Chronic shortages of resources to run the state have been a feature of Mozambique since the colonial period. Even before the adoption of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in the late 1980s, conditions were austere due to the effects of Portuguese colonialism, a decade of liberation struggle, prolonged civil war and policy mistakes following independence in 1975. Drawing from archival research and oral accounts, this article analyses the impact of the liberalization of higher education in Mozambique. It explores the strategies adopted by intellectuals and academics to navigate reduced state support and donor conditionalities accompanying austerity measures from the late 1980s. It also highlights the paradoxical effects of austerity measures on fundraising, intellectual production, and the expansion of educational institutions. Austerity measures brought about by SAPs have forced universities and faculty to reinvent themselves by commercializing and privatizing higher education and seeking external funding for research. At the same time, scholars are now intellectually freer but more dependent on donors’ research agendas. Finally, the introduction of privately owned higher education institutions and the marketization of public institutions have increased divisions between the elites and the majority of Mozambicans who cannot afford to pay the fees charged.

Young people from the low-income settlements in Kenya's third-largest city, Kisumu, struggling with unemployment refer to their efforts to generate a livelihood as ‘hustling’. At the same time, many of them put art (dance, music, poetry) at the centre of their lives. This article attempts to account for the significant popularity of the arts among Kisumu's youth. It understands the ‘way of the artist’ as an alternative interpretation of work and a framework in which people situate their experiences of unemployment, waiting and insecure work. To examine this framework in action, the article follows Janabii, a poet who has been at the centre of attempts to establish a spoken word scene in Kisumu. Janabii has spent several years in limbo, oscillating between glittering performances and a more discreet daily life, marked by functional homelessness and a refusal to surrender to the violence of Kenya's informal world of work. The article contributes to recent studies about hustling by combining an ethnography of a week in Janabii's life with a literary analysis of excerpts from one of his poems, in order to elucidate how his struggles to get by are narrated and stylized through a spoken word, artistic imaginary that interrelates with his everyday life.

This article explores the movement of children between households in Zambia as a site of ‘moral navigation’. Moral navigation extends Henrik Vigh's concept of social navigation from contexts of conflict and migration to more socially stable contexts in which well-being depends critically on people's ability to manage relationships. The live, dynamic and mobile character of these relationships means that they require active, real-time cultivation and response. While having practical objectives, these negotiations are also moral, articulated with ideas of what ought to be, and seeking to fulfil sometimes competing ethical projects. Life history interviews present three main perspectives: recollections of times in childhood spent away from birth parents; birth parents’ reflections on having a child living with others; and adults’ accounts of taking in other people's children. Strong norms of kinship unity and solidarity notwithstanding, in practice terms of engagement are differentiated through gender, marital, social and economic status, plus relational and geographical proximity. The pursuit of personal benefit contains the seeds of both contradiction and convergence with the collective good, as a relational understanding of moral selves sees one's own gain as proper, rightful and virtuous when it is realized in and through providing for others.

Work hard, work smart, make the right connections, get the right education, invest wisely – yet after doing all the supposedly right things, success remains elusive to many. For a few, however, who may or may not have done exactly these things, success seems to come effortlessly. Some are very fortunate and others not so much. The lack of correspondence between exertion and success or work and good fortune is an issue that confronts lay persons and professionals alike. Focusing on Yoruba people, I discursively present lay Yoruba persons’ apprehension and common-sense view of this conundrum as reflected in their contextualized language use and supported by other ‘mundane’ information from day-to-day life. By looking at their everyday language, it is possible to deduce their reality as socially constructed in their discourses and gain insight into how they reconcile individual exertions with a view that asserts determinism. Further, I will suggest that the basis of the Yoruba conventional knowledge system informing their utterances and actions pertaining specifically to people's earthly fortunes lies in their origination narrative and original life quest, the essence of which remains inarguable even if temporarily pliable. The popular saying ‘iṣẹ́ o kan oríire’, exertion does not relate to success, is used as a point of departure and sense contained in their orature – situational utterances, pithy proverbs, aphorism and anecdotes – to tease out the Yoruba ordinary meaning of success/fortune and how it is acquired, relative to individuals’ earthly journey and preoccupation. Based on the sampled day-to-day utterances, individual life, it seems, unfolds as presumably scripted, despite apparent avowal and disavowal of ordination in people's pronouncements. Orí (head) retains its position at the summit, assenting – or not – to earthly endeavours.

Sutura (discretion, modesty) is a central element in Senegalese Wolof culture that, among other things, promotes feminine honour through chastity, silence with regard to discussing sexuality with elders, and refraining from articulating same-sex desires in general. Consequently, sutura is seen as limiting the space for non-normative sexualities. However, lesbiennes in Senegal strategically employ sutura to navigate this gender and sexual normativity, whereby they queer the initially heteronormative framework. This article explores how, at the frontiers of international sexual rights activism and its antithetical Islamic social code, young women open new avenues for thinking queer Africa. The article explores young women's diverse tactics to turn sutura from a heteronormative framework into a vehicle for queer expression. These women demonstrate the constant yet indeterminate possibilities to negotiate between normative expectations and queer lives. They furthermore propose an alternative to the international queer frontier of overt resistance and protest, and suggest that the silences that sutura prescribe are more productive for queering their urban environment. By balancing the simultaneous desires of same-sex intimacies, family life, societal expectations and urban success, these women are pioneers in offering new routes for ‘queering queer Africa’, as Stella Nyanzi has described it.

Scholars have commonly interpreted the emergence of claims of Israelite descent among African peoples as attempts of marginalized communities to construct empowering identities by drawing on biblical narratives. This article tries to make sense of such claims from a more emic perspective, not as an instrumental counter-discourse but as a genuine attempt to grapple with the nature of ethnic membership and the place of certain communities in relation to biblical genealogies, time and space. The article explores the claims of Nuer members of several Evangelical Zionist churches operating in western Ethiopia and South Sudan that the Nuer are among the ‘lost tribes’ of Israel. It demonstrates how Nuer Zionists have reinterpreted Nuer identity, known for its permeability and constructivist nature, in light of contemporary premillennialist Zionist notions of history and peoplehood, which emphasize ethnic fixity and focus on lineages, exclusive bloodlines and biological descent. The article offers a new perspective on Israelite identities in Africa and on the influence of born-again Christianity on the construction of ethnic identities.

This article explores the question of what happens when highly socialized and contingent forms of provisioning go wrong, and young men are forced to start again in unfamiliar urban contexts. The decline of George Mirembe's moneylending business in Kampala pre-empted his departure from the country and his arrival in Nairobi in search of new socio-economic opportunities. Lacking the documents and language skills necessary to enter formal sectors of the economy, George claimed asylum as a sexual refugee while working as a smuggler and a voice actor in the shadow film industry. His activities illustrate the advantages and limitations of the hustle as a framework for understanding the activities of transnational ‘others’ in African cities. I argue that translational practices of acting and storytelling have become a generalized tactic of survival among migrants in urban East Africa. Such practices are illustrative of a form of ‘uprooted hustle’ – or hustling on the move – that is oriented towards individual survival and exit rather than place-based transformation.

Under Idi Amin's government, institutions that served the public interest were dramatically under-resourced. An array of self-nominated, self-important, self-righteous people were empowered to take on administrative tasks that, in an earlier dispensation, had been the work of professionals. Businesses and institutions that had formerly been under the regulatory authority of credentialled experts were thrown open all at once for commoners to operate. Everywhere there were campaigns, as the new regime made obscure and technical issues into urgent problems demanding a resolution. Ugandans were called upon to defend cultures, to struggle against imperialism and racism, and to transform the architecture of the economy. That is how people came to see themselves as proprietors of public life. Their work allowed commoners to claim equity over resources and infrastructures. In their investments in the operations of public institutions, people became custodians, proprietors and petty authoritarians. Their proprietary sense of responsibility was a powerful inducement to self-sacrifice. It was also the fuel for demagoguery.

The Kwando Basin of north-eastern Namibia is firmly embedded in current national and international conservation agendas. It is a key part of the world's largest transboundary conservation area, the Kavango–Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area, and the home of seven community-based conservation areas (conservancies) and three smaller national parks (Mudumu, Nkasa Rupara and Bwabwata). While conservation agendas often start from the assumption that an authentic part of African nature is conserved as an assemblage of biota that has not been gravely impacted by subsistence agriculture, colonialism and global value chains, we show that environmental infrastructure along the Namibian side of the Kwando Valley has been shaped by the impact of administrative measures and the gradual decoupling of humans and wildlife in a vast wetland. The way towards today's conservation landscape was marked and marred by the enforced reordering of human–environment relations; clearing the riverine core wetlands of human habitation and concentrating communities in narrowly defined settlement zones; the suppression of specific, wetland-adapted subsistence practices; and the elimination of unwanted microbes with the help of insecticides. The interventions in the ecosystem and the construction of an environmental infrastructure have created a unique conservation landscape in the Namibian Zambezi region, which provides the foundation for its popularity and success.

In Nakuru, a secondary city in Kenya, herbal doctors argue that African bodies are infested by ‘dirt’. Gathering at crossroads, they teach about the dangerous effects of processed foods on African bodies. During public product demonstrations, they patch together urban gossip, kemikali (chemicals in Kiswahili) and consumer goods from abroad to demonstrate their overheating effects on stomachs. In this article, I think through metabolism and digestion to demonstrate how ‘navigating’ urban toxicity in Nakuru implies a bodily praxis that hinges on debates about the porosity of the nation's borders responding to the afflictions of globalization. I show how the occult character of kemikali pivots on the collapse between insides and outsides, leading to overheating stomachs, and consequently argue that herbal interventions coating the lining of the stomach and the gut do what national borders are unable to achieve: keeping out toxic intrusions. From this point of view, herbal practices in Nakuru demonstrate agency and resistance to worlds perceived as increasingly toxic and polluted.

This article provides an account of the relationship between imperial Ethiopia and Eritrea in the realm of banking governance from the start of the federation to the last years of the imperial regime. It looks in particular at the relationship between the Ethiopian administrations and an Italian bank, Banco di Roma, which had its headquarters in Eritrea from 1948 to 1967 before moving to Addis Ababa. The struggle for control of the economic flows generated by the Italian bank is an index of the changes in centre–periphery linkages between Addis Ababa and the sub-regional centre of Asmara. Archival evidence highlights the multifaced nature of Ethiopian governance and the role performed by the Italian institution in providing alternative sources of diplomatic leverage and wealth accumulation to the Eritrean elite. It is argued that the extraterritorial status enjoyed by Banco di Roma until 1967 was actively tolerated by a section of the Ethiopian establishment, which resorted to an established pattern of imperial governance based on flexibility in return for tribute. This centre–periphery arrangement was harshly opposed by prominent Ethiopian officials from the Ministry of Finance and the National Bank of Ethiopia, who struggled to enforce tighter government control over capital flows within and across the country's borders. The National Bank's final success in the quest for financial centralization drained significant resources out of Eritrea, with adverse effects on the preservation of the pax aethiopica in the former Italian colony.

This article explores the everyday lives that African migrants in Durban, South Africa share with other residents of the city. In conversation with Obvious Katsaura's work on ‘ethno-mutualism’, we use the example of ordinary greeting practices to show how Durban's urban everyday has been hijacked by xenophobic sensibilities. By demonstrating how the act of excluding migrants from these practices threatens to render the quotidian city uninhabitable for them, we shed light on the importance of mundane forms of social interaction for building a sense of identity and belonging. We then consider several ways in which African migrants develop and participate in Muslim forms of sociality that assist them in ‘disarming’ the urban everyday: from providing a platform for building solidarity with fellow migrants to mediating a ‘sense of welcome’ from the established Indian South African community. Elaborating on this, we delineate how forms of reciprocity emerge through the interactions between migrant and Indian Muslims that reproduce the ambient life of the city as a shared habitat, opening up new possibilities for entanglement. As such, our analysis contributes to emerging conversations about urban mutuality and migrant religious practices in the everyday lives of African cities.

This article examines the abandonment of an important food taboo – the prohibition of milk consumption by newly married women – in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. Offering a detailed exploration of this hlonipha custom in three rural communities, I start from the position that food always reflects the entanglements of its material and symbolic attributes. By tracing health and illness, shifting livelihoods, diets and an important social medicine intervention, this article reveals that in the 1950s milk was a symbolically and materially different food than it had been in the 1930s. I argue that this difference determined whether or not hlonipha would be abandoned. By centring on understandings of food, health and taboos as material and symbolic, this article draws on scholarship on livestock in Southern Africa and contributes to scholarship on food taboos and hlonipha customs, pushing for the incorporation of material aspects of those customs.

Bayaaye is a Luganda word meaning ‘hooligans’ used since the 1970s to both disparage Ugandan urban youth and celebrate their streetwise resourcefulness. The original so-called bayaaye were youth, often fresh from the countryside, who worked as street hustlers in the 1970s underground economy. This article focuses on how one Ugandan intellectual, M. B. Nsimbi, in his Luganda-language novel about the Idi Amin era, Kulyennyingi (1984), diagnosed the rise of the bayaaye as a national moral pathology. I discuss how this novel relates to earlier Luganda literary works, which advocated an idealized precolonial, rural African tradition as a moral reference point for modern living. A recent revised discourse about urban youth as ‘bayaaye’ or ‘ghetto’, accompanying the political rise of reggae star Bobi Wine, is considered in light of the earlier history of the bayaaye stereotype.

This is an ethnography of internet scams in Abidjan through which I attempt to develop a theory of digital sorcery. The brouteurs of Côte d'Ivoire impersonate Europeans in social media profiles and seduce others into falling in love with them. After months of flirtatious messaging and photo exchanges, disaster strikes their avatar and they ask for an emergency wire transfer from their digital lover. While millions of euros of income are sent to Abidjan every year, the brouteurs say they can no longer succeed without the use of occult forces, and they turn to marabouts for assistance. During my fieldwork in 2015, rumours circulated that brouteur wealth depended on the blood sacrifice of children for its success. As Ivoirians increasingly employ smartphones and social media in their daily life, the anxieties concerning the illusions and manipulations of the virtual world become enmeshed with those of the occult second world. I suggest that the overlap between hacker technology, con artistry and occult power outlined in Ivoirian urban rumour suggests a model for rethinking the space of virtuality in the global economy as a form of magical semiosis, one that can be every bit as vitality draining as witchcraft itself.

Throughout Africa, contemporary boundaries are deemed ‘artificial’ because they were external impositions breaking apart supposedly homogeneous ethnic units. This article argues that the problem with the colonial borders was not only that they arbitrarily dissected African societies with European interests in mind, but also that they profoundly changed the way in which territoriality and authority functioned in this region, and therefore they affected identity. The presumption that territories could be constructed in which ‘culture’ and ‘political power’ neatly coincided was influenced by European ideas about space and identity, and privileged the perceptions and territorial claims of those ruling the most powerful centres in the nineteenth century. Thus, this article questions assumptions that continue to influence contemporary views of the Lake Kivu region. It shows that local understandings of the relationship between space and identity differed fundamentally from state-centred perspectives, whether in precolonial centralized states or colonial states.

The influx of Chinese-made African ethnic dress has been central to debates about the consequences of the growing Chinese presence in Africa. Exploring the reception of the Chinese-produced capulana in Mozambique and net'ela in Ethiopia, we demonstrate that Mozambican and Ethiopian manufacturers and traders, from the grass roots up to cultural elites, engage with Chinese imports with creativity and verve. While welcoming Chinese materials for their affordability, bold and bright colours and suitability for dressmaking, they fashion them in ways that fit their own tastes and the local fashion trends. We distinguish three practices by which people do this: first, by incorporating Chinese materials or design elements into their own products; second, by co-creating new designs and dress with their Chinese counterparts; and third, by altering the imported fabrics. Apart from fashioning imports, some manufacturers use strategies to distinguish their own products from Chinese counterparts. These strategies include naming practices linked to the stories of their origin and alterations to the material.

Ghana's post-independence era has been shaped by a series of coups and numerous attempted military interventions. While the involvement of the Ghana Armed Forces in politics has received widespread academic attention, the detrimental effects of these events on the military as an institution remain largely understudied. Using the coups of 1979 and 1981 as a point of departure, the article explores from an institutional perspective how the disruption of the everyday in the Ghanaian barracks resulted in the temporal breakdown of discipline and the collapse of military hierarchy. The article further examines the measures taken by the Provisional National Defence Council junta to rebuild and nurture hierarchy following its breakdown. It is also argued that restoration of hierarchy in the Ghanaian barracks called not only for an appeal to soldierly values, such as respect for rank and authority, but also for dramatic performances of authority and military hierarchy. The article depicts hierarchy in various settings, while exploring how the military order is expressed and lived in the current constellation. In short, the article not only illustrates a historical evolution, but also demonstrates that the maintenance of order and hierarchy in a closed institution such as the military is an ongoing and continuous negotiation process.