In 1932, as Nyasaland (present-day Malawi) was heading to indirect rule, a small vocal community in the north of the country resisted the colonial government’s attempts to assign them a Native Authority. Instead, they proposed their own form of government: a council of thirty-two mafumu (chiefs) who would make decisions on an egalitarian basis, the Atonga tribal council. The champion of this alternative form of governance was a Tonga intellectual named Filemon K. Chirwa. At the height of the political manoeuvring to institute the Atonga tribal council, Filemon wrote and published his only book: Nthanu za Chitonga (Folktales in Chitonga). This article argues that this book was – and still is – an important piece of political literature. Through an exploration of the context of the creation of the Atonga tribal council, it sets out the stakes that were at play in the construction of local traditions and customs, and then shows how the book was part of a project of producing an image of these. It then explores the ‘afterlife’ of the book, as it became a symbolic force in contemporary village communities, not only articulating the sense of political marginalization experienced, but also capturing a new form of political agency. The article concludes by suggesting that Filemon Chirwa’s collection of stories is an astounding example of the deeply political role that folktale literature can play within colonial and (post)colonial Africa.

Nine Ghanaian private banks collapsed during the country’s 2017–19 financial crisis. Apart from public audits that revealed liquidity problems and large portfolios of non-performing loans, the crisis generated vibrant debate on ‘indigenous banks’ as integral to national economic sovereignty. At the centre of these debates was a contested central bank-led project to inject equity in five struggling Ghanaian banks through a special purpose vehicle (SPV), Ghana Amalgamated Trust (GAT). Set against the historical dominance of foreign banks in West Africa and Ghana’s recent history of political fault lines, this article explores the moral discourses and popular discontents of harnessing an SPV – a device typically used to isolate financial risk – for a desire for African economic sovereignty. Drawing on banking archives, public debates and fieldwork in a private bank selected as a benefactor of the SPV, I focus on the contests of value that emerge when costly banking sector reforms meet a critical public that doubts the sincerity of politicians and bankers as economic ‘reformers’. Arguing that ‘indigenous banks’ became a moral category that embedded abstractions of finance in a nationalist discourse of affect and sentiment, this article illuminates the long history of centring domestic ownership of financial infrastructures in postcolonial African economic policymaking.

Why are Nigeria’s universities launching a growing number of open access journals while simultaneously expecting their academic staff to publish ‘internationally’? And what impact do these expectations have on Nigerian journals? Drawing on interviews with editors and publishers, we describe the emergence of a hyperlocal ‘credibility economy’ within the Nigerian academy. The great majority of Nigerian scholarly journals are excluded from Scopus and Web of Science, the two main global citation indexes. Stigmatized by geography, Nigerian journals are ignored, rendered invisible, classed as poor quality or condemned as ‘predatory’. Historicizing these trends, we illustrate our argument with four case studies: two science and technology journals hosted by universities and two independent publishers, one with expertise in African studies, the other in information studies. In each case, we explore the motivations, commitments and strategies of editors and publishers. Their stories exemplify the impact of colonial histories, global discourses and bibliometric infrastructures on African research publishing cultures. The histories, logics and fragilities of this regional research ecosystem reveal how Africa’s scholars and publishers are getting by – but only just – amid the metricized judgements of the global research economy.

Africanists have written much about interactions between multiple currencies in Africa, yet paperwork-based regulations that apply to these interactions remain less studied. Meanwhile, ethnographic studies of paperwork examine the roles of documents more in state administration than in commercial transactions. Based on ethnographic research with individuals and institutions involved in the international transfer of the franc CFA in Congo-Brazzaville during a severe foreign exchange (forex) shortage from 2016 to 2021, this article argues that the participants in forex transactions manoeuvre paperwork to regulate the speed of the forex outflow – where paperwork functions as what I term ‘bureaucratic valves’. Responding to the outflow of forex caused by the oil price slump since 2015, the Bank of Central African States (BEAC) required numerous documents from buyers of forex to justify their demand. This policy slowed down international money transfers because it took more effort to meet the paperwork requirements. Yet banks, money-transfer agencies and individuals in Congo subsequently developed their own paperwork-based mechanisms to cope with this change. These manoeuvres show that paperwork is a flexible and essential tool for adjusting transactions for different participants, especially in the money markets and in (central) banking in Africa.

Not long after his election as prime minister of Ethiopia, Dr Abiy Ahmed declared that the country would privatize state-owned enterprises (SOEs) such as Ethiopian Airlines and Ethio Telcom, opening up sectors once considered off limits to foreign capital as part of his medemer reforms. On the surface, it might appear as if the Ethiopian leader was signalling a greater embrace of neoliberal (or market liberalizing) policies through his advocacy of privatization. However, this article interprets the call not as an ‘opening up’ to the demands of global capitalism, but as a calculated policy decision existing within the logics of the state’s developmentalist ideology. Through an analysis of the intellectual foundations and institutional evolution of the country’s privatization programme, I argue that the Ethiopian government privatizes SOEs as a revenue-generating strategy that augments state economic power by capitalizing on incomes gained through development investments – using the case of the domestic beer industry as my ethnographic example. By doing this, I unsettle assumptions about the meaning and uses of privatization within a developmentalist framework, demonstrating how Ethiopian leaders contend with global ideas, producing innovative strategies of resource mobilization to promote economic growth while protecting local sovereignty – a distinct form of African state capitalism.

This article brings new perspectives on state–citizen relations in African petro-states by analysing the role of Nigerian trade unions in the recurring fuel subsidy protests. Nigerian trade unions have played an instrumental role in protests against fuel subsidy removals since the mid-1980s, most recently in the massive 2012 protest known as ‘Occupy Nigeria’. Based on the idea that the fuel subsidy forms part of a social contract in Nigeria, and through revisiting T. H. Marshall’s seminal work on citizenship and industrial citizenship, I propose that the protests are sites for popular assertions of broader citizenship, as people rally behind the fuel subsidy as a social right and affirm political rights to participate and civil rights to bargain. This article further argues that the trade unions act as a mediator between state and citizens – that is, embedded in their industrial citizenship with collective forms of representation, organizing and bargaining. In this way, Nigerian trade unions have kept their relevance for workers and beyond, despite eroded labour rights. However, this social contract is fragile, contextual and contradictory, and the mediating role of the unions carries challenges and ambiguities, which became particularly clear in the 2012 protest.

In 2015, the Central Bank of West African States selected a private credit bureau to build a digital platform to collect and analyse financial data across the eight-country West African Economic and Monetary Union, including the activities of credit cooperatives and microfinance agencies that serve many West African borrowers. The credit-reporting platform promises to produce new and valuable knowledge about borrowers’ creditworthiness and risk. But valuable in what ways and for whom? Private credit bureaus rely on vast arrays of personal and financial data in order to produce credit reports and consumer credit scores that claim to represent the creditworthiness of individual borrowers. Cooperative loan officers, instead, understand creditworthiness to be highly variable and rely on relational metrics in order to determine risk as well as carefully overseeing existing loans to ensure their timely repayment. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with loan officers at a small-scale credit cooperative in Lomé, Togo, this article examines how the impending arrival of a private credit bureau and new credit-reporting technologies highlights the distinction between the ways in which credit bureaus and loan officers understand the nature of financial risk, as well as the centrality of loan officers and their management of borrower debt in sustaining the field of small-scale lending in Togo.