This article contextualizes Ugandan urban–rural relations through urban children's knowledge, imaginations, and experiences, which are affected by the present sociohistoric moment in Uganda. Influenced by urban–rural migration, changing notions of family and kinship, and the national government's prolific “development-through-education” campaign, urban schoolchildren imagine “the village” both as an integral imaginary space of ethnic identity origination and a location for fulfillment of national citizenship through development.

Media privatization, commercial growth, and new concern in the popular culture about changing patterns of marriage, love, and sexuality led to a sudden embrace during the 1990s by upwardly mobile urban Ghanaians of a previously minor element of globally circulating mass culture, Valentine's Day. Far from a story of cultural imperialism, the rise of Valentine's Day in present-day Accra shows that local adoption of global consumerist preferences is best understood as a local process imbued with local meanings and values, deliberately and rationally pursued.

This article examines the rise of vigilantism in southeastern Nigeria. Two opposing discourses on Nigerian vigilantism are examined. The first is characterized by the valorization of vigilantes as heroes in popular Nigerian video movies. The second is represented by a recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report denouncing die vigilantes as criminals. My research utilizes ethnographic research to contextualize the video movies as a means toward understanding the ideological gap between these discourses. A close analysis of the Issakaba video series reveals a subtle treatment of the vigilante phenomenon designed to appeal to an indigenous perspective that is cognizant of the inherent risks of vigilante justice but also aware of the limitations of reform strategies such as those proposed by the HRW report.

This article discusses the role of the media in Nigeria's Fourth Republic between 1999 and 2003. Employing a case study approach, it highlights as well as analyzes the media's role in insisting on accountability and decency in Nigeria's notoriously corrupt public life. The media's crusade ran against the country's geopolitical divisions and revived the debate on the national question as well as the media's own morality. The article draws on both primary and secondary data to examine the media's role in an emergent democracy.

This article focuses on how Hausa men in Niamey, Niger, use street side hira (“conversation”) groups to navigate their lives as migrants and to experience, negotiate, and create their own understandings of modernity. In Niamey, hira groups are the most important institution of public culture. More than any other aspect of Hausa social organization, hira groups bring together, in a concentrated fashion, circulating people and circulating ideas and thus offer a prime localized entry into the global reality of modernity.

The Zenzele clubs of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, which date from the late 1920s, were founded by mission-educated African women who sought to improve the lives of rural African women by enhancing their subsistence farming and cooking skills and educating them about household cleanliness, basic child care, and health care. Unlike associations for African women in British colonial Africa, Zenzele clubs did not evolve into political organizations. In the white-run segregated and apartheid states that persisted through 1994, Zenzele women did not engage in direct political action; rather, they sought to unite African women across class and ethnic lines and focused their efforts on community development.

This article shows the links between naming practices and war. The focus is on MPLA war names used during the Angolan struggle for independence. These names are framed in the wider context of the relations between language and war. In many African contexts, names are not singular and fixed, but may change with every personal transformation. Entering the life of a soldier constitutes just such a drastic change. The article shows that through war names, a kaleidoscope of issues may be addressed, including the relations between language, rank, and power, personal history and popular culture, spirit possession and resurrection, self-description and labeling, writing and legitimacy, and secrecy and identity.