In order to uphold international obligations, Ethiopian officials effectively had to revoke their sovereignty over some Somalis indigenous to Ethiopia. Yet Britons’ practical application of extraterritoriality to Somalis was predicated on assumed racial differences between Somalis and highland Ethiopians (‘Abyssinians’). Thus, Ethiopia's recognition of British extraterritorial jurisdiction would lend legitimacy to claims exempting Somalis from Ethiopian sovereignty due to differences in identity. The case reveals how assertions about race, nationality and ‘tribal’ identity articulated to subordinate Ethiopian rule to British interests and, in the longer term, to delegitimize Ethiopian governance over Somalis.

Twenty years after the Mozambican war ended, a return to arms from 2013 by the opposition movement Renamo served to revitalize support for the party in the 2014 election, and put pressure on the Frelimo government to consider demands for constitutional change. Building on existing research on post-war politics and on recent economic change, this article addresses the question of how Renamo obtained civilians’ approval for renewed armed action in the south of Sofala province, the region where conflict broke out in 2013. I argue that popular legitimacy for Renamo's challenge to the state is constituted in a narrative about Renamo that is congruent both with present-day grievances against the state and with understandings of local history dating to the anticolonial struggle that challenge the nationalist history on which Frelimo hegemony rests. Renamo has adapted this narrative in such a way as to claim a historic role for itself in defending the interests of central and northern Mozambique and in struggling for an inclusive and democratic state. In this way, Renamo has gained support for its renewed armed actions, not only among those politicized by Renamo in the earlier war but more broadly among civilians in the region.