This article examines how African transnational relationships in the twenty-first century differ from their manifestation in previous periods of mobility and long-distance intimacy. I argue that the possibilities for and expectations of immediate communication and co-presence facilitated by the current technological landscape distinguish this era from earlier ones and fundamentally alter the ways in which African migrants connect to those at home. Although time–space compression allows for the potential of new practices of virtual intimacy, it also creates an imperative of availability for migrants that is reinforced not only on micro- and meso-levels by families and communities but also on macro-levels by neoliberal state policies that target migrants as agents of development and providers of social services.

As in many parts of the world, the school system in Senegal has suffered from state budget cuts associated with structural adjustment and neoliberal reform in the 1980s. As a result, the quality of elementary public schools has been compromised; meanwhile a significant private sector developed. This article analyses the proliferation of private schools in Dakar and the ways in which Senegalese parents navigate the multiplicity of school types (French, Franco-Arabic or Franco-English, Catholic or secular), to understand how families struggle to ensure their social and material reproduction in a neoliberal economy. I suggest that educational investments are situated at the intersection of global and intra-family inequalities. International migration has made global inequalities apparent within and between Senegalese families, who are unequally positioned depending on whether they include members living abroad.

Scholarship on transnational families has regularly examined remittances that adults abroad send to children in their country of origin. This article illuminates another permutation of these processes: family members in Senegal who establish relations with and through children in France through gifts and money. Focusing on relationships between children in Paris and their family members in Dakar, it provides an insight into the everyday exchanges through which transnational families attempt to assure the material reproduction of households in Africa. I trace the ways in which children use Facebook to maintain relationships with relatives in Senegal and examine how adults shape these relations. Focusing specifically on innovative forms of ‘cross-cousin’ relationships in the Senegalese diaspora, this article illustrates how adults create cultural scaffolding around children who may be unaware of the kinship terms for the relationships in which they are implicated. I demonstrate how practices that have permitted Africans to weather economic volatility for centuries are now carried out, in part, through social media. Approaching material circulation and the transmission of cultural values as mutually imbricated processes, I demonstrate how Senegalese selectively reinforce links with certain family members, in an attempt to favourably position themselves in socio-economic networks of transnational kin.

Grotesque and vulgar, the masked character Gongoli upends the codes of Mende decorum in his madcap pursuit of laughs. His impropriety goes so far as to allow his mask to fall, comically revealing the identity of his dancer and subverting the anonymity so elemental to his fellow spirits’ vaunted status. Yet despite such transgressions, he stands among the most beloved figures of Sierra Leone's rich performance traditions. Gongoli's popularity hinges on his irreverence towards the fundamental laws of masked dance, laws that also regulate the balance between individual agency and communal responsibility, between internal desire and external restraint. The only quality necessary to play Gongoli is shamelessness (ngufe baa), and the greatest performers are acrobats braving risks that are not physical, but social. This article follows Siloh, an itinerant performer whose celebrity inheres in his uncanny similarity to the Gongoli he often plays. The composite figure Siloh Gongoli exemplifies a comic aesthetic relished throughout Sierra Leone in storytelling, ritual, festivals, videos and radio shows. Although mobilized for different ends, each of these conventions undermines principles of self-effacement, gerontocratic privilege and esoteric power by shamelessly playing with and within the existential tensions between interior and exterior selves.

For more than a century, observers have noted that the West African power associations known as Komo and Kono prohibit women from seeing their performances and assemblages. Reportedly fearful of seeing something they are not permitted to see, women and children run for shelter and shut the doors. Yet, in western Burkina Faso today, certain Komo and Kono chapters authorize some women to view their arts, and women who are not authorized still interact with performers during events, consult with the organizations’ leaders at other times or assist power association leaders in other ways. A focus on the unseeing but ever-present audiences of Komo and Kono reconfigures our understanding of audiences. Scholars of theatre audiences in different times and places have sometimes used ‘spectators’ as a synonym for ‘audience’, implying a group of people who are physically present for an event and can see it. Unseeing audiences are physically present at a live performance and interact with performers even though they are prohibited from actually seeing the event other people can see. Shifting our focus to women as members of unseeing audiences also reveals women's varied contributions to organizations and arts that have long been framed as institutions that operate squarely within men's domains.

This article examines artist André Sanou's individual agency in the invention and popularity of ‘portrait masks’ in and around Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. Rather than depicting abstract qualities of unseen natural forces, common among masks in this region, Sanou created the first portrait mask headpiece in a stylized but highly naturalistic manner, using a photograph as reference. It clearly depicted a specific human being, redefining the mask as a portrait of the deceased whom it honoured. Sanou's act gave rise to a wildly popular mask genre. However, portrait masks have aroused debate about the (im)propriety of naturalistic representation in masquerade. I argue that the features that make André Sanou's portrait mask genre so popular – celebrating specific individuals who are visually identifiable by their physiognomic likeness – are the same ones that make the genre controversial. The controversy illustrates the messy business of reconciling creative differences with societal values that individual artists, patrons, organizers, performers and audience members who serve as gatekeepers of cultural institutions maintain and at times negotiate. As the portrait mask genre demonstrates, masquerade is not necessarily a steadfast, uncompromising institution. Individuals can unsettle or disrupt accepted mask practice, even as they broaden its scope and invigorate audiences.

In this article, I describe the belief system at the centre of Mau and Dan mask spirit performances and some implications of these beliefs in practice, and I suggest an ontological framework for interpreting the ambiguous agency embodied in such performances. I ground my discussion of this ontological framework by juxtaposing ethnographic material about non-commercial, community-based mask spirit belief and practice with details of the career of an international ‘star’ mask spirit performer, Vado Diomande. I propose that the ambiguous agency at the heart of these performances is best understood using a performance framework that locates being in process. My interlocutors’ discourse about and practices of these performances suggest that, rather than looking for ontology in performance, we understand ontology as performance – or perhaps better yet, performance as ontology. Such a framework illuminates both the challenges and the strategic advantages that ontological ambiguity presents to mask spirit performers in immigrant settings in the US. This framework also provides a philosophical grounding for theories positing African art as process, and sheds light on the ways in which mask spirit performers manoeuvre in the interstices of display and disguise, addressing both belief and market demand.

Understanding masquerade performance is a difficult challenge because so many dimensions of expressive culture come together. There are questions of performer ambiguity and secret expertise, the confounding relationships between secular and spiritual, the many aspects of secrecy, and the involvement of higher powers. There is also the basic question of what a performance is supposed to accomplish, and the most fundamental issue of individual identity and agency.

Nigerian newspapers, like newspapers elsewhere, are often established as part of the apparatus for the extension of personal or group interests, to mobilize and contest meaning in the overall project of constructing hegemony in an ethnically fractious polity. In this article, I trace the emergence of Alaroye, the best-known Yoruba-language newspaper today, by identifying its survival strategies and stabilization against the changing circumstances of a hostile environment. The article aims to demonstrate that, in challenging the oppressive activities of a military dictatorship led by the Hausa-Fulani and a media market dominated by English-language newspapers, Alaroye has been able to negotiate its existence within the contested space that is Yorubaland in particular and Nigeria at large. In this state of contestation and fierce competition, tabloidization has been central to Alaroye’s success, making it a leader whose example is being closely emulated by other Yoruba-language newspapers. Following from this, the article discusses the genres of Alaroye and the newspaper's genre-blurring innovations, including its oral written style, all of which point to its transformation into a tabloid, against the background of its initial failure at the newsstand and the factors responsible for its revitalization and stabilization after three failed attempts.