This article is concerned with science and sexuality, and the possibilities and pitfalls of using the former to change minds about the latter, taking as its main source of data a report released by the Academy of Science of South Africa in 2015, Diversity in Human Sexuality: implications for policy in Africa. I frame the report in terms of co-production – borrowed from science and technology studies – and a theory of publics – taken from literary criticism and queer theory. I first describe how science has played a role in recent queer politics before showing how the report intervenes by appealing to a particularly African public. Thereafter, I describe how the choosing agentive subject disappears in the report’s depiction of the legitimate sexual citizen. Such a framing of citizenship raises several possible problems, some of which I address in the final section. These are described as potential confounders inhibiting the success of the report, preventing effective co-production or the summoning of a public. The article’s goal is not to discredit the report; rather, in pointing out how the report might fall short of its goal, it is directed towards a more reflexive activism.

This article tells one of the many stories that remain largely untold despite the vast literature on colonial Lagos history. Although the social history of Lagos has witnessed increasing interest on the part of historians and scholars from other disciplines and has been told in relation to sex, childhood, social welfare, state, gender and elitism, many personal renditions of the city’s history are hidden from mainstream narratives. The article examines one such personal history. In particular, it exhumes narratives from the phenomenological content of Adunni’s story – of teenage and early adult years, largely lived in the late colonial period. Adunni’s personal experiences speak to those of other living (though few) individuals whose status as living archives often enriches scholarly interrogations but who are regarded as sources of history rather than history itself. This article presents Adunni as a telling example of this neglected aspect of colonial Lagos history.

This article analyses the debates surrounding the ʿawra (nudity or nakedness in Arabic) of the female voice – what I call here vocal nudity – and the public presence of the female voice in Nigeria. It focuses on the preaching activities of two Muslim female preachers, Malama Khadija Gambo Hawaja and Malama Dr Zahrau Muhammad Umar, who present tafsīr (Qurʾanic interpretation; Hausa: tafsīrin azumi) to the public during Ramadan and rose to prominence through the publicity of their audio and video sessions and fatwas offered to women. I discuss their interpretation of verse 33.32, the only verse that refers to the female voice in the Qurʾan, their understanding of vocal nudity, and how they use the interpretations to reshape the concept of a righteous woman (Hausa: mace ta gari) in twenty-first-century Muslim West Africa.

Recent studies of migration into artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) have explored the motivations, strategic agency and professional trajectories of women and men miners who move to mine. In this article, I seek to shift the focus from the ‘push/pull’ factors in migration to consider the varied entanglements of mobility with authority and power relations pervasive through rural institutions. The importance – or lack of importance – of being a ‘migrant’ in these mining sites rests largely on the particular gendered cultural politics shaping livelihoods in the area. Drawing principally on ethnographic research in Tonkolili District, Sierra Leone, this article examines how migrant status for men and women working in the gold sites who came from other parts of the country is more marked than for Zimbabwean migrants working in artisanal gold mines in Manica, Mozambique. I argue that migrant status is marked by various authority and power relations in artisanal gold-mining sites when those controlling access to mining livelihoods, including access to residency in the mining communities, are able to emphasize contingent forms of belonging by migrants compared with those defined as ‘locals’. Critical to these differential forms of valuation is the particular organization of labour.