In post-colonial Namibia public memory of the liberation war prioritizes the armed struggle from exile. This master narrative of national liberation, having become the new nation's foundation myth, legitimizes the power of the post-colonial SWAPO elite as the sole, heroic liberators from apartheid and colonialism. It has not remained uncontested, however. The article develops the complex transfigurations of liberation war memory, culture and nationalism in post-colonial Namibia around a discussion of two memory sites. The National Heroes’ Acre near Windhoek, inaugurated in 2002, appears as the cast-in-stone nationalist master narrative, aimed at homogenizing the multi-faceted agencies during the liberation war, whereas the Heroes’ Memorial Shrine at Eenhana, constructed in 2007, expressly recognizes the heterogeneity of war-time experiences. The Eenhana site further gives visual expression to recent Namibian unity-in-diversity discourses, which have followed, and partly been running alongside, a period of ideational emphasis on nation building, based on a national culture supposedly forged through the nation's joint struggle against oppression and colonialism. I argue that the social processes of remembering and forgetting political resistance, on the one hand, and those of cultural reinvention in the new nation on the other, are entangled, and that both registers of imagining the Namibian nation have shifted since the country's independence in 1990.

There is an assumption that the photographic iconography of the South African struggle against apartheid is universally known and familiar. It is however dominated by certain tropes and categories that obscure the many complexities and nuances of its origins, its practitioners and its effects. This article focuses on one photographer, Omar Badsha, and explores his own narrations about city and family life in the Indian Ocean port city of Durban, and the artistic and political trajectories in which he was embedded that gave rise to his own photographic work and the organization of other photographers into the collective known as Afrapix. Badsha grew up in ‘the imperial ghetto’ of Grey Street in Durban within a rich legacy of radical political and cultural debate, becoming an artist and later a trade union organizer. It is the imperatives of the latter work that pushed him into photography as a medium of literacy. Many of his own photographs started as a personal visual diary when he re-explored the spaces of his childhood as an adult, and in the process became increasingly sensitized to the parallels between political and religious ritual. In particular he was fascinated by the dynamics between the leaders and the led, and the techniques and theatricalities of the different genres of mobilization. His work and the multiple forces and influences at play suggest that there were (and are) plural and competing aesthetic regimes during (and after) apartheid that are little recognized, mostly due to a deeply entrenched (and ongoing) separation between the domains of aesthetics and politics in South Africa and elsewhere outside the African continent.

Intra-state conflicts in Africa have been attributed to various factors such as the end of the Cold War, globalization, sustained population growth, environmental scarcity and violent youth culture. Extracts from these dominant global perspectives, collocated and mixed with the economic crisis thesis at the national level, constitute the mainstream analytical scheme for understanding the proliferation of communal conflicts in Nigeria. However, the relevance of horizontal inequality in accounting for the multitude of communal conflicts in Nigeria has been glossed over by scholars. This article highlights local narratives of inequalities and how they provide impetus for communal conflicts in Aguleri and Umuleri communities of south-eastern Nigeria.

The formal labour markets and economies of many cities in sub-Saharan Africa have been very weak for decades and this has led to significant adaptations in the nature of the livelihoods of most urban households. The lack of formal and reasonably paid jobs has also had a strong impact on population growth in cities, although this is often not recognized. This article reviews some of these trends and illustrates them with case study material from Harare, Zimbabwe. There, many urban residents have increasingly struggled to get by and their perceptions of the city and their future within it show a strong negative trend. Links to rural areas and the possibility of making livelihoods there in the future have become more important. These adaptations build on the long history of rural–urban linkages in sub-Saharan Africa but contemporary practices, including patterns of circular migration, are influenced by the harsh realities of African urban economies. The decisions and future plans of some migrants may not, therefore, fit with their aspirations – and the degree and nature of this mismatch are influenced by factors such as gender, age and position in the urban household, and links to rural areas. It is suggested that it helps to analyse the consequent migration patterns in terms of a framework in which migrants’ decisions to stay in the city or leave it are conceptualized as either willing or reluctant.

Rural–urban migration and networks are fundamental for many livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa. Remittances in cash and kind provide additional income, enhance food security and offer access to viable resources in both rural and urban areas. Migration allows the involved households to benefit from price differences between rural and urban areas. In this contribution, I demonstrate that rural–urban networks not only contribute to poverty alleviation and security, but also further socio-economic stratification. This aspect has been ignored or neglected by most scholars and development planners. Using ethnographic data from Namibia, I have adopted a translocal perspective on migration and stratification, focusing on the resulting impact in rural areas where modern urban forms of stratification, induced by education and income from wage labour, are on the increase.

Since 1991 Salafism has gained renewed strength in Ethiopia, spurred increased tensions within the Muslim community, and created concern among the Christian population. This contribution focuses on the early emergence of Salafism in the area of Bale, currently one of the movement's strongholds. It discusses its initial arrival in south-eastern Ethiopia, and pays particular attention to the developments in Bale during the 1960s. Challenging the notion that treats Islamic reform as seemingly homogeneous and as ‘foreign’ – distinctly separated from ‘local’ Islam – the contribution explores the arrival of the Salafi teaching from Saudi Arabia, and follows the process of reform embodied in an emerging group of local merchants and in graduates returning from studies in Saudi Arabia. The contribution highlights how socio-economic changes and developments of infrastructure facilitated the emergence of new groups of actors, transcending local boundaries and actively generating novel discourses about religious symbols and practices. It also demonstrates how a diversified body of situated actors was crucial for the appropriation and domestication of the Salafi message, and points to the trajectory of reform as a dialectical process of moulding that related such influences to the local context.