Competition has rarely been an explicit theme in ethnographies of African settings, despite being a familiar dynamic to ethnographers in the field. Trust and mistrust, although prominent themes, tend to feature in discussions of their relationship to cooperation. Re-reading ethnographic and historical accounts of diverse competitive practices on the continent invites a closer attention to the subtle ways in which competition – as a specific genre of collective action – shapes and is reshaped by relations of trust and mistrust. This article begins by drawing this lead out from extant literature, before pursuing it in conversation with the ethnographic materials presented across this part issue. We show that competition gives rise to particular acts and dispositions of trust and mistrust. These, in turn, prompt people to reimagine the competitive structures and practices they engage in. Competition, trust and mistrust are thus mutually implicated. This insight demonstrates how ethnographies of African settings can continue to strengthen conceptual understandings of both competition and trust in anthropological and social theory while challenging representations of African societies as historically uncompetitive at a time when assumptions about the relationship between competition and trust continue to inform macro-economic modelling and policymaking that shape millions of lives, in Africa and beyond.

For young men in Cameroon, football has long been a paradigm of sociality through competitive spirit. In recent decades, however, the stakes of competitive football have been raised: the sport has also emerged as a strategy for young men to migrate abroad and earn a living. On and off the football fields, young men seek to grab limited opportunities to sign contracts with clubs abroad, but few succeed. However, the aspiring athletes rarely see themselves as autonomous individuals competing for a limited number of spots in football clubs. Rather, they attribute failure or success to questions of trust and mistrust: in competitive peers, in neighbours and kin, in Pentecostal Christianity, and in football as a source of livelihood. Competing for a place in a global football industry has led the footballers to mistrust potentially envious others, but also increasingly to put their faith in a Christian God and develop a confident orientation towards a future of success despite the odds. The nexus of football, religion and migration aspirations in Anglophone Cameroon reveals how trust retains a central, albeit ambiguous, place in high-stakes competitive environments, namely as a leap of faith and a confidence in engaging uncertainty. It complicates the idea of competition as a singular and neutral principle that obviates the need for trust, and refines anthropological theory that tacitly confines trust to interpersonal relationships.

In Kenya, the transition to a devolved system of governance in 2013 buoyed hopes for meaningful democratization. County governments were expected to lower the stakes of electoral competition, distribute national resources more equitably, enable citizens to hold their local leaders to account, and thus promote impersonal forms of political trust in state institutions and bureaucratic procedures. Yet personalistic trust based on shared kinship and ethnic identities continues to characterize citizen–state relations. This article explores how and why. It does so based on ethnographic fieldwork in post-devolution Gusiiland, an ethnically homogeneous and politically fragmented context where clan and sub-clan kinship identities remain central to local electoral mobilization. Here, competing for office means negotiating alliances that bridge polities divided by a history of uneven development, partisan patronage, and intersecting clannist, classist and patriarchal prejudices. Candidates negotiate such alliances by partnering with local ‘agents’ or intermediaries, who broker votes and patronage in their families and family networks. Zooming in on candidate–agent cooperation, the article shows how its terms and outcomes are partly contingent on intermediaries’ gender, class and personal reputation, as well as rivalries among families and voters vying for brokerage positions. The brokerage of patronage systematically recreates the material conditions of possibility not just for transcending but also for lending fresh legitimacy to normative conceptions of trust as ‘natural’ among kin. Thus, the resilience of kinship-based trust can be explained in terms of the plasticity of patronage-based electoral mobilization and its potential to enact moral ideals of kinship in new, seemingly democratic ways.

The anthropology of sport literature, and literature on neoliberalism in Africa more broadly, has often been predicated on the notion that neoliberalism forces a conversion from seeing the self as collectively produced towards the development of an individualistic and competitive ‘entrepreneurship of self’. While global long-distance running is increasingly competitive, with the odds against success stacked ever higher, this is not a dynamic that can be traced in Ethiopia. Rather, there is a sense that the individualism and competitiveness that are acknowledged to already be at the heart of Amhara society must be tempered in order for athletes to survive within this system. Increasing competition is understood to require people to work together more closely, rather than forcing them apart. In this article, I explore the paradox that bodily acts of trust can coexist with the discursive insistence on the impossibility of trust in competitive environments. By focusing on the warm-up as a key site of trust work, I show how an awareness of the challenges inherent in enacting trusting relations in close proximity with others necessitates deliberate work over a number of years to render such behaviour as unspoken as possible.

This article analyses a competitive payment practice common aboard artisanal fishing boats in Sierra Leone. The competition for payment between crew members on board fishing boats complicates common discursive claims about generalized mistrust in post-war Sierra Leone. Through a phenomenological ethnography of working relations at sea, I show how competitive practices generate flexible trust between crew members. Competing in what is known as handfailure produces moments where others’ intentions and moral character become legible, allowing fishermen to forge and revise trust in light of shifting evaluations of trustworthiness. The trust forged through handfailure differs from older patron–client relationships between boat owners and fishermen, and from the interpretations of social breakdown in fishing communities given by government officials. The article contributes to recent anthropological conversations about mis/trust by showing how, in contexts where people question trust or claim that mistrust is widespread, trust can nevertheless be forged anew on more flexible and negotiable terms.

Once considered an underclass, Gurage people have emerged as Ethiopia’s quintessential entrepreneurial class over the last seven decades. Studies on entrepreneurialism often focus on factors contributing to entrepreneurial success, such as ethnicity. The Gurage case study rethinks entrepreneurialism as nation making, demonstrating how Gurage entrepreneurialism was essential to the formation of Ethiopia’s modern economy and nation state in the twentieth century. The success of Gurage entrepreneurialism partly depended on support from the Ethiopian imperial state. The principal argument developed here is that Gurage entrepreneurs’ struggle against the ‘expatriate’ domination of Ethiopia’s capitalist commerce came to be constituted as a struggle for national economic independence, which was central to the nation-making project in this post-liberation period. In the process, Gurage transformed their own previous marginalization and denigration as ‘foreigners’ to become quintessential Ethiopian nation builders. It is a story about Gurage entrepreneurialism’s input into the Ethiopian nation-building project, one that contributes to larger theoretical discussions about entrepreneurialism, nation making, the state–market nexus and threats of foreign dominance in African markets.

The October 2016 train accident on Cameroon’s main railway line remains shrouded in mystery. The announcement of the derailment before it happened, followed by a denial by the Minister of Transport a few hours later, at the very moment of the accident, has given rise to much speculation. According to testimonies collected in Eséka through fieldwork and the media, this tragic event was interpreted as the result of a witchcraft conspiracy. The inhabitants of the Bassa region, who consider the railway crossing their territory as a cultural heritage, had expressed their discontent with attempts to rationalize the line for some time. These accounts reveal that the disaster was triggered by collective action which unfolded through three distinct phases: labelling, whereby words acquire particular power; harbingers of misfortune; and finally, the bewitchment of the train to ‘zombify’ it, leading to its derailment. In response to these witchcraft imaginaries, the president himself addressed the Bassa’s grievances and requested an adjustment of the train stops, thus demonstrating the performativity of witchcraft and its capacity to put grievances on the agenda and to shape public policies. This article puts forward the idea that witchcraft represents a repertoire from which a community draws to express dissent. Bewitching and zombifying the train to make it derail are, for some actors, a way of signalling to the modern African state that it is not always ‘master in its own house’, that it does not have total control over reality and that it must constantly negotiate its authority.