He may have died tragically young, but Binyavanga Wainaina’s brilliance lives on. His caustic skewering of white journalism – ‘How to write about Africa’ – was first published in Granta in 2005 (Wainaina 2005). It remains a vital anti-guide to sweeping generalizations and cheap condescension. By comparison, writing about African universities should be easy. After all, aren’t most of us already insiders within, if not institutionalized by, higher education? There lies the rub. Academography, to use Eli Thorkelson’s pithy neologism, is much harder than it looks.

In his article ‘African universities and the challenge of postcolonial development’, Jeremiah Arowosegbe discusses the trajectory of universities in postcolonial Africa, drawing particularly on the experiences of public universities in Nigeria. Arowosegbe accounts for the state of the institutions against the backdrop of ‘hostile material conditions and uncongenial political control’, which continue to ‘undermine institutional autonomy and the integrity of scholarship’. This think piece reflects on the particular case of the state of humanities scholarship in Nigeria in the face of persistent onslaught on academia.

What is the state of copyright in Africa today, when specialists in the field, notably in the USA, are sounding the alarm? Taking as its starting point a right that emerged in the West in the twilight of the nineteenth century, this article examines the ways in which copyright is discussed, established and experienced in sub-Saharan Africa. It questions the relevance of the vocabulary used and asks how Africa can be made intelligible in the context of a heterogeneous world. Since the 1990s, international organizations have promoted and imposed the economic notion of material goods, inventing a new tradition. The result is a heritage, the commons, that is reduced to a resource divorced from any historical or social context. How can we go beyond these rights, which are a source of a ‘promise economy’ for creators, to promote imprescriptible and inalienable human rights? How can experienced creators resist copyright that takes them back to the Middle Ages?

When the American political scientist James C. Scott passed away in July 2024, tributes praised him as one of the most influential thinkers of his generation.1 Building on years of ethnographic research in Southeast Asia, his numerous books offered new ways of thinking about subaltern resistance, as well as the mechanisms of state oppression and control. A self-professed anarchist, he organized against the Vietnam War as a junior faculty at the University of Wisconsin in the latter part of the 1960s, and he maintained a forty-six-acre farm for decades while teaching at Yale. While obituaries widely remembered Scott as a figure of integrity, some dissonant voices on social media commented more negatively on his involvement with the CIA as a young man and as a leader in the United States National Student Association (USNSA). The political scientist Karen Puget first brought this episode in Scott’s life to light in a book that carefully exposed the ties of the USNSA with US intelligence (Puget 2015). Puget showed how, in the 1950s and 1960s, what was then the most important student organization in the USA allowed itself to be fully infiltrated by the government. The young liberal-minded students at the helm of the organization worked hand in hand with CIA handlers to curb Soviet influence among their peer organizations in Europe, Asia and Africa. For a few years, after graduating from Williams College and before embarking on his doctoral studies at Yale, Scott occupied a prominent role among these young shadow Cold Warriors, first as the USNSA’s representative in Paris and later as its vice president in charge of international affairs.

Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe’s essay ‘African universities and the challenge of postcolonial development’ sheds significant light on political and economic influences, freedom within academia, and the role of these institutions within wider socio-political contexts. I want to endorse some of his proposals and make additional suggestions to comprehend the complexities and potential directions of African universities.

In his latest article, ‘African universities and the challenge of postcolonial development’, Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe argues convincingly that public universities in Africa are in crisis, and that this crisis reflects the failure of postcolonial states to build the societies promised by anti-colonial liberation. He is certainly correct that the political economy of higher education (HE) in postcolonial Africa is a much-neglected topic, and his article is even more welcome for that reason. As a scholar with an extensive career in Nigerian public universities, Arowosegbe has also undertaken research fellowships in Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, South Africa and the USA. Now he finds himself at the University of Leeds in the UK. He has experienced much from within and reflected deeply from afar on the state of universities in Nigeria and across the continent. His article is a serious work of reflection and scholarship, crafted and refined over years of engagement. Therefore, his serious charges on the state of the universities in Africa cannot be dismissed lightly.

Arowosegbe’s (2023) treatise on the crisis of higher education across the African continent raises many issues about the failures of Africa’s postcolonial states and the situations of the continent’s public universities. His courage in bringing to the fore the predicaments of Africa’s public universities is commendable. Two issues in particular attract my attention. First, while he underscores the strained relations between the state and the academy and recognizes the existence of some divergent ideological underpinnings therein, his account neglects the impacts of ideological contradictions on society’s political stability and socio-economic development. Second, his account omits the quandaries of private universities in Africa, an aspect of higher education across the continent that should not be overlooked if one is to holistically appreciate the predicaments of Africa’s universities within the context of the role of the postcolonial state.

I want to say what a privilege it is to be invited to comment on Jeremiah Arowosegbe’s article ‘African universities and the challenge of postcolonial development’. First and foremost, this is because Arowosegbe’s piece is exactly the kind of intervention we need more of: passionately written, politically engaged commentaries on the state of African universities today by scholars based on the continent who are invested in charting the best way forward for their institutions. African universities have been in a kind of Janus-faced state for at least the last decade, if not longer. On the one hand, institutions with records of having been among the world’s most exciting universities of the 1960s and 1970s – Makerere, Ibadan, Dar es Salaam – have had to endure a near total, decades-long collapse driven by austerity programmes imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and forced on African states from the 1980s. This is a crisis that undoubtably lingers – indeed, Arowosegbe makes it his focus – and these universities have had to struggle not to be entirely defined by this story of lack and of failure. On the other hand, some of these institutions (including those named above) have come through the fire of this collapse and have emerged with new life that cannot be reduced to mere tendrils. On the contrary: the continent’s top dozen or so universities are today producing students who will very likely become the world’s next generation of humanists, social scientists and hard scientists focused on Africa, and beyond too. The pipeline for this present generation of students often now runs from undergraduate and master’s programmes in Africa, to top doctoral programmes in North America and Europe, to these students being the most competitive candidates for the mini-boom (relatively speaking) in tenure-track positions in disciplinary scholarship and pedagogy focused on Africa. Amidst a more general withering of the humanities in globally northern universities, African and Black Studies constitute a partial exception to the dying throes of higher education as we know it and are part of a laudable and long overdue diversification of the field. Adding to the reconfiguration of African Studies’ landscape of labour, the dramatic shortage of viable jobs in North America and the UK is making the job market for graduates of the world’s top PhD programmes a truly global one that includes Africa prominently. Not since the 1960s have we seen the prospect of top African universities being realistically able to attract new scholars trained in the global North to base themselves in Africa – a potential boon to African universities (even if one that remains more in potentia than realized).

The impact of neoliberalism on the world university system has been widely debated. Trends in the global North today show not only the tighter managerialism that comes with cuts to university funding and commercialization, but also competition for fee-paying ‘student customers’ and casualization of academic staff in an era of increased international student mobility. There are louder calls for quality enhancement and more inclusive learning environments regulated and indexed by global rankings. In the global South and in Africa in particular, the same factors also drive institutional and infrastructural decadence amidst other postcolonial factors that have brought wider confrontation between the state and university staff and student bodies, which constitute the subject of this discussion.

I am grateful to all the authors who contributed thoughtful reflections on my 2016 and 2023 articles; and to the editors of Africa for calling on me to have the last word and write back in a compelling conversation on knowledge production and the crisis of public universities in Africa. It is time to pull the strings together. As I seek to do this, my aim is less to answer – collectively or individually – the authors and their contributions to my articles. Rather, I endeavour to put on record further thoughts on issues about which I have been silent in earlier publications. In pursuit of a longstanding interest in (1) how knowledge is produced on non-metropolitan societies, (2) the future directions of postcolonial universities, and (3) the relations of knowledge and power in Africa, I ask further questions and examine new archives and bodies of evidence. I appreciate the difficulty of ignoring the economic determinants of Africa’s material base – built as it is on dependent and disarticulated capitalist economies. In recounting my lived experience as an eyewitness to university life in Africa, and in shedding more light on the historical problems that I grapple with, I acknowledge change and continuity in historical explanations and the historiographies of my universe. In the present as in the past, the sense of sight shapes experience. I admit, with Ludmilla Jordanova (2012: 3), that vision has a history and that objects necessarily play a central role within it.1 As Peter Burke (2008) has shown, looking at alternative evidence and records enables one to examine historical problems and subjects in a different and hopefully renewed way. Historians therefore ask different and new questions. Such questions are informed by the changing nature of the environments and universes of analysis, historiography and historical scholarship. These activities demand continuous examination of existing arguments and conclusions against the backdrop of changing evidence and facts. Understood as the best intellectual imagery of modern society, I turn to the postcolonial universities in Africa. Ultimately, this effort, together with my other works, should illuminate what one might safely conjecture about the future of the universities in Africa.

In the mountainous areas of south-western Uganda, peasant miners are characterized as people who ‘work for the stomach’ and pursue an unsustainable activity: extracting alluvial gold with artisanal technology. After days of hard work in the mines, they allegedly squander their money on alcohol and sex. A common way of disapproving of these miners’ behaviour is to compare them to lake fishers (ababariya). By focusing on the ababariya narrative as an entry point into the lifeways of miners, and the relationship between mining and fishing and agriculture, we explore how peasant miners think about a sustainable life. Our argument is that the ababariya can be instrumental in the reproduction and legitimization of existing social and economic inequalities. We therefore examine the contexts that frame the ababariya narrative and the inequalities that it legitimizes. This leads us to reflect on whether this narrative on ‘excessive behaviours’ reveals something about an alternative way of thinking about economy and social relationships based on abundance rather than scarcity.

This article explores the trajectories and narratives of people who have exited marginalized urban spaces in Nairobi to move through other social spaces in the city, or abroad. Claiming to belong to the ‘ghetto’, an idiom that refers to both a local space of exclusion and a globalized cultural and political imaginary, our interlocutors embrace the contradictions of this belonging in their everyday experiences. The careers they have built in different fields (art, activism, sport, academia) identify them as figures of social success and make them question their relationships with those around them. Defining their aspirations as intimately linked with the ghetto, but perceiving it as a strong constraint, they are not cutting ties with the place they come from. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork that pays attention to both their self-narratives and their writing, we propose the notion of ‘small boundaries’ to describe how social and spatial mobility from the ghetto produces, for each individual in a different way, an intimate cleavage within the self. We then propose to unpack this specific self as a configuration of three types of distancing (social, spatial and self-distancing) that allow both their aspirations and their obligations to coexist in everyday life.

From 1950 to 1963, a columnist named ‘Kadebona’ (The Experienced One) published regular pieces in Izwi lama Swazi (The Voice of the Swazi), the vernacular newspaper of the British protectorate of Swaziland (now named Eswatini). Although lacking definitive evidence, it is probable that Kadebona was John J. Nquku, a leading political figure of colonial Eswatini. Kadebona’s 300-plus columns positioned themselves as meeting places for the embryonic Swati nation. In contrast to the closed-door discussions of those in power, Kadebona’s columns styled themselves as transparent platforms for a give-and-take debate among emaSwati (as residents of Eswatini were called). Kadebona not only ‘spoke’ via his columns; he also expected replies on the part of the nation. His column was a space available to all, ‘where the rich and the poor, and where leaders and their followers, all meet’. In a period of debate over the future of the independent Swati nation, Kadebona’s columns encouraged all emaSwati to shape their country, and allowed all perspectives audibility via the column and ‘Letters to the Editor’. At the same time, however, there were distinct limits to the egalitarian public summoned through these articles. While Kadebona encouraged all emaSwati regardless of rank or class to speak up, he was far less welcoming towards other voices, including women and youths. This article provides an introduction to these fraught columns, a small sample of which are presented here, both in their isiZulu original and in English translation (siSwati – the language spoken by emaSwati – had no authorized written form well into the 1960s; instead, the South African isiZulu was used for written communication). In what follows, I provide Izwi lama Swazi’s history, discuss the emergence of Kadebona as a columnist in the 1950s, and comment on some of his key concerns.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.