Between the 1950s and the 1990s, Chinese enamelware products dominated kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms in the northern part of Nigeria. These were initially imported from China by European trading firms but later manufactured in Nigeria by Chinese-owned factories. Liu concludes that it was not only the immediately obvious “modern” advantages of the enamelware that enabled it to dominate northern Nigeria’s market, but it was also its integration into local, socio-cultural networks of meaning that granted it a significance far beyond its practical use. Such processes of integration further enabled enamelware to become an important component of local marriage customs and an essential possession for Hausa women.

Evan Mawarire’s poetic video “This Flag,” first posted on Facebook on April 20, 2016, mobilized an international protest movement against then-president of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe between April and September of 2016. In the video, Mawarire built on the poetics of anti-colonial resistance and nationalization to create a rallying cry. The piece’s remediation through the hashtag channel #ThisFlag created rhetorical links between digital organizing and grounded action. This literary perspective on contemporary discussions of social media and collective identity formation shows how the poetic elements of the video enabled Mawarire’s claim to spread and motivate a grounded movement.

Since 2012, when broadcasting licenses were granted to various private television and radio stations in Mauritania, the controversy around the Battle of Um Tounsi (and Mauritania’s colonial past more generally) has grown substantially. One of the results of this unprecedented level of media freedom has been the propagation of views defending the Mauritanian resistance (muqawama in Arabic) to French colonization. On the one hand, verbal and written accounts have emerged which paint certain groups and actors as French colonial power sympathizers. At the same time, various online publications have responded by seriously questioning the very existence of a structured resistance to colonization. This article, drawing predominantly on local sources, highlights the importance of this controversy in studying the western Saharan region social model and its contemporary uses.

When the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) movement erupted at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in March 2015, it not only sparked the proliferation of student movements across South Africa, but also led to the formation of #RMF at the University of Oxford and similar movements at universities in the United States. By drawing on ninety-eight interviews with various actors involved in both movements, Ahmed’s empirical research contributes to the limited academic literature on the connections between the #RMF movements in Cape Town and in Oxford. The example of the #RMF movement in Cape Town inspired the #RMF Oxford movement to challenge the epistemic architecture of the University of Oxford.

This article uses the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in post-independence Nigeria to examine the transition from individuated agents of religious exchange to integration into global corporate religiosity. Early Latter-day Saint adherents saw Mormonism as a mechanism by which they could acquire access to monetary resources from a financially stable Western patronage, despite political animosity due to Mormonism's racist policies and sectional tumult during the Nigeria-Biafra war. Drawing on oral and archival records, this article highlights how Mormonism as an American-based faith was able to be "translated" to meet the exigencies of indigenous adherents.

The inhabitants of slums have developed creative ways of addressing the inherent instability of their lives. Chułek analyzes two approaches to self-organizing work on the basis of data gathered in two slum areas of Nairobi, Kibera and Korogocho, arguing that the key element of slum inhabitants’ actions is the reproduction of structures which enable their survival by making their lives predictable. These structures are evident in the work of trash pickers and orodha people, who have developed a finely-tuned infrastructure that governs their actions while allowing room for as many as possible to participate. They can also be seen in the work of hustlers, whose “brain work” is dependent on their network of relationships and on their constant improvisation. These are two examples of the way that inhabitants of Nairobi’s slums manage to maintain a sense of autonomy and agency in the face of constant economic challenge.

This article examines the effect of geographical proximity on targeting patterns during Ebola-era xenophobic outbursts by Senegalese against a migrant Peul population of Guinean origins. It highlights the limited extent to which epidemics shape the micro-dynamics of outbreaks of xenophobia during public health crises, demonstrating that epidemics are not defining events that inflect inter-group relations. They mostly reinforce long-persisting patterns of exclusion. The conclusion is that the contours of xenophobia in contexts marked by public health crises and in those situations in which these issues of public health do not constitute a major concern tend to mirror each other.

This article is an historical analysis of West Africa’s first coup. Starting from contemporary accounts of the 1963 assassination of president Sylvanus Olympio of the Republic of Togo, and the overthrow of his government, the article identifies three competing explanations of events. It follows these three explanations through Togo’s “shadow archives,” asking how and why each of them was taken up or disregarded by particular people at particular moments in time. The article develops a new interpretation of West Africa’s first coup, and outlines its implications for the study of national sovereignty, neo-colonialism, and pan-African solidarity in postcolonial Africa.

Looking back on my incarceration in Guantánamo from the relative security of my home in Nouakchott, I now realize how significant the African presence was in the illegal detention facility. While at the time, and as my Guantánamo Diary makes clear, our captors treated us primarily as Muslims, jihadis, Arabs, and Middle Easterners, the reality was that many of us were first and foremost African. We were born in African countries, our citizenship was that of African nations, we were handed over or surrendered by our own African governments to the U.S., and we shared the common experiences of Africans. The ASA forum held in celebration of my memoir has enabled me to reflect further on this and on what happens when we rethink Gitmo as a place of African detention, created by the collaboration of independent African governments. Fewer than one hundred detainees in Guantánamo hailed from the African continent, which is 12 percent of the total population at its peak. Algeria and Morocco had the most representation, and most detainees were North African, but sub-Saharan Africans featured prominently too. In this commentary, I want to share a little bit about my experience, with a view to making Guantánamo Diary more comprehensible to an Africanist audience.

Africanists struggle with Mohamedou ould Slahi’s story for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the Saharan region is often considered a space betwixt and between. Not only does the Sahara lie between the Maghreb and the Sahel, but Slahi’s experience illustrates how the military and political histories of counterterrorism and the intellectual and social histories of Islamist calls for religious reform are imagined as occurring elsewhere. The upswing in violence in Burkina Faso and Mali, the continued disruptions of Boko Haram, and the deep military involvement and investments in the Sahara remind us that the African continent has been an important site in the global war on terror (Thurston 2017). American and European foreign assistance, often in the form of military aid, has helped expand the surveillance capacities of African states, especially after 2001. In the case of Mauritania, American counterterrorism funds contributed to the consolidation of power in the authoritarian regime of Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya, who ruled from 1984 to 2005, while the Mauritanian government ignored demands for democratization from its own citizens and instead pursued repressive policies that accused political opponents of Islamist activity, limiting their freedom of expression (Jourde 2007). Slahi’s story, then, can be seen as part of a much longer history of foreign incursion and neocolonial intrusion into African affairs, as the war on terror has led to a similar bolstering of authoritarian governments, an influx of military aid and funds that encourage corruption, and worrisome increases in weapons at the expense of other needed projects and investment, as happened during the Cold War (Schmidt 2013). Rather than promote economic development and democracy, these policies undermine Africa’s future.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi is arguably one of the most famous contemporary Mauritanians worldwide. This is largely owed to his Guantánamo Diary, a bestseller that he penned while he was an inmate in Guantánamo prison. The memoir appeared in January of 2015, reflecting on Slahi’s plight as a wrongly incarcerated detainee in the (in)famous jail. Prosaic and sincere, the book, so far the only voice of a Guantánamo detainee, depicts the wretched life within a Kafkaesque oubliette, an impersonal, yet rationalized and inhumane, castle where legality is suspended in a state of exception. Slahi’s story is about the inside humane oscillations of a homo sacer, struggling to come to terms with his difficult situation. Ever since the book appeared, and after Slahi’s release and return to his home country of Mauritania in October 2016, Slahi’s post-Guantánamo life has attracted attention from communities of readers worldwide. This aggregate interest is now accumulating in a forthcoming Hollywood movie based on Slahi’s story. Various factors conspire to encourage this interest, much of which involves the politics of reading, imagination, and hermeneutics of the respective readers. Yet I will argue that the story should interest Africanists as well. First, Slahi’s is a Mauritanian story, telling us numerous facts about African culture and politics in the region and how they coalesce in Slahi’s story. Second, even from a theological perspective Slahi’s intellectual and personal profile reflects a story of African post-Islamism, a theology of forgiveness rarely outlined in the literature. Third, Slahi is also a public intellectual, contributing to the debates in Mauritania, which gives his story a reflexive dimension and an agency lacking in other obscure Guantánamo detainees. In short, Slahi tells a story that is distinct from the typical Guantánamo and terrorism-linked profiles, a story that is situated in a specific African context.

We also have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We're going to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussions, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies if we're going to be successful.

If the unvarnished power of the state has a face, then it is the prison. When the mask of cultural hegemony slips, we encounter the walls of the penal institution, its barbed wire, and its blankly functional architecture, mute and unseeing. A prison is one of the most concentrated modalities of state power. By definition, a prison is a zone of exclusion; it defines the normal, everyday civic sphere by defining a site of exception. A prison has its own distinctive logic and temporality, in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s words, “dull, mundane, monotonous, tortuous in its intended animal rhythm of eating, defecating, sleeping, eating, defecating, sleeping” (1981:116). It is a world of boredom, isolation, and fear. Nonetheless, because of its close proximity to state power, the prison also offers a sharp-edged reflection of the operation of power in a society. As Michael Hardt observes, “Those who are free, outside of prison looking in, might imagine their own freedom defined and reinforced in opposition to prison time. When you get close to prison, however, you realize that it is not really a site of exclusion, separate from society, but rather a focal point, the site of the highest concentration of a logic of power that is generally diffused throughout the world” (1997:66). Or as Robben Island prisoner Michael Dingake remarked in his 1987 autobiography, “Prison is the heart of oppression in any oppressive society” (1987:228).