Violence is a murky issue to research and to theorize: this introduction suggests that it has also often been approached differently by anthropologists and historians. In the pages that follow, we reflect on the ways in which both disciplines have worked to interpret violent events in Africa, whether in the deep past, during the colonial era or in more recent periods. To better contextualize these disciplinary advances, we intersperse them with brief reviews of general theories on violence. The three articles featured in this special section, while dealing with very dissimilar case studies, provide common insights on three main themes. The first engages with the paradox of the contingency and continuity of violence, and with the unevenness of perpetrators, victims and targets. The second deals with the refractive meanings attached to violent events. The third probes, underneath the apparent turmoil of violent acts, the deep moral and cultural frameworks of action that underwrite them. We have composed this introduction around these main questions.

Government College, Umuahia is known as the alma mater of eight important Nigerian writers: Chinua Achebe, Elechi Amadi, Gabriel Okara, Chike Momah, I. N. C. Aniebo, Chukwuemeka Ike, Ken Saro-Wiwa and Christopher Okigbo. Many illustrious Nigerian scientists, intellectuals and public leaders passed through the college in its prime, and in West Africa the name of the school evokes an astounding range of success stories. But Umuahia's legend as ‘the Eton of the East’ and the primus inter pares of Nigeria's elite colonial institutions obscures its present reality: nothing remains of its past but its extensive grounds, landmark buildings, and the glittering roll call of dignitaries who once studied within its walls. In 1979, prompted by the many signs of impending doom, a group of old boys joined hands in a historicizing venture, The Umuahian: a golden jubilee publication – the commemorative booklet compiled by the school's most famous alumnus, Chinua Achebe, to mark the college's golden jubilee. The booklet conjured up the school's founding ideals and glorious past in order to lay the ground for its rehabilitation. This introductory essay explains why The Umuahian is an indispensable source for the literary, cultural and educational history of West Africa, contextualizing its singular construction of colonial educational heritage. Sample and hitherto unpublished texts from the booklet by Achebe, his editorial to The Umuahian and its coda, ‘Continuity and change in Nigerian education: a jubilee essay’, are included with the main article. While the contributors to The Umuahian pertain to elite circles, and the volume had a world-class literary figure as its editor, the volume itself was produced for a local occasion and rarefied local audience, had a very limited distribution, and subsequently fell into obscurity. It is in the spirit of the historical and academic retrieval of such locally published and little-known materials by African thinkers and writers that this work appears in the Local Intellectuals strand.

The publication of a new translation of Akiga Sai's History of the Tiv invites reappraisal of Akiga himself as a local intellectual. This essay presents a biographical account of this early Tiv convert to Christianity, locating his celebrated History in its social, cultural, ethnic and historical contexts, and presents a provisional narrative of his career subsequent to the publication of Akiga's Story, the version of the History edited by Rupert East. As such, it is intended as an invitation to a full biography. The essay reconstructs, insofar as sources permit, the complex relationship between Akiga, East, the Dutch Reformed Church Mission and the International African Institute that led to the publication of Akiga's Story in the form known until now, comparing that version with the complete translation. Akiga's History emerges from this re-examination as a compellingly contemporary narrative engaged with the lived experience of ethnic identification under colonial rule.

Between 1984 and 1986, South Africa was engulfed in widespread uprisings in the townships across the country. State repression, aimed at curbing popular protests, had the detrimental effect of radicalizing sections of black youth who were at the forefront of the struggle against the apartheid regime. While the insurrectionary period was marked by non-violent repertoires of protest including boycotts, strikes and protest marches, violent strategies gained momentum as well. One area that saw the proliferation of popular protest was the Vaal Triangle, a highly industrialized complex south of Johannesburg. It was in this area where protests against an illegitimate and defunct local government, poor service delivery and rent increases turned into a popular uprising in September 1984. This uprising not only signified the redrawing of boundaries of community but also a shift towards more militant and violent strategies among sections of politicized youth. Based on life history interviews and archival research, this article argues that political violence aimed to forge a new political and social order. Strategies of violence emerged out of the intersection between localized conflicts and broader ideologies and strategies of the African National Congress, including its call for ‘ungovernability’ in 1984 and its promotion of a People's War in 1985.

In March 1961, war broke out in Northern Angola. The Portuguese authorities attributed the violence to the UPA – a nationalist movement led by Northern Angolan immigrants resident in Congo. The movement's leadership tried to keep in contact with its (potential) followers in Northern Angola by various means, pamphlets being one of the most important. Written for a local audience, these pamphlets provide an insight into the inner lines of communication – and internal hierarchies – of the nationalist movement. By using Darnton's ‘communication circuit’ model, this article investigates the processes of writing, distributing and reading the pamphlets and analyses their generic characteristics, and their position in a tradition of regional popular literacy. In so doing, an interpretation is offered of the social history of the pamphlets: they are treated as a historical subject in their own right. While they can be read as anti-colonial tracts, it is shown that the pamphlets' main concern is to establish the mandate of a leadership in exile over a constituency in Northern Angola.

Since 2009, several unions of Congolese retailers have demanded the implementation of a 1973 law forbidding foreigners from operating small businesses and limiting their access to retail. Seemingly similar mobilizations have been observed elsewhere in Africa (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa), but the Congolese situation remains undocumented to date. The current discursive patterns and social practices that have emerged from this mobilization call for a socio-political enquiry, interrogating their xenophobic undertones but also viewing them in relation to the distribution of power and emerging political subjectivities of post-Mobutuist urban contexts. Based on extensive fieldwork, combining ethnographic research with interviews with key informants, conducted in Kinshasa between 2010 and 2012, this study focuses on mobilization techniques, the web of representations they give rise to, and political actors involved in or resisting the movement. It reveals a complex type of nationalistic discourse that draws on historical and contemporary global sources, while also being influenced by Congo's ambivalent relationship to national identity in the post-Mobutuist period. The non-distinct xenophobic undertones of the discourse, while mostly directed towards Asians and Lebanese, also result in the systematic targeting of West African business operators. Yet, despite often xenophobic and virulent rhetoric, interactions between Congolese and foreign traders have mostly remained characterized by ‘peaceful coexistence’. Those Congolese and foreigners who have chosen to resist injunctions to exclude the latter from economic spaces thus directly question national citizenship as the main basis for political and economic membership in the city of Kinshasa.

The key to understanding the experience of AIDS mortality lies in the stories that people tell each other about those they know who are suspected to have died from AIDS. We use a unique set of texts produced by rural Malawians reporting everyday conversations in their communities. These texts, drawn from the online archive of the Malawi Journals Project, consist of several thousand instances of ordinary people telling each other stories in the ordinary course of their lives. They are a form of insider ethnography, accounts of everyday life written by people immersed in the lives of their communities. Through analysis of these texts, we show that narratives of death are predicated upon the question ‘Who is to blame?’ We argue that a micropolitics of blame arises from practices of narrating death and shapes individual and collective responses to the epidemic. When we pay attention to the details of the production and exchange of these stories, we can see how the fact that narratives of death are predicated upon the question of blame both expresses and produces a desire for justice, both for the righting of wrongs through retributive punishment and for the restoration of harmonious social relations among the living. This desire for justice, we argue, is a central feature of the social impact of AIDS.

This article pays tribute to Akiga Sai (1898–1959) and his iconic status as the first great Tiv writer who recorded Tiv history, customs, beliefs and experiences during the turbulence unleashed by colonization and missionary intervention in the early twentieth century. It offers an appreciation of Akiga's vivid writing style and his achievements as both a historian and a recorder of his people's way of life, which was fast changing. The article presents the perspective of a younger Tiv generation who encountered Akiga Sai's work in the course of their education. Akiga, from this viewpoint, is not only an individual pioneer and creative genius, but also the representative of a better era, after which moral decay and a decline in communal health and well-being set in.

This article investigates the fraught relationship between violence and healing in Central African history. Looking at the case study of one of the largest uprisings in the colonial history of Congo – the Lobutu–Masisi Kitawalist uprising of 1944 – the article asks how the theories of power that animated the uprising might help better illuminate the nature and role of violence not only in the uprising itself but in the broader history of the region. Drawing attention to the centrality of discourses that relate to the moral and immoral use of disembodied spiritual power (puissance/nguvu/force) in the uprising, the article evokes critical questions about the deeper history of such discourses and the imaginaries and choreographies of violence that accompanied them. Thinking about violence in this way not only breaks down imagined lines between productive and destructive/legitimate and illegitimate violence by highlighting that such distinctions are always contentious and negotiated, but also demonstrates that the theories of power animating such negotiations must be understood not as tangential to the larger anti-colonial political struggle of Bushiri and his followers, but as central to that struggle. Moreover, it paves the way towards thinking about how these same theories of power might animate negotiations of legitimacy in more recent violent contexts in Eastern Congo.

Following a localized Hutu uprising in 1972, the Tutsi-dominated state in Burundi embarked on a vast series of reprisals across the country, leaving between 100,000 and 300,000 dead. Prominent political leaders were liquidated, Hutu who were able or learning to read were arrested, and many who had achieved any marginal level of exceptionality in economic success or other social achievement were accused of treason and murdered. Described as a ‘selective genocide’, the means of this violence proved deeply informative of its nature and of the experience of those caught up in the bloodshed. In the northern province of Ngozi, selection was managed through roadblocks and lists of names, creating the inescapable image of a totalitarian and bureaucratic state order. These methods fuelled a strong reaction of obedience, both among the youth and other agents of the state who took part in the arrests, and among the victims, who are commonly described as reacting with ‘docility’ to the violence. A matter of ‘law-making violence’, the selective means of the genocide shaped the political and social order that emerged from it, the ‘implements’ of genocide substantially contributing to the recognition of discrete ethnic communities among the population at large.

This article introduces a new translation of Akiga Sai's History of the Tiv, a manuscript completed in Tiv by Akiga in 1935. Portions of Akiga's text, translated and annotated by Rupert East, were first published in English by the International African Institute in 1939 as Akiga's Story. But the new translation, available in the online version of the journal, is the first complete one: no section of the Tiv manuscript has been omitted, and the order of the material has been left as originally written by Akiga. This article tells the story of how Harold Bergsma, when working as a secondary school principal in Nigeria, rescued the Tiv typescript from the rubbish bin and deposited it in the University of Ibadan library; and how, some forty-five years later, he assembled a team of Tiv intellectuals to undertake the task of translation. It reflects on some of the linguistic challenges presented by the Tiv text, and draws attention to the rich and varied information the work contains – on clans, genealogies, plant and animal names, food preparation, marriage customs, the religious practices of the Tiv, and Akiga's own experiences of childhood, family, and encounters with akombo and witchcraft. The article is complemented by selections from Chapters 8 and 9 of the new translation, chosen and annotated by Richard Fardon.

Inequalities are growing on a global scale and rising consumerism has exacerbated the negative connotations of material deprivation in many places. What does this imply for how poor people experience their situation? What role does religion play in their lives? This paper explores these questions by studying how young Qur'anic students (almajirai) in Kano in northern Nigeria experience, and deal with, being poor. In the context of growing violent conflict related to the Boko Haram insurgency, poor Muslims, including the almajirai, have frequently been cast as being prone to violence in order to claim their share of highly unequally distributed resources. Religion has often been portrayed as a radicalizing force in their lives. This paper challenges such views. It describes how the almajirai deploy religious discourses to moderate feelings of inadequacy and shame triggered by experiences of exclusion. At the same time, recourse to religious discourses emphasizing the values of asceticism and endurance does not further an agenda of social change and thus risks perpetuating the almajirai's weak social position. The paper concludes that consumerism and wealth-based definitions of status are likely to silence demands for social justice.

In the last three decades, the politics of indigeneity have led to discrimination against and marginalization of non-indigenes as well as numerous violent conflicts between indigenes and non-indigenes in Nigeria. This discrimination, which is based on a localized place of belonging, has today become bureaucratized: local governments produce ‘certificates of indigene’ to identify the origin of their holders. This article looks at the bureaucratic machinery of issuing certificates of origin in two local governments of Oyo State (in the south-west) and the everyday encounters between users and bureaucrats that cannot be reduced to practices of corruption. It looks at the complicated and ambivalent process of identifying a ‘true indigene’; this process is supposed to strengthen local citizenship but it also contributes to the daily functioning of the state and is largely accepted by the majority as part of the state's ‘insidious gentleness’. The article also seeks to understand why official discrimination against non-indigenes is poorly contested locally by assessing the role of these documents in accessing public employment, university places and basic services, and examining whether areas inhabited by non-indigenes are perceived as being neglected or abandoned by the state. Currently, discrimination policies are implemented unequally and in many instances client–patron relationships help sidestep these policies.

Ongata Rongai, a rapidly growing, ethnically heterogeneous community on Nairobi's urban periphery, has remained remarkably convivial in a country so frequently defined by conflicts over land and belonging. Bolstered by a distinct set of political logics and social practices, many of the site's multi-ethnic residents overtly reject the validity of ethnic violence and politics with reference to an explicitly articulated universalist inclusivity rarely seen in Kenya. Locally described as ‘being cosmo’, this distinct political rhetoric and emerging subjectivity has its roots in the mixed ethnic origins of its leaders, the history of land acquisition, and xenophobic persecution and displacements elsewhere in the country. More specifically, the evolution of this conviviality in the shadow of conflict has been driven by the interests of ‘half-caste’ political elites and increasingly established Kikuyu landowners. Together they draw on and reinforce a foundation myth of fair land transfers to promote peace and their own economic and electoral ambitions. The result is a vernacular and spatialized cosmopolitanism that fosters localized ethnic blindness. Its success depends on demonizing discourses of indigeneity while embracing ideas of ethnic homelands beyond the city. By acting as a foil to a growing literature on the ethnicization of land and space in Africa, this article demonstrates the need to understand spatially constructed subjectivities as responses to supra-local social and political practice.

I look at the image of a generation of youth as the vanguard force of an ongoing struggle for independence and a new nation on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Ivorian independence. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of Reinhart Koselleck, I explore the making of national time as layered temporality, with generations not succeeding each other but rather coexisting. My analysis of expressions and performances of ‘doing being youth’ helps in understanding how the label ‘youth’ is used to mark membership in or exclusion from a collective. I examine the process of how ‘youth’ is made into a meaningful marker and how and why political actors engage in performances of ‘being youth’. I embed this analysis in a genealogy of the nation as a metaphoric kin group and examine the ways in which Ivorians belong to and actively create ‘generations’, referring to independence as a lieu de mémoire. The paper explores the cultural expressions of contemporary Ivorian politics and analyses performances of the past in the present and the positions young people may take or are given in the nation's past, present and future.

The article situates a new type of stand-up comedy, performed in Kinshasa's mourning spaces (matanga), within the city's social universe. This type of funerary joking, enacted by comedians unrelated to the bereaved, represents a clear departure from the customary funerary humour in which accepted jokers occupy particular social positions vis-à-vis the deceased. Following recent changes in the organization of mourning rituals within the circles of Kinshasa's wealthy, these rather intimate events are ever more open to ‘strangers’, who anticipate the spending capacities of the gathered crowd. Comedians constitute one among a wide range of outsider groups who approach the bereaved community as a space of opportunity. It is argued that this emergent cultural form is utterly urban, and could only appear within urban life worlds where conviviality with others, and in particular an understanding of people's need to make a living in precarious circumstances, transforms the mourning community into an audience that pays for a cultural performance. Humour is not only derived from a symbolic difference between the poor and the rich, but also through the performance of exaggerated flattery, producing the illusion of patronage and situating the comedian within a feigned patron–client relationship for the duration of that performance.