This article examines the shifting experience of national belonging and state patronage at a crucial juncture in Mali's post-colonial history, the ten-year period that marked the end of the country's First Republic (1960–8) and the beginning of its Second Republic (1968–91). My focus is on the contested politics of culture that characterized this period, elucidated through the experiences and expressions of two popular dance bands, Las Maravillas de Mali and Les Ambassadeurs du Motel. By following the post-colonial careers of Las Maravillas and Les Ambassadeurs I explore social and musical encounters with national community and state authority from which broader questions of political sovereignty and accountability emerge.

Côte d'Ivoire has travelled full circle from economic success (from 1960 to about 1979) to failure (from the 1980s onwards) in little more than a generation. In the early 1990s, Zouglou, today Côte d'Ivoire's internationally best-known music, emerged at the university residences of the University of Abidjan in the Yopougon quarter. The young people who were to become the ‘Zouglou generation’ were precisely the generation that bore the brunt of this economic deterioration. Zouglou was born at a time when, as a result of an unprecedented economic crisis and the attendant structural adjustment measures, university students experienced a general downgrading not only as students but also as future graduates hoping to find employment. In addition, the number of students and school pupils who were unable to complete their education grew considerably during this time. As this article demonstrates, these phenomena had a profound influence on the development of the philosophy associated with Zouglou music. Accordingly, Zouglou singers have called themselves the ‘sacrificed generation’. Indeed, the many songs about orphans in Zouglou music can be read as a symbolic statement about this experience: the sense that Ivoirian youth have been abandoned by their elders, their families and the political authorities is unmistakable in the words of Zouglou songs consoling such (metaphorical) orphans. Zouglou music has become an important platform through which this generation has been able to express itself, as well as a site for oral street poetry and collective catharsis. The article discusses the content of these songs, as well as interviews with Zouglou singers on this matter, to investigate how Zouglou, as a cultural phenomenon, grew out of the experience of a generation.

The Muslim-dominated ‘Swahili coast’ has always served as a conceptual as well as physical periphery for post-colonial Kenya. This article takes Kenyan youth music under the influence of global hip-hop as an ethnographic entry into the dynamics of identity and citizenship in this region. Kenyan youth music borrows from global hip-hop culture the idea that an artist must ‘represent the real’. The ways in which these regional artists construct their public personae thus provide rich data on ‘cultural citizenship’, in Aihwa Ong's (1996) sense of citizenship as subjectification. I focus here on youth music production in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa between 2004 and 2007. During this time, some local artists adopted a representational strategy that subtly reinscribed the symbolic violence to which members of the coast's Muslim-Swahili society have long been subjected. I examine the representational strategies that were adopted during this period by Mombasan artists who happened to be members of the Muslim-Swahili society (‘subjects of the Swahili coast’, as I name them), with an ethnographic eye and ear trained on what they say about the ways in which young subjects of the Swahili coast are objectified and subjectified as ‘Kenyan youth’ in the twenty-first century.

In the aftermath of social conflicts and urban violence between autochthons and migrants in Italy in recent years, the question of how to control the growing number of illegal immigrants is increasingly discussed in the language of zero-tolerance anti-crime campaigns. Traffic in women has been a ‘structural’ social reality in the Italian migration landscape over the last 15 years, and is a prominent aspect of illegal female migration. These women are qualified as ‘victims of human trafficking’ when they denounce their pimps. Most of their suffering – involving psychological or psychiatric symptoms and requiring psychosocial support – is expressed through an emic vocabulary that talks about fetishes, spirit possession, witchcraft, sacrifice, debts, and spiritual and moral deliverance. This study – based on extensive field research in Turin into an Ethno-Psychiatric Service (provided by the Frantz Fanon Centre) in which 50 Nigerian women participated – addresses the following anthropological issues: the relationship between emic vocabulary (so called ‘voodoo’ or ‘juju’), migration, and moral economies of violence; and the intersection between symbolic violence and coercion, as experienced through sexual abuse and/or ritual violence (occurring both in Nigeria and Italy, and also during the migration itself in different countries such as Benin, Mali and Libya). In the conclusion of this article, I underline the limits of psychiatric and psychological therapeutical methods vis-à-vis the symptoms and traumatic experiences that ‘mark’ these female bodies; and I discuss in particular the emergence of new forms of post-colonial disorders affecting subjects who are at the mercy of compromised desires.

This study addresses the problem of sexuality and ideology in relation to (pan)-Africanist doctrines that have been instrumental in the effort of post-colonial African elites to constitute an exclusive African sexual selfhood. The focus is on their efforts to ‘Africanize’ the sexuality of the masses in a global context that dramatizes the uncontrolled flow of sexual desires, and favours the emergence of new forms of sexual expressions and practices that destabilize the post-colonial sexual order. The leading question informing this study is how a hegemonic heterosexual identity has come to be internalized in post-colonial Africa, and how both men and women have come to believe that to be ‘good’ citizens or ‘real’ Africans they have to become repressed subjects who not only limit their sexuality solely to heterosexual desires, but also have a natural aversion to other forms of sexuality such as same-sex relations. My main argument is that in most African countries, and specifically in Cameroon, both the edification of a phallocratico-patriarchal society and the political invention of the sublimated Muntu, the so-called libidinal African straight, went along with the suppression, annihilation or negation of gays and lesbians, generally misrepresented as deracinated Africans and dangerous ‘witch-others’.

Anti-retroviral therapies have radically transformed the HIV epidemic in rural southern Malawi and this article explores the ways in which women are learning to live with the virus in a matrilineal setting. Through discussion of the experiences of HIV-positive women, I argue that stigma can only be understood through an appreciation of the pre-existing, and often complicated, social relations into which new information about a person is folded. The women's narratives reveal a tentative hope for the future, which is replicated in my own optimism that the anthropology of HIV is undergoing a parallel reorientation towards the study of life with HIV, rather than death by AIDS.