The young men of Nima, a popular neighbourhood in Accra, organize themselves in small age groups that meet almost daily in a specific spot, to chat, play and ‘wait’, while dreaming together of a better future in a distant elsewhere. The friendships that find root in these so-called bases, which often have names such as ‘Chicago’ or ‘Brooklyn’, lead to hope and specific modes of action through which these young people engage with the city, the wider world and their own aspirations. Taking these bases as an ethnographic vantage point, this article looks into relations of proximity, friendship and trust and the agency of the young men. The article's focus then turns to the virtual world of the same young men – and their girlfriends – in order to analyse the new modes of friendship that are shaped by their internet browsing. It shows how the modalities and intricacies of online, often deceitful, friendship and love rely on vital localized friendship bonds, defined by trust, of browsers in the zongo. Browsing opens up new possibilities but also challenges, and erodes existing moral socialities between friends.

Northern Uganda is in transition after the conflict that ended in 2006. While its cities are thriving and economic opportunities abound, the social institutions governing land access are contested, the land administration system is changing, and the mechanisms available to address conflicts over resources have themselves become a venue for authority claims. This article examines the intergenerational nature of land conflicts in northern Uganda, focusing on the interplay of customary law, return migration and the development of a market in land. There are three contributions to existing literature: (1) a discussion of children's property rights under customary and statute law in Uganda; (2) the identification of the dual nature of children during complex emergencies as both victims and agents; and (3) an addition to knowledge on post-conflict return and community reconstruction. Evidence comes from several sources, the most important of which are a set of interviews conducted in Gulu and Kampala in May and June 2015. Secondary sources augment the field research, particularly survey research conducted in northern Uganda after the conflict.

Sarah Ann Glover (1785–1867) believed that singing was for the public good and Samuel Àjàyí Crowther (1809–91) thought that speech tones should be preserved in writing. Their stories illustrate that diversity in thought may encounter obstacles, but can ultimately shape human consciousness. While this shows a positive side of missionary work, bringing people and ideas together, the transmission of Glover's and Crowther's ideas was mediated by the overlapping political, social and cultural hegemonies of the colonial era. Crowther was celebrated in the English-speaking world as evidence that the civilizing agenda – and colonialism – was good for all involved, but his orthographic approach was credited to the missionary linguist Johann Gottlieb Christaller. Glover's innovations in music education have been misattributed to John Curwen and Zoltán Kodály. Drawing evidence from ethnographic work, field recordings, language surveys and literature from a variety of disciplines, this article asks the question: why is do-re-mi the preferred heuristic for Yorùbá speech tone? Glover's and Crowther's physical paths never crossed, but their ideas did, converging in a remarkable inter-continental and trans-disciplinary synthesis. The do-re-mi heuristic resists the pitch-height paradigm used in formal linguistics (low-mid-high). In a culture where drums can speak, it is unsurprising that a musical model filled a void in the (European) concept of what a language could be.

This article is an attempt to reconsider the representations that, in Senegal in the 2000s, linked the social history of the tirailleurs (African colonial soldiers) with the practical and symbolic processes at the heart of a number of migratory projects, especially among young people. The history of this social military body was rooted in almost a century of colonial domination, from 1857 to 1962. The tirailleurs played a part in all the battles of the French army and generated different kinds of social imaginaries that were woven between France and Africa. In the late 1950s, another figure, another ideal type, became established in the Senegalese public space: the migrant. After tracing the history of the way in which these two figures were constructed, I trace how, more recently, the younger generation has been able to mobilize the dominant memory of the tirailleur in its own aspirations of exile. Some preliminary methodological proposals will be needed to account for these migratory imaginaries.

Governments in South Sudan have long built their authority on their ability to fashion changing regimes of revenge and compensation, war and peace. Governments’ capture of these regimes has resulted in the secularization of compensation despite the ongoing spiritual consequences of lethal violence. This article explores these issues by focusing on the western Dinka of Greater Gogrial. In recent years, they have been closely linked to the highest levels of government through familial networks and comradeship. Violent revenge among the western Dinka is best understood not as revealing the absence of institutions of government, but as a consequence of the projection of government power over the details of local, normative codes and sanctions. In this age of post-state violence with automatic weapons, oil-wealthy elites and ambiguous rights, government authority and intention have often been erratic. As government authority now backs up these regimes of compensation and revenge, governments’ shifting nature has reshaped their meaning. In the last decade, the declining political space for peace and the disruption of the cattle economy has undermined the current value of compensation and its ability to appease the spiritual and moral demands for revenge. It has even distorted regimes to the extent that children become legitimate targets for revenge. The article is informed by archival sources and based on ethnographic research among the western Dinka (South Sudan) between 2010 and 2013, and further research in South Sudan until 2015.

One product of the vicissitudes of apartheid-era labour migration, of persistent constraints on urban settlement and of continuing post-apartheid oscillating migration between South Africa's cities and countryside has been extensive domestic fluidity for many South African working people. As a consequence, they have repeatedly created new social networks across the urban–rural social field. In making sense of those networks by reconfiguring their notions of kinship and clanship, they have demonstrated the significance of kinship as an identity idiom. Based on research in Cape Town's largest African township during the early 1990s period of transition from apartheid, the article shows how, through people's use of notions of clanship, they have recursively reconstructed their idiom of kinship in a context of systemic instability. This article uses ethnographic data from that time and context to argue that we need to understand kinship as a cultural resource, pragmatically used and reinvented over and over again, each time emerging anew. In doing so, the article shows that kinship is not a fixed, recordable structure and that, like so many aspects of culture, it is repeatedly reinvented and reconstituted in order to address pragmatic circumstances.

Forced migrations, both now and in the past, imply a process of constructing and modifying accounts of past events, which become codified in memories. Memories are constructed to negotiate and reshape identity in the country of arrival. A number of factors interact in this process, some aspects are silenced and others emphasized, and new events may be invented. One of the arguments I make elsewhere is that, along the way, memories of the past, especially if gathered and codified through writing, may lose meanings that are unknown to the people who codify them. Yet, in times of forced migration, certain aspects of the memories re-emerge from the background and gain new relevance. This was the case, for instance, with matriliny and matrilineal names, which were not recognized or emphasized by those who codified certain oral traditions of migrations at specific historical times in written form in Somalia. Yet, in the process of seeking integration in Tanzania after the forced migration caused by the 1992 war in Somalia, these aspects regained their importance in Somali Zigula memories and helped to achieve inclusion in the country of migration. Zigula memories of the past have undergone some changes. The way in which these changes have occurred is not unique: the process of modelling memories of the past that are based on idioms of kinship follows specific patterns that are part of a specific culture of mobility. Based on fieldwork carried out with refugees forced to migrate from southern Somalia to Tanzania in the early 1990s, I show how their collective memories of past events took on newly gendered features when circumstances changed and the main spoken language progressively shifted from Kizigula to Kiswahili.

Grotesque and vulgar, the masked character Gongoli upends the codes of Mende decorum in his madcap pursuit of laughs. His impropriety goes so far as to allow his mask to fall, comically revealing the identity of his dancer and subverting the anonymity so elemental to his fellow spirits’ vaunted status. Yet despite such transgressions, he stands among the most beloved figures of Sierra Leone's rich performance traditions. Gongoli's popularity hinges on his irreverence towards the fundamental laws of masked dance, laws that also regulate the balance between individual agency and communal responsibility, between internal desire and external restraint. The only quality necessary to play Gongoli is shamelessness (ngufe baa), and the greatest performers are acrobats braving risks that are not physical, but social. This article follows Siloh, an itinerant performer whose celebrity inheres in his uncanny similarity to the Gongoli he often plays. The composite figure Siloh Gongoli exemplifies a comic aesthetic relished throughout Sierra Leone in storytelling, ritual, festivals, videos and radio shows. Although mobilized for different ends, each of these conventions undermines principles of self-effacement, gerontocratic privilege and esoteric power by shamelessly playing with and within the existential tensions between interior and exterior selves.

This article is about women's labour in nineteenth-century Abẹ́òkúta, in present-day south-west Nigeria. It is based on primary research which explores women's economic independence and its intricate connection to the indigenous institution of polygyny. By examining the institution from the perspective of Anglican Church Missionary Society evangelists, it also demonstrates how indigenous culture conflicted with the newly introduced Christian religion and its corresponding Victorian bourgeois ideals of the male breadwinner and the female homemaker. It investigates the extent to which missionaries understood women's work in the Yorùbá context, their representations of the practice, their attempts to halt female labour and their often unsuccessful efforts to extricate their congregations and their own families from these local practices. It argues that European Christian principles not only coloured missionary perceptions of women's labour, but influenced their opinions of the entire Yorùbá matrimonial arrangement.

For more than a century, observers have noted that the West African power associations known as Komo and Kono prohibit women from seeing their performances and assemblages. Reportedly fearful of seeing something they are not permitted to see, women and children run for shelter and shut the doors. Yet, in western Burkina Faso today, certain Komo and Kono chapters authorize some women to view their arts, and women who are not authorized still interact with performers during events, consult with the organizations’ leaders at other times or assist power association leaders in other ways. A focus on the unseeing but ever-present audiences of Komo and Kono reconfigures our understanding of audiences. Scholars of theatre audiences in different times and places have sometimes used ‘spectators’ as a synonym for ‘audience’, implying a group of people who are physically present for an event and can see it. Unseeing audiences are physically present at a live performance and interact with performers even though they are prohibited from actually seeing the event other people can see. Shifting our focus to women as members of unseeing audiences also reveals women's varied contributions to organizations and arts that have long been framed as institutions that operate squarely within men's domains.

This article argues for the importance of ‘literary materialism’ in colonial African understandings of respectability. It draws attention to a particular form of acquisitiveness that placed value on the materiality of literary things. That is, literary objects – books, journals, magazines, notebooks, diaries and encyclopaedia volumes – were valued for their material and physical qualities as well as for their use in imparting ‘knowledge’. They had the capacity, in Bourdieu's terms, to display cultural capital. My focus is Akinpelu Obisesan, a voluminous diarist whose life spanned the entire colonial period in the Yoruba city of Ibadan. The article first re-examines Obisesan's early years of diary writing, particularly how the activity related to his professional identity as a clerk, and then goes on to reconstruct the fraught circumstances that surrounded his purchase of the Encyclopaedia Britannica between 1928 and 1931. Obisesan struggled to pay his debt for the encyclopaedia, and all the time used his diary to confess his dire financial state. Ultimately, his claim to the cultural capital that the encyclopaedia embodied was undermined by his lack of economic resources.

This article is built upon both an observation and a paradox. The observation is that the dream is nowhere to be found – at least at first glance – as a theme in Tuareg oral sources and ancient poetic tradition. The paradox expresses itself in the visceral relationship poets maintain with the dream, because oneiric inspiration – from the creative and visionary dreams of poets of the past – is pervasive in their work. Using an interdisciplinary approach at the crossroads of psychological anthropology, oral history and the ‘archival turn’, the article explores the theme of the dream in Tuareg historical sources and in relation to contemporary practices.

The issue of ‘alien’ voters in Ghana's electoral politics since the return to multiparty democracy in 1992 points to tensions between local/ethnic identities in culturally demarcated spaces and national identity/citizenship promoted by states. Focusing on the two Ewe-speaking communities of Nyive and Edzi, this article examines the legacies of partition in the aftermath of World War One, when the British and French split the former German colony of Togo between themselves and established new administrations under international oversight. It argues that relationships have changed, specifically from political hegemony to largely ritual practices, and that, though distinct, the two are co-determining. The salience or legitimacy of political authority is sustained by ritual authority, and chiefly authorities invest in these rituals to maintain political authority. These shared ritual practices are important, as they are mobilized to promote a sense of belonging among Ewe communities that straddle state boundaries. This is evident in the phenomenon of ‘international chiefs’, as expressed in continued allegiances of village chiefs in Ghana to senior/paramount chiefs in Togo.

In this article, I examine the fear of others’ envy among young students and graduates in the port city of Mahajanga, Madagascar. Although the city provides a favourable environment in relation to the economy, employment and general well-being, many young people from middle-class milieus worry that their aspirations will remain unfulfilled because of envious peers who resent them for any advantage they might have gained. While malicious envy is most expected within close social relations in which social comparison and competition are prevalent, most social actors respond to this threat with tactical practices of secrecy that arguably help to secure an individual's well-being and shield them from unsocial behaviour. I scrutinize these micro-politics of life projects, social comparison, increasing inequalities and a rising sense of mutual mistrust. Yet, I depart from approaches that frame envy as a human condition that socially produces either a prosocial levelling mechanism or a destructive force that bulldozes social bonds. Instead, I understand envy as an assemblage that points to intertwined and often ambivalent social aspects. For many young individuals, overcoming their fear of envy is part of becoming a complete person, a sign of being successful and a responsible adult.

Ruination has recently received much attention as a defining aspect of the materiality of modernity. Less attention is given to the processes of regeneration that occur within sites of ruination. In this article, we examine how processes of ruination and regeneration are folded into each other, by looking at the materiality of a single site, a small village in the vicinity of Dakar, Senegal. By building the University of the African Future at Sébikotane, the Senegalese president has sought to rekindle the spirit of excellence that inspired education at the École normale William Ponty in a Pan-African spirit. As part of a larger plan for urban expansion, the site of Sébikotane has inspired hope for development. Examining how the different temporalities of utopian modernism and Afro-nostalgia intersect in the ruined site, this article reflects on the ruination of African futures on a site of ever renascent utopian infrastructures.

Indigenous significances of nineteenth-century |Xam San folktales are hard to determine from narrative structure alone. When verbatim, original-language records are available, meaning can be elicited by probing beneath the narrative and exploring the connotations of highly significant words and phrases that imply meanings and associations that narrators take for granted but that nonetheless contextualize the tales. Analyses of this kind show that three selected |Xam tales deal with a form of spiritual conflict that has social implications. Like numerous |Xam myths, these tales concern conflict between people and living or dead malevolent shamans. Using their supernatural potency, benign shamans transcend the levels of the San cosmos in order to deal with social conflict and to protect material resources. As a result, benign shamans enjoy a measure of respect that sets them apart from ordinary people.

This article examines artist André Sanou's individual agency in the invention and popularity of ‘portrait masks’ in and around Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. Rather than depicting abstract qualities of unseen natural forces, common among masks in this region, Sanou created the first portrait mask headpiece in a stylized but highly naturalistic manner, using a photograph as reference. It clearly depicted a specific human being, redefining the mask as a portrait of the deceased whom it honoured. Sanou's act gave rise to a wildly popular mask genre. However, portrait masks have aroused debate about the (im)propriety of naturalistic representation in masquerade. I argue that the features that make André Sanou's portrait mask genre so popular – celebrating specific individuals who are visually identifiable by their physiognomic likeness – are the same ones that make the genre controversial. The controversy illustrates the messy business of reconciling creative differences with societal values that individual artists, patrons, organizers, performers and audience members who serve as gatekeepers of cultural institutions maintain and at times negotiate. As the portrait mask genre demonstrates, masquerade is not necessarily a steadfast, uncompromising institution. Individuals can unsettle or disrupt accepted mask practice, even as they broaden its scope and invigorate audiences.

Refugees are generally viewed as a transitory problem. In many African countries, however, protracted refugee situations have turned the temporary refugee state into a more or less permanent phenomenon. In this article, I draw on the concept of uncertainty, and on claims that suspicion structures humanitarianism, to examine how long-term residents in Dagahaley refugee camp in Kenya attempted to make themselves worthy of being considered for resettlement. I demonstrate how the incompatibility between the UNHCR's resettlement criteria and Somali refugees’ lived realities provided both sets of actors with a resource: they used understandings of vulnerability as a means for making or denying resettlement claims. Refugeeness is a process of becoming, premised on how earlier arrivals deployed long-term suffering as a justification for being prioritized for resettlement. These dynamics resulted in the emergence of ‘new’ and ‘old’ refugee distinctions through which the meanings of vulnerability were redefined.