This article begins by exploring the efforts of African women’s movements from the 1990s onward to end violent civil conflicts and to insist on guarantees of gender equity in newly formed governments. It attempts to explain these recent successes first by examining the complex relationships between international women’s movements and African women’s groups from the Second World War onward, particularly from the era of the U.N. Decade for Women beginning in 1975. The article then turns to a broader problem: exploring the connections between contemporary women’s activism and deeper currents in African history that link the precolonial period with the more recent past. By examining a variety of twentieth-century women’s protests, it argues that cloaked in the language of political, economic, and environmental grievances, these movements also reflect a hidden history of women’s influence as public healers, empowered not only to cure individuals, but also to mend broader relationships in the community.

Kuduro, meaning “hard-ass” or “in a hard place,” is a contemporary genre of music and dance produced and consumed in Angola, especially in Luanda. This article maps kuduro historically and assesses it in its current moment. While the dance is full of invention and the genre has thrived in the informal economy, this alternative expression and the infrastructure it produces cannot be considered politically or economically liberatory. But the international “os Kuduristas” campaign promoted by two of the Angolan president’s children and companies they own shows the dangers of a culturally conservative discourse that dismisses kuduro as a vulgar popular phenomenon while hegemonic political and commercial forces embrace it.

This essay examines two novels by exiled Guinean writers in which physical space functions as a central point of reference for very different, though related, considerations of traumatized memory, identity, and exile. In Williams Sassine’s Wirriyamu (1976), a violent and violated rural landscape becomes emblematic of a specific traumatic event occurring within the time frame of the novel and of contemporary political reality; while in Tierno Monénembo’s Pelourinho (1995), a present-day cityscape provides consistently uncertain territory for thinking through a trauma that transcends history, that of the transatlantic slave trade. This article seeks to examine some of the ways in which contemporary trauma theory may be useful in reading Francophone West African fiction as well as some of the limitations of this theory in its applications to this corpus.

Drawing upon the dynamic interrelationship between human agency and space, this article sheds light on the constitution of and relation between “place” and “path” among the pastoral Pokot of East Pokot District in the Kenyan North Rift Valley. It discusses the transformation from a more mobile pastoralist model of spatialization, which relies on a flexible network approach combining paths and places, toward a more “place-making,” postpastoralist model linked to increasing sedentariness, privatization of land, a clearer definition of external and internal boundaries, and a rapid emergence of schools, churches, and other physical structures.

This study examines the historical development of hostility between the Shona-speaking inhabitants of Buhera district in south-central Zimbabwe and Ndebele speakers who settled in the area after being forcibly removed from various parts of Matabeleland and Midlands provinces between the 1920s and 1950s. It shows how competition for productive farmlands, which became visible beginning in the 1940s, produced and sustained the Ndebele–Shona hostility in Buhera. While other scholars view this hostility primarily from an ethnic perspective, this article argues that ethnicity was just one of many factors that shaped relations between these people.

The role of power over people and over land is an important issue in West Africa, with important implications for relationships between commoners and elites. Along with conquest, slave raiding, marriage, and procreation, control over land has enhanced the ability of chiefs and other elites to gain control over people, thus increasing their production and reinforcing social hierarchy and centralization of power. This article utilizes oral evidence and European documentary sources to examine the importance of the concept of “wealth-in-people” for understanding the significance of land in African societies. By focusing on the Gambia region, where both paddy and upland rice farming were practiced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the article contributes empirical observations to support the argument that control over both land and people played a central role in the accumulation of wealth in many African societies.

Contrary to expectations of modern democratic development, the establishment of liberal-democratic institutions in Ghana has not led to the demise of political clientelism. Instead, the underlying informal institutions of leadership—friendship, capitalist entrepreneurship, family, and religion—contribute to the persistence of personal rule in urban Ghana. Leaders amass political power by accumulating followers in daily life. The article provides empirical evidence to substantiate these theoretical claims in the form of two ethnographic case studies—a politician’s primary campaign and the screening of a football match in an urban slum. It proposes an alternative model for the study of democracy and political accountability that extends beyond the formal institutional realm to include informal mechanisms that shape political clientelism in a democratic environment.

In 2012, of the ten ongoing intrastate conflicts in Africa, half had seen at least one relapse into violence after an agreement had been signed between warring parties. This statistic tells the story of stalled and failed peace processes on the continent, but it does not point to potential causes for these failures. By comparing the Sudan People’s Liberation Army’s divergent decisions during different peace processes in 1997 and 2005, this article finds that changes in the group’s grievances and cost–benefit analysis influenced its leaders’ decision to participate in or spoil a peace process.