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.

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 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.

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.

Africa’s regional archives offer crucial records to explore the continent’s postcolonial past. Although these archives are often difficult to locate and access and are exposed to several challenges that might even threaten their existence, this article presents a solid case for reconsidering their importance. Recent trends, aptly labelled ‘postcolonial African archival pessimism’, have mainly pointed to problems and often to the limited accessibility of state archives in some regional and local contexts. This article instead engages with their potential, discussing four case studies in Benin, Cabo Verde, Ghana and Congo-Brazzaville. Results stemming from these case studies are brought into contact with wider debates on custodial cultures and the regional archives’ role in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. The intention is to provide a more positive and empirically based overview of research possibilities at regional archives and ultimately to change the nature of our approach to these resources.