Annual festivals in Ghana celebrate the agricultural harvest and commemorate the political authority of local chiefs. Today, multinational corporations such as Guinness, MTN and Vodafone sponsor almost all aspects of festival production. Sponsor participation has transformed festivals into sites saturated with images of commodities and corporate brands. While some chiefs support corporate participation, others deplore sponsors, who they perceive as threatening chiefs' control over the festival arena. A critical medium through which chiefs police and participate in discourses about cultural and political legitimacy is dress: chiefs clothe members of their entourages alternatively in T-shirts with corporate logos and T-shirts with images of chiefs. During festivals, chiefs orchestrate embodied practices to assert new claims to their political authority based on the nobility of their lineage or their participation in global economic networks. Through an exploration of contemporary dress practices, I argue that what is at stake in corporate-sponsored festivals is the emergence of new logics of value that challenge people to reassess the social and economic relations that underlie the production of political power in Ghana.

This article concerns literary culture and the representation of romantic love in colonial Nigeria's print media. It examines how Nigerians, during the first half of the twentieth century, began redefining love, as both a biocultural and a historical construction, through what I call the modernization of African romantic passion. Through letters to editors and articles, print media showed that love, like education, politics and other institutions of colonial power, could be modernized to reflect Nigerians' quest to embrace ‘civilization’ and Western modernity. Modern romantic love did not just replace the precolonial or ‘traditional’ norms; rather, selective appropriation of precolonial gender and romantic norms created a hybrid that was neither African nor totally Western. While much has been written on African textual and print culture, gender, marriage and sexuality under colonial rule, the subject of romantic passion has received limited attention. Those few published works on the subject overlook it as a significant element of modernization that was championed by Africans who sought new avenues to express their emotion for the consumption of the reading public. This article attempts to retrieve the literary culture of colonial Nigerian youth by weaving textual analyses of representations of love into the wider socio-cultural transformation under alien rule.

Since the mass violence committed by Katangese against non-natives – mostly Kasaians – in the early 1990s in the Katanga province (Democratic Republic of Congo), Katangese and Kasaians have eschewed subjects relating to the past violence in their daily interactions. However, during the November 2011 presidential and legislative election period, expressions linked to the past violence, such as ‘This time, you will go back home by foot’ or ‘This time, you will not drive us out. We will fight’, were common. The paper documents and analyses how Kasaians and Katangese dealt with the memory of the violence during this election period, in Likasi and Kolwezi, two cities particularly affected by violence. Based on qualitative fieldwork research conducted between November 2011 and January 2012, the paper understands the November 2011 election as being a crisis situation informed by the fear of a violent outbreak in the event of the victory of Etienne Tshisekedi, leader of the opposition and a Kasaian. This crisis situation led to the simplification and polarization of collective identities: whether friend, neighbour or colleague, a person was perceived only as a Kasaian or a Katangese. In such a context, routine practices of coexistence based on self-censorship and avoidance tended to disappear.

As a result of the autopsy of Sierra Leone's civil war, we have become familiar with a rather dystopian vision of ‘traditional’ economic life in that region. Combatants often described their family villages as spaces where profound inequalities were hidden within households; where labour exploitation was woven through kinship relations. This article follows several young men who fled conditions of bonded labour in their rural homes: not to join the war but to seek a new life in the commercial fishing economy. Elsewhere across the postcolonial world, there is a rich ethnographic literature illustrating that people on the fringes of the global capitalist order respond with profound unease as their economic lives become ever more strongly regulated by impersonal market forces. Less often acknowledged is the possibility that, for some people, in some contexts, severing social relations might be exactly what they want, and that therein lies the greatest appeal of an economic life characterized by market transactions. For the young men described in this article, commercial fishing appeared to offer a level of personal ‘freedom’ unimaginable within the patron–client structures of village life. However, most find themselves drawn rapidly back into new forms of extractive relationships.

Based on a study of the International Women's Day (8 March), a truly popular event in Cameroon, this article attempts to understand the dynamics of state mobilization in this long-lasting regime. By observing the production and use of one of its symbolic objects, the pagne du 8 mars (a dedicated wax print), it sheds significant light on the social fabric of loyalty and the articulation of loyalist and disruptive popular mobilizations and allows us to move beyond ready-made, state-centred explanations. As an object of exchange and social distinction, the pagne provides women with a variety of ways of interacting (or not interacting) with the state and with men. Although, on the face of it, the act of dressing in the day's cloth may be seen as an expression of collective loyalty to the regime, one cannot assume that it represents a single, undifferentiated approach to authority. Licentious behaviour while wearing this pagne may even represent a real condemnation of moral and political power imposed on women. For the moment, however, this ritual and its popular mobilization are sufficient for the government's purposes: it is able to point to the event as an example of its capacity to mobilize its female citizens, thereby showing that its claims to legitimacy are well-founded.

Beauty pageants in Nigeria have become highly popular spectacles, the crowned winners venerated for their beauty, success and ability to better society through charity. This paper focuses on the Carnival Calabar Queen pageant, highlighting how pageants, at the nexus of gender and the nation, are sites of social reproduction by creating feminine ideals. A divinely inspired initiative of a fervently Pentecostal First Lady, the pageant crowns an ambassador for young women's rights. While the queen must have ‘grace and beauty’ and be ‘ever prayerful’, the discussion unravels emic conceptions of feminine beauty, religiosity and respectability. Yet, young women also use pageantry as a ‘platform’ for success, hoping to challenge the double bind of gender and generation they experience in Nigeria. The discussion pays particular attention to how young women, trying to overcome the insecurities of (urban) Nigerian life, make choices to negotiate individualism with community, and piety with patriarchy. Ethnographically, this paper situates beauty pageants in the region's past and present practices that mould feminine subjectivities. Contributing young women's experiences to recent literature on the temporalities of African youth, the paper's explicit focus on how new subjectivities form through action illuminates important themes regarding agency, resistance and notions of the religious self. In doing so, it furthers current analyses of Pentecostalism, seeking a more nuanced understanding of gender reconfiguration and demonstrating how religious subjects can be formed outside church institutions.

This article focuses on life without migration in Dakar. In a context of scarcity of opportunities and the emergence of emigrants as new models of success, many who remain are seen as unsuccessful and are under a personal or social expectation to emigrate. This paper examines the unfolding of everyday life without migration. Through ethnographic description, it points to the coexistence in the capital city of changes and continuities in the moral economy, the scarcity of income-generating opportunities for men, and women's growing financial contribution. This article suggests that, for those of an age to support their families, these transformations often mean living with contradictions. To overcome these tensions, inventive strategies of ‘demonstration’ and ‘concealment’ are deployed to fit in with the moral economy. However, living without migration in Dakar is often easier when an alternative moral economy is adhered to.

North-east Nigeria is an area of great ethno-linguistic diversity and religious pluralism, with Islam and Christianity both having a strong presence. The majority of the population is Muslim but there is also a substantial indigenous Christian minority, who form a majority in some local government areas. This paper draws on fieldwork by the authors in two north-eastern states, Bauchi and Gombe, to explore why, despite comparable religious demographics, there are marked differences in the levels of collective violence experienced in the two states. Although ethno-religious violence has increased across northern Nigeria since the 1980s, some areas have been more affected than others. To understand why this is, it is necessary to place ethnic and religious differences in their local historical and political contexts. This paper compares Gombe and Bauchi and argues that, although there are complaints of marginalization among different groups in both cases, Gombe State has developed a more inclusive system of government and local conflict management than Bauchi State. We explore what accounts for this difference in the articulation and management of belonging and whether the contrast is significant enough to explain differential levels of violence. In doing so, we consider how inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations have been shaped historically in the two cases and compare current forms of collective mobilization, considering different social and political spaces within each state. The paper also briefly outlines the impacts of the radical insurgent group Jama'at ahl al-sunna li'l-da'wa wa'l-jihad, nicknamed Boko Haram, in Bauchi and Gombe states.

In contrast to the tolerant and largely peaceful ‘living politics' of informal settlements, as embodied by the social movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, this article considers a darker side of squatter politics: ‘xenophobic’ mobilization. I show how the historical stratification of citizenship in South Africa remains spatially embedded in longstanding informal settlements, where distinctive repertoires of collective action have been shaped by a (still unfinished) history of struggle for inclusion. Using archival research and interviews conducted in the informal settlements of Atteridgeville, Gauteng, I show how the continuing struggle for equal citizenship draws on shared experiences of mundane hardship and collective labour, giving rise to social distance between established local squatters and politically indifferent foreign newcomers. At times of protest, this polarity is concentrated by and converges with familiar practices of insurgent citizenship, creating a context for mobilization against foreigners. In this sense, ‘xenophobic’ mobilization may be seen to articulate a claim for inclusion by structurally excluded ‘citizens', rather than an exclusionary claim by those who already belong. The article provides a useful counterpoint to readings of ‘xenophobic’ violence that focus on the role of elite discourses, instrumental leaders or crude racial identities in shaping such mobilization.

This paper argues that the uniform, conceived as a special type of ‘social skin’, has been incorporated by individuals and groups into a complex chain of processes and meanings in the Cameroon Grassfields; I describe this practice as the uniformization of socio-cultural life. I demonstrate that uniforms, unlike ordinary clothing, are salient precisely because of their unique role as markers of collective identity but also because they embody and simultaneously express the paradox of similarity and difference. Central to these processes and construction of meaning are community-based associations that have elevated the uniform to a new kind of orthodoxy. These perspectives are borne out by ethnographic interpretations of the ways in which variously positioned subjects in the Grassfields relate to and embody the special object that the uniform represents.

Film review of Da Kali: the pledge of the art of the griot (2013, 86 minutes) and Dò Farala A Kan: something has been added (2013, 69 minutes). French and Bamanankan, with English subtitles. Directed by Lucy Durán, edited by Michele Banal, and made with assistance from Lassana Diabaté.

The ability of hunting and gathering populations to adopt herding forms of subsistence constitutes the crux of a long-standing debate in southern African archaeological and anthropological scholarship concerning the spread of livestock to the subcontinent. This article takes as a detailed case study the subsistence strategies of the nineteenth-century ǀXam Bushmen of the Northern Cape (South Africa), extracted from a transcription of the entirety of the Bleek–Lloyd Archive. It focuses on ǀXam characterization of and relationships with the various domesticated species that shared their Karoo landscape, and asks whether these relationships differ markedly from their conceptions of non-domesticated animals. Turning to the wider context of hunter-gatherer engagements with domesticates, the article concludes by proposing that, for the ǀXam, domesticated fauna were part of a spectrum of differentiated resources, and did not entail an interaction with a wholly alien suite of new demands.

Several recent publications have explored the African National Congress's (ANC's) external links during South Africa's apartheid years. The following four texts offer an insight into the very different personal and methodological approaches that have so far shaped attempts to understand this aspect of the ANC's struggle. The section starts with a review of Stephen Ellis's recent book External Mission: the ANC in exile, 1960–1990 by Hugh Macmillan, who argues that Ellis overemphasizes the relationship between the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP). In a response to this review, Stephen Ellis justifies his approach by pointing to the importance of interpretation for the production of history, but also by referring to the different networks and resources, both in South Africa and beyond, on which he and Macmillan were able to draw. A review of Hugh Macmillan's new book The Lusaka Years: the ANC in exile in Zambia, 1963 to 1994 by Arianna Lissoni follows. Lissoni agrees with the author that the debate about the ANC in exile must be understood in the context of contemporary disaffection with South Africa's ruling party. Emphasizing the specificity of the Zambian experience, she welcomes Macmillan's focus on the multiplicity of experiences in exile as potentially opening new avenues for further study and reflection on the ANC. Finally, Mariya Kurbak's consideration of Irina Filatova and Apollon Davidson's The Hidden Thread: Russia and South Africa in the Soviet era explains that the authors' close understanding of Russian–South African relations enables them to illuminate the previously hidden importance of the Soviet Union in the history of South Africa and the ANC.

Most literature on cloth focuses on its capacity as a medium of identity construction in relation to politics, economy, ethnicity, age and gender. As such, the equalizing properties of uniforms are often contrasted with the creation of individual styles of dress. This article discusses a further dimension in the complexity of the meanings of clothing: it explores the history, uses and local meanings of fabrics on which photographs of public personalities are printed in Bamako. In Bamako in the 2000s, entrepreneurs from different sectors of society, such as politics, religion, media, art, education and commerce, rediscovered this type of cloth as a business opportunity. They have produced decorated fancy textiles for events where large, heterogeneous groups of people participate most often, and where they multiply the image printed on their clothing. Some of these personalities distribute the cloth as promotional gifts, while others make their fans and followers purchase fabrics as evidence of their admiration. The uniforms decorated with photographs reflect a tendency towards asymmetrical relationships between the owners of the dresses and the personality depicted on them. Some of these relationships even encourage individual styles that transgress the uniform character of the dresses.