African communities are witnessing a perplexing proliferation of diverse arrangements of mutual security that draw upon old and new solidarities and inventively merge market logic with reciprocal forms of distribution and sharing. The dynamics of such voluntary arrangements and their broader social impacts emerge as increasingly important topics of study. The changing nature of global economies poses challenging questions about the novel relationships between state and market, and the potential of human agency to find alternatives to address growing inequalities. This collection focuses on local institutions of mutual security as alternative – yet also interdependent – forms of distribution that have become particularly relevant in the current era of global financialization and the changing dynamics between private and public social spheres. Various voluntary associations and informal economic networks, financial mutuals and savings/credit groups are becoming central in regulating access to resources and defining patterns of association in African communities. The articles in this themed part-issue explore these social security networks and organizations, concentrating on their ambiguous potential to empower the marginal as well as to contribute to social strife and political conflict. Ethnographic cases from diverse parts of Africa illustrate the impacts of the environments of uncertainty on the emergence of novel forms of association. The contributions suggest that contemporary mutual help arrangements should be seen as being central to the emergence of new social spaces and power configurations in such settings, revealing a broader social dynamic of globalization.

Self-help groups of varied kinds emerge when kinship, territorial governance or other accustomed associations prove unreliable. Interactions that appear helpful and mutual to one party need not always seem so to another. Shaping their character are not just reason and economic or political necessity, but also feelings, some of which humans share with other animals. These feelings often depend, however, on distinctly human symbolic and linguistic contrivances, sometimes of ironic kinds. Mutual help in Africa often spans generations, and by some interpretations both the living and the non-living. Rites and ceremonies can change over time in relation to other ones performed. Whether these conventions strengthen each other, as if by exercise, or substitute for each other in a more hydraulic way as a trade-off is hard to predict or generalize. Input from several sciences, once integrated with humanistic inquiry, may further enrich our understanding.

In the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, chronic economic uncertainty has seen social relations stretched to breaking point. Informants speak of a ‘war between men and women’. While grinding poverty, death in the shape of HIV/AIDS and suspicion stalk the land, and the project of building the umzi (homestead) falters, hope for the future and, with it, trust between people leach away. One response to such uncertainty is a turn to ritual. Through a nearly relentless schedule of ritual activity that invokes the ancestors and the Christian deity in various forms, Xhosa people attempt to shore up trust, secure ongoing investment in the rural homestead and sustain ties of reciprocity both among rural people and between them and their urban kin. It is also through the staging of these rituals that women, acting together and in support of each other, are increasingly assertive – often in the face of a violent rearguard opposition from men – in their efforts to exercise agency over the differentiated, fragmented and fragile social and economic relationships within their homesteads and across their villages.

The paper enquires into the practices of cooperation and mutuality that are reproduced in contemporary mutual help groups of post-socialist Tanzania. Diverse associations of cooperative work and mutual security are on the rise in globalizing African communities. Local institutions of mutual assistance are becoming increasingly important in regulating access to resources and redefining socialities in environments of persistent instability. Mutual help groups among Kuria people have emerged as institutions for facilitating exchange through relationally oriented expansion that enables the rise of new economic niches and social identities. A complex intermingling of diverse organizational features has enabled the associations to engage novel types of resources and categories of participants. The paper examines hybrid and haphazard elements of formalization that occur with the regularizing of work reciprocities and the increasing use of monetary loans and savings. Exploring culturally relevant metaphors of life-sustaining flows and passageways, indispensable for individual and social growth, the article investigates the value conversions mediated by the groups and their impacts on wider public spaces in Tanzanian communities.

Mutuality is at the heart of the continued violence and inequality in South Africa. This historical and anthropological analysis of Cape Town's taxi associations reveals how mutuality has become strongly connected with violence and economic marginalization. The breakdown of apartheid led to new mutualities along the rural–urban divide, which resulted in taxi wars between ‘urban insiders’ and ‘rural outsiders’. After liberation from apartheid, mutuality within Cape Town's taxi associations became a central issue in government policy and commercial interests, which contributed to taxi associations becoming mafia-like organizations. This analysis reveals that taxi owners today find themselves in a trickle-up economy characterized by: violent and shifting mutualities; the embrace of illegality and informality as being vital to doing business; and strong economic intervention by the state.

If a thriving capitalist economy relies on the innumerable small deposits of savings that local people place in banks, then ‘unbanking’ represents a threat to just such an economy. And yet, across the globe, billions remain outside the formal banking sector, thereby reducing the ability of formal banks to set these savings in motion. This unbanking has been the subject of many reports and studies by economists, corporations and non-profit organizations, but unbanking never seems to diminish. Indeed, by all accounts, it continues to thrive. In order to offer an alternative explanation for this phenomenon, the author revives an important, age-old distinction between hoarding and saving, while also providing an anthropological survey of alternative modes of saving in Africa. In so doing, the author argues that the critics of unbanking may be ignoring the ways in which banking and unbanking are tied up with subject formation.

Across the world, the presence of domestic animals in protected areas (PAs) is considered an ‘incursion’ that threatens the economic and ecological viability of these areas. Dominant narratives about incursions inaccurately describe the relationships between people and PAs because they lack adequate contextualization. In this paper, I rely on a political-ecological framework to argue for an alternative narrative. Through a case study from a PA in southern Kenya, I demonstrate how incursions are instead modern co-productions that arise from the intersections between changing political geographies of resource control and variable animal geographies of resource utilization – thus clarifying a long-standing debate about the presence of domestic animals in PAs. I rely on direct empirical and supporting evidence from place-based studies to illustrate the spatial and temporal differences in resource access strategies of wildlife and livestock within and outside the PA. I contrast these against changing land tenure and resource management policies to highlight how livestock movements into PAs are patterned in ways that reflect the changing nature of PA management, the material conditions of the landscape, and the agency of animals. Through these investigations, this paper provides a more accurate and nuanced explanation for livestock movements into PAs.

In dryland West Africa, policy makers have come to acknowledge livestock mobility as a sound adaptation strategy for variable dryland climate regimes. In Mali, the national government is taking measures to support mobility in the form of grazing zones, conflict management mechanisms and, most notably, livestock passage corridors. These corridors are part of a long and contentious history of territorialization in agrarian West Africa. This paper demonstrates through a comparative case study that livestock corridors can accomplish the agro-ecological objective of improving herd mobility but they also have unforeseen political impacts that depend on socio-spatial relations between farmers and herders. By historicizing corridors and contextualizing them within the host–stranger relationship that is found throughout the region, this paper reveals the different meanings that boundary-making processes take on for autochthonous farmers and mobile herders. In an area where ethnic Fulani herders have settled independently from farming communities, the latter have rejected a proposed corridor. In contrast, farmers in areas where herders are seasonal guests have supported the same measure. These divergent outcomes do not depend simply on different levels of resource competition, but, instead, on the ways in which corridors and their boundaries become inscribed in perceived land claims and power relations between competing groups. These findings have broader implications concerning the interactive changes occurring between autochthonous rights and decentralized democratic institutions in sub-Saharan West Africa.