Extensively ignored by the literature on the subject, recent interest in the fate of academic freedom in Africa is linked with shared concerns about the exploding nature of its societal crises. The collapse of political integration and social cohesion; the decline of the civil society and the implosion of conflicts; the rise of authoritarian, non-developmental populist regimes amid extreme poverty; and the worsening material conditions of the populations are major indications of such crises. Nowhere are these crises worse illustrated than in the universities where constrained funding, infrastructural collapse, massive brain drains and strained relations with the state inhibit the production of knowledge. This article reflects on the trajectory of the universities in postcolonial Africa. It draws on the national public universities in Nigeria and accounts for the changes and continuities underlying their performance against the backdrop of hostile material conditions and uncongenial political control, which not only remain disruptive but continue to undermine institutional autonomy and the integrity of scholarship in the universities across Africa.

Savings groups are an important feature of life in rural Uganda and elsewhere. They have been celebrated as an ‘alternative’, community-based approach to economic development with a particular focus on empowering women. In this article we offer a more critical perspective, showing how a savings group in a village in eastern Uganda informs more general experiences of financialization. Joining the group was not really an ‘alternative’ to other forms of finance and was often a first step to securing loans from moneylenders, microfinance institutions and commercial banks. We show how poorer members of the group, typically women, ‘rented out’ their membership to wealthier villagers. Members also used the Friday meetings to socialize and to build political careers, and to reflect critically on experiences of financialization. ‘Money looks for money’, a phrase new to the area, interrogates these socialities and inequalities, as part of the seemingly inexorable pull of loans, interest and financialized debt.

This article draws from funeral rituals and performative festivals to reflect on how and why burials, reburials and performances of Eyo and Nzem Berom festivals provide excellent examples of cultural politics and represent occasions for the (re)production of kinship, belonging and claims to ownership in the cities of Lagos and Jos. It argues that existing literature on the politics of belonging in Africa either understates or overlooks the roles of funerals and festivals in expressing and contesting ownership of the city. Relying on institutional ethnography, the article illustrates the essentially political nature of festivals and funerals in relation to city ownership, not only in the sense that traditional place identity benefits some groups more than others but also in that it defines who belongs and who does not while inducing conflicts.

This article studies how anti-Christian, ‘traditionally African’ organizations, locally known as Églises des Noirs, navigate religious competition in the Congolese capital through sonic and linguistic strategies. It focuses on the understudied Mpadist community, a ‘dissident’ branch of the better known Kimbanguist church. Mpadists mobilize diverging appreciations and meanings of sound and language to set themselves apart from the dominant Lingalaphone Pentecostal loudness of the city. In doing so, they pursue a delicate balance between Kongo traditionalism, the source of their spiritual legitimacy, rooted in colonial prophetic movements, and tactics of ‘modern’ community making in order to remain competitive within Kinshasa’s prolific religious setting. The article argues that ideologies of sound and language should be analysed within the same nexus, for they operate and are operationalized in similar ways. It therefore proposes to expand the sociolinguistic notion of indexicality to incorporate elements of the volume and modalities of sound making. The article also shows that sonic and linguistic ideologies are bound by context. In Kinshasa’s ‘low-fi’ soundscape, the indexical values of the languages Kikongo and Lingala, and of unamplified and amplified sound production, share similar features, yet they are evaluated differently in rural ‘hi-fi’ sonic environments.

Most existing literature on the causes of party switching both in Africa and around the world is built on tenuous empirical foundations. The question of why members of parliament (MPs) switch parties has hardly been asked directly either to the MPs themselves or to everyday voters. While MPs could lie or give more favourable accounts that suit their interests, putting this question to them could uncover other crucial factors that have fallen through the cracks in previous theorizations. This article takes a triangulation approach by drawing from the viewpoints of researchers, voters and MPs themselves to give a more holistic picture of the drivers of party defection. Through a combination of a nationwide representative survey and elite and key informant interviews, I situate the trend of party switching in Nigeria within broader comparative literature on the subject, showing how Nigeria conforms and deviates from existing conceptualizations of party switching around the world. I find evidence of interactions between formal and personal drivers of party switching in Nigeria. I also discover that while a majority of Nigerian voters are suspicious of defectors, defectors point accusing fingers at the lack of internal democracy within political parties, thereby exposing an issue not adequately addressed in existing literature.

Since the 1980s, hundreds of predominantly working-class African-American Muslims have travelled or relocated to the rural yet renowned city of Medina Baye, Senegal. They were invited there by Shaykh Hassan Cisse, a Senegalese Islamic scholar and leader in the Tijani tariqa (Sufi order). This article focuses on the experiences of African-American and fellow diaspora Black Muslims living and learning with African Muslims in the Tijani hub of Medina Baye. It interrogates the assumptions, expectations and misunderstandings that characterize relationships between the two groups. I argue that, as members of the Tijani tariqa, diaspora Black disciples become integrated within the local system of collective care modelled by African disciples. Complicating analyses of African–diasporic exchanges that tend to differentiate and hierarchize the interconnected economic hardships facing diaspora Black and continental African communities, I argue that the relationship between these groups illustrates the role of Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse’s branch of the Tijani tariqa as a counterhegemonic social movement offering new paradigms of social and economic reciprocity that enable Black Muslims on both sides of the Atlantic to mitigate the contemporary impacts of racial capitalism and global apartheid.

In West Africa, concrete is increasingly taking hold of physical landscapes, popular consciousness, and everyday conversations. Ubiquitous and pervasive, concrete is now an integral part of West African urban materiality and cultural identity. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory on the production of space, I consider this material as both a product and a producer of urban space. By tracing flows of building materials across the West African urban corridor linking the cities of Abidjan, Accra, Lomé, Cotonou, Porto-Novo and Lagos, this article proposes to understand how cement and concrete (re)shape African built environments, human lives and urban futures. It examines three dimensions of this concrete urban materiality: its links with capital, its social meanings for inhabitants-builders and its ecological impacts. I conclude by highlighting the potentials, limits and contradictions raised by this now contested material, thus shedding light on the complexity of the production of urban spaces in West Africa.

Exploring the ‘hollow’ character of middle-class status in contemporary Kenya, this article shows how upwardly mobile young Kenyans struggle to cope with the expectations for distribution that their displays of achievement create. Focusing on the urbanizing peripheries of Nairobi, it shows how accusations of envy (wivu) made about poorer friends and relatives reflect their anxieties about failing to act as the providers they are expected to be. Anticipation of the disappointment and resentment of their would-be dependants encourages them to withdraw from friendships and kinship relations in their home neighbourhoods, and seek instead an impersonal life in new urban enclaves closer to Nairobi. The avoidance of obligation is justified through discourses of individual effort and achievement, while poorer peers and relations are criticized for looking to rely on others. The article shows how such tensions over obligation and desires for withdrawal illuminate the fragility of Kenya’s emerging middle class and the ‘ironies of accomplishment’ – that their very precarity denies these Kenyans the respect and status they desire in their neighbourhood homes.

This article deploys sand as a potential way of engaging with contemporary livelihoods in the Ghanaian city of Accra – one of many metropolitan nodes in an urbanizing region of West Africa. Both as a very real material at the heart of concrete urbanization and as metaphorically indicative of the shifting landscapes of opportunity and income on which lives and livelihoods are marked out, sand is offered as a way of seeing and writing about the city. The article brings these two facets of urban sand together in more concrete ways, considering how the material production of the city becomes the uneven, uncertain ground of urban life-making. Drawing from fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Accra, the article engages with the movements of sand across the city, as it travels from extraction zones (or pits) to lorries and then to places of consumption. By honing in on the material behaviours and temporal junctures of sand as it shifts its shape, form and directions, the article draws out the ways in which sand emerges as a platform for exchange, negotiation and ultimately income for different people across the city region. In turn, it offers a share in the sands as a tentative holding space for the kinds of claims made on and through sand, positioning them as indicative of a dweller-led, emergent politics that claims a share of an income, livelihood and urban future.

In central Uganda, even a casual observer would notice the widespread presentation of often identical commercial services and goods – fruit vendors, street food or motorcycle taxis, for instance – in a small shared area. This article brings the dynamics of this phenomenon into view under the heuristic rubric of ‘bundling’, reflecting both on diverse examples from present-day Kampala and on some of the phenomenon’s historical and linguistic scaffolding. We take this phenomenon seriously as an alternative form of socio-economic exchange and growth, one that is distinct from liberal and neoliberal imaginaries of an unlimited flow of goods, people, things and services. Bundling, we argue, reflects an aesthetics in which both material value and social relationships are imagined to arise through thickenings of persons and things, assembled and ordered in spatial proximity and symmetry. The article suggests that bundling offers conceptual resources to imagine growth otherwise, as a process unfolding in ways that complicate and clog conventional economic imaginaries.

This article traces bricolage in the city of Lomé, Togo, as it is given meaning, practised and resisted by the ‘makers’ involved in the city’s makerspaces. While the Lévi-Straussian definition of bricolage as ‘making do’ given limited resources is heralded as an innovative practice in the Euro-American Maker Movement, Lomé’s makers appear to distance themselves from the concept due to its perceived stigmatization in both Lomé and Francophone Africa as a devalued survival practice through improvisation. Through their identification as ‘makers but not bricoleurs’, and their expression ‘we deserve new things’, I unpack the ambiguous relationship Lomé’s makers have with bricolage, and how their disavowal of the concept reveals more about the global infrastructural inequalities that surround it. By foregrounding the critical self-awareness of Lomé’s makers, I explore how ethnography allows for the de-centring and decolonization of foundational concepts and ideologies, as the makers challenge and reclaim bricolage to arrive at a future where it is no longer a necessity but a choice.

Countering the focus on crisis and irregularity that frames dominant representations of African migration to Europe, this article explores Gambian migrant women’s journeys of return. It is argued that Gambian women returnees’ financial resources, levels of education, kinship relations and social networks have positioned them in such a way that they can benefit from the opportunities and possibilities in The Gambia, thereby influencing their decisions to return. Significantly, their positions have helped them to negotiate and, in some instances, challenge gendered expectations and relations in their experiences on return. Further, the exchange of knowledge and their transnational networks and connections place the global South and the global North as co-constitutive elements in the development of their work and their gendered subjectivities. As such, I focus on the analytical purchase that the concept of return affords, as well as its political possibilities. The article contributes to existing scholarship on migration by highlighting the importance of returnees’ multiple subjectivities in both their decisions to return and their experiences on return. In addition, I foreground the contributions that returnees make to the places to which they have migrated, thereby challenging representations of African migrants as deficient and of Africa as a place of absence.

In this article, I consider how migration practices around the Black Atlantic and discourses of repatriation mobilize Black African diasporic Muslim identities in present-day Senegal and in a mosque in South Carolina that is situated on land that was formerly a slave plantation. I use the term ‘reversion’ as a vocabulary of ‘diasporic becoming’ to signal how notions of Islamic piety are coupled with a politics of Black Atlantic Muslimness in the context of a West African Sufi tariqa – or ‘Black Atlantic Sufism’. Moreover, I consider how identity formation and African Muslim ancestry are impacted by discourses of geographic return and repatriation that are linked to spiritual tourism.

This article analyses the racial framing of the humanitarian encounter between Turkish and African Muslims as a trope of first contact. Intensifying humanitarian relations with Africa south of the Sahara, in tandem with the foreign policy of the AKP (Justice and Development Party), has led to the emergence of a racialized affective regime in Turkey that endows Islamic philanthropy with new racial meanings. This article argues that racial subjects such as the White Muslim and the Black Muslim are produced through the affective labour of humanitarian volunteers and others, who narrativize and circulate experiences of first contact in Turkey. Based on a multi-sited ethnography in Turkey, Tanzania, Senegal, Gambia and Benin, this article explores race-making as affective labour. Taking on Berg and Ramos-Zayas’s call for an anthropological theorization of race and affect, it develops a critical framework to examine how humanitarian voluntarism produces differently racialized subjects. In order to do so, this analysis draws on James Baldwin’s insights into the racial and affective politics of the first contact to discuss how Turkish humanitarians build on and alter the racialized affective regime Baldwin describes.

Following a severe drought in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the invasive shrub Prosopis, a kind of mesquite native to South America, was introduced by international organizations to locations across Kenya’s drylands, including the Turkana region in the far north. Prosopis, known as etirae in Turkana, was envisaged as a solution to a range of problems, including deforestation, fuelwood shortages and general environmental deterioration. While exacerbated by drought, these problems were perceived to reflect a much more fundamental crisis, with prevalent views at the time envisaging pastoralism as unsustainable, destructive and in need of overhaul – a narrative dating to colonial times that has since been discredited. Since its introduction, etirae has spread relentlessly, invading riparian land, encroaching on cultivation plots and growing to new heights and thicknesses. Investigating its entanglements with Turkana livelihoods and economic relationships is also a process of understanding how it has braided its way through contested processes of social change, and how it has come to be intertwined with conceptions of cascading crisis quite distinct from the narratives that led to its initial introduction. Implications emerge regarding both the complicated biological residues of past development interventions and the totalizing crisis-oriented narratives that shape drylands development in the current era of climate change.

Against the background of post-Cold War trade and media liberalization, this article examines how young women living in Yaoundé, Cameroon, share digital images of their crafted styles via WhatsApp. Such sharing is an act of influence usually aimed at building the woman’s name as a digital ‘fashionista’, in that it constitutes a virtual potential for persuading others to copy one’s style. When this potential is actualized among women of status and rank, young women can fashion relations of matronage, opening up avenues of upward social mobility. To reach out to women of status and rank, young women circulate images of their styles to mobilize digital follower networks of peers, kin and strangers, drawing on their skills, status and knowledge. This mobilization in turn relies on the actual and potential benefits that sharing a fashionista image can bring to the follower. Thus, I argue, interdependencies between stylish leaders and their followers are key to making and maintaining a name as a digital fashionista. This article contributes to the literature on fashion and social mobility in West Africa by showing how the circulation of digital images over social media networks generates potentialities for young women living in Yaoundé to fashion matronage relations and social mobility. More broadly, the framing of followers as a form of wealth-in-people provides a critique of the neoliberal market valuation of social media influencers, illuminating alternative regimes of valuation that inform digital influencer economies.

In this article I explore changing state–citizen relationships in Mauritius. To do so, I outline and provide analysis of the system through which this Indian Ocean island has historically managed its diversity – a process that I call conscripting communalism. Conscripting communalism was formulated at independence in a context of behavioural predictions for the future that the internet era has challenged in powerful ways. To illustrate my argument, I explore three specific moments when ethnic and religious discourses were surpassed by collective concern within a rapidly authoritarianizing state: first, the sinking of the Wakashio oil tanker off the coast of Mauritius in 2020, which resulted in national solidarity towards the environment rather than communal violence; second, proposed legislation put forward by the Mauritian Information and Communication Technology Authority (ICTA) in 2021, which attempted to enable state surveillance of social media and which was soundly resisted by both domestic and external parties. And finally, I explore 2022 accusations that the Mauritian government authorized the installation of digital interception technology by representatives of the Indian state on one of the country’s fibre optic cables. The article argues that Mauritius represents an important site of analysis of the tensions between competing global visions of human rights, political autonomy, surveillance, solidarity and expectations for the future and the role of the internet in shaping these competing visions. I explore how new technologies have become the tools of both repression and resistance. The implications ripple far beyond the island.

Kiamaiko in Nairobi hosts one of the largest goat markets in East Africa. The goats come from across Kenya and the region, as do many of the people there, illustrating how regional movements of human and animal bodies are part of Nairobi’s becoming, and making Kiamaiko an extremely diverse part of the city. Through a discussion of the working lives of people involved in Kiamaiko’s goat meat industry, this article explores the material flows and blockages, and processes of containment and transformation, that entangle lives and livelihoods in Kiamaiko with those of the city as a whole. These flows and processes are marked by uncertainties and contingencies that can be both full of potentiality for (re)forging regimes of order, social relations, subjectivities, mobility and livelihood aspirations, and entrench inequalities, social hierarchies and exclusions, as well as undermine the safe containment of material forms essential for liveable lives. Since the mid-2000s, city authorities have repeatedly failed to impose planning and public health-related regulations and relocation on Kiamaiko’s goat industry. These efforts and their repeated failure reflect the emergent but productive excessivities of the material, corporeal and bodily flows that constitute cities, which both demand and yet often defy formal mechanisms of regulation, containment and order.