As the COVID-19 pandemic rages across the globe, ebbing and flowing from one region to the next, new infections and deaths continue to rise (Johns Hopkins 2020). Some of the first documented cases in Africa occurred in areas frequented by foreign tourists. Early on, the disease also circulated among Africa’s jet-setting political classes that had spent time in other regions of the world with higher infection rates. Since then, infections have taken off in the continent’s urban areas that are better connected globally via trade and travel. From there, it has spread to smaller cities, towns, and then to rural areas, a process known as hierarchical diffusion (Moseley 2020a). Unfortunately, there is another scourge that accompanies COVID-19, and that is a global hunger pandemic. In April 2020, the director of the World Food Programme warned that an additional 130 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020 because of the coronavirus. This comes on top of the 821 million people in the world who are already food insecure (Khorsandi 2020). Increasingly, scholars of food security, food systems, and poverty have come to realize that the hunger and malnutrition associated with COVID-19 may actually kill or debilitate more people than the disease itself, especially in regions of the world with weaker social safety nets (Fanzo 2020; HLPE 2020a, 2020b; UN 2020).

The written words of African Muslims have recently received renewed attention. This stems from a push to go beyond colonial archives as well as concerns with terrorism and Islamic radicalization. While Ajami—that is, African languages written in Arabic script—has been a part of this trend, Manding-language publications in the N’ko script have been overlooked. And yet, this literary industry is distinctly Islamic. Putting the writings of Sulemaana Kantè into conversation with historical authors and his contemporaries, Donaldson demonstrates that N’ko represents an iteration of Afro-Muslim vernacular thought, thereby illuminating Kantè and a body of N’ko and Ajami publications.

Taking as a starting point the observation that Tanzania has historically been a more effective nation-builder than Kenya, Gorham asks why that is the case, focusing on the construction of national narratives in state-run museum spaces to gain a better understanding of official nationalist pedagogy. State-run museums are spaces where states can articulate their vision of the nation, and by cataloging and analyzing the content of exhibits, one can better understand the different types of narratives constructed by states with diverging nation-building strategies. The narratives produced in museum sites in Tanzania and Kenya differ in terms of their consistency, clarity, and inclusivity.

Uganda’s touring orphan choirs engage in a form of charity that is dependent on the mobility not only of money, but also of people and sentiments. Boyd considers the moral economies that underlie this ongoing project of compassionate “circulation.” If a key finding of the work on humanitarian affect has been how such “affective surpluses” mask inequalities between donors and recipients, this article considers how participants in charitable relationships conceive of dependency and indebtedness differently. These differences compel us to understand how moral and religious sentiments give shape to the inequalities inherent in dominant forms of global humanitarian “care.”

“Political violence” is seemingly on the rise again in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The violence that began in the 1980s and reached a peak in the transition period resurfaced before the local government elections in August 2016. Krämer provides a processual understanding of local dynamics of violence in the eThekwini Municipality and situates the current episode within the historical trajectory of violent conflict. He examines how exclusionary identities get activated in local elections and argues that underlying the violence between supporters of hostile political parties are conflicting forms of autochthonous belonging and contradictory ideas about what constitutes membership in a community.

The Nigeria-Biafra war contributed to the rise of post-colonial moral interventionism, ushering in a new form of human rights politics. During the war, relief agencies evacuated 4,000 children from the conflict zones to Gabon and Côte d’Ivoire to protect them from the conflict. This was part of a broader international humanitarian airlift operation that brought relief supplies to the besieged Biafra territory. At the end of the war, most of the children were returned to their homes in Nigeria through an international humanitarian repatriation effort. Ibhawoh examines how state interests and the politics of international humanitarian interventionism manifested in debates about classifying and protecting displaced children, the most vulnerable victims of the conflict.

Mawazo Nakadhilu is a former refugee born to a Namibian father and a Tanzanian mother near Kongwa, Tanzania, in 1972. Her biography illuminates how people have made homes in Southern African exile and post-exile contexts. Williams traces Mawazo’s story from her Tanzanian childhood through her forced removal to SWAPO’s Nyango camp to her “repatriation” to Namibia. In so doing, he highlights tensions that have not previously been addressed between exiled liberation movements and their members over family situations. Moreover, he stresses the value of biographical work focused on aspects of refugees’ lives that tend to be overlooked in nationalist discourse.

Migration debates tend to focus on the numbers of people moving, whether they are economic migrants or asylum seekers, deserving or not of protection. This categorization usually rests on national identity, necessitating simplified one-dimensional representations. Ndlovu uses a case study of Zimbabwean migrants memorializing Gukurahundi in Johannesburg to highlight the ways in which migration narratives can be more complex and how they may shift over time. She presents Gukurahundi and the formation of the MDC in Zimbabwe, along with xenophobic violence in South Africa, as examples of the ways that the meanings of national and ethnic identities are contested by the migrants and influenced by political events across time and space.

Refugees in sub-Saharan Africa residing among host communities experience the need to articulate belonging in order to generate a greater sense of security. Based on the individual life stories of Ivorian refugees in Northeastern Liberia in 2011, Bedert finds that local patterns of integration between landlords and strangers are foregone by the bureaucratic identity of refugees as imposed by the international community. In addition, local integration is not self-evident, as it entails a degree of reciprocity and mutual recognition. In the eyes of landlords, strangers are evaluated based on what they can bring to the table.

Over the last two decades, witchcraft violence has emerged steadily as a “push factor” for African asylum seekers who argue that being accused of witchcraft or targeted with witchcraft renders them members of a “particular social group” (PSG), subject to persecution and eligible for refugee protection under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. This article examines the refugee status determination (RSD) processes through which immigration regimes in Canada and Australia have adjudicated allegations about witchcraft violence made by asylum seekers from across Anglophone Africa. It critiques the utility of expanding PSG along cultural lines without a commensurate expansion in adjudicators’ knowledge.