This paper examines the fissures within recent decolonial debates, arguing for the privileging of alternative narratives from formerly colonized groups and a shift away from centring colonialism. It calls for the recognition of decolonial struggles whose histories run deep and the need to link the struggles with indigeneity, its poetics of relations, and connectedness. Therefore, decoloniality requires thinking and doing and paying attention to social and economic well-being of hitherto marginalized indigenous communities, while giving due recognition to their poetics of relationality, reciprocity, and conviviality. Drawing on the example of #RhodesMust Fall movement in South Africa, it raises difficult questions around ownership, agency, while pointing to cracks that this contemporary movement surfaced, in spite of its claim to decoloniality.

We study who perceives gains and losses in political representation in Rwanda and Burundi and why. We do so in the run-up to and during violence, but also in its aftermath characterized by radically different institutional approaches to manage a similar ethnic divide in both countries. We rely on quantitative and qualitative analyses of over 700 coded life histories covering the period 1985–2015. We find convergence in perceived political representation across ethnic groups in Rwanda, but divergence in Burundi, and argue how this relates to the postwar institutional remaking, legitimization strategies, and their impact on descriptive and substantive representation.

Sudan’s political distortions under Bashir’s regime between 1989 and 2018 resulted in multiple economic crises and civil wars. After assuming office in 2019, the Transitional Government implemented economic reforms aiming to stabilize the economy. It sought support from donors and international financial institutions, who conditioned support on stringent conditions. Civil society publicly decried the economic reforms and warned of the implications of discounting Sudan’s political distortions. Ultimately, the military orchestrated a coup citing poor economic management. Sudan’s experience highlights the importance of contextual policymaking during political transitions and the limitations of the approach employed by donors and multilateral organizations.

The secessionist state of Biafra enacted a propaganda campaign that simultaneously built support for its war of independence (the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970) and fostered nationalism. Integral to this effort, although understudied, were the currency, stamps, posters, and cartoons artists produced while working for the government. Putting these materials in dialogue with print and radio propaganda, and the Ahiara Declaration (the culminating treatise of Biafran nationalism), this article demonstrates how visual propaganda actualized a nation, constructed national identity, positioned Biafra as a foil to an irredeemable Nigeria, and defined a citizenry. Through the materials they created, artists shaped Biafra’s national consciousness.

Music enhances participation in emerging democracies where the rights of association, assemblage, and and the freedom of expression are suppressed by the state apparatus meant to guarantee them in the first place. Ugandan Afropop musician and politician, Robert Kyagulanya (aka Bobi Wine), composed the song “Tugambire ku Jennifer” (Tell Jennifer on Our Behalf), which articulated the social aspirations of Kampala’s street vendors. The song’s meaning does not begin and end with the composer’s intent but stretches to its effects on the listeners. Analyzing meaning through the lens of speech act theory provides an understanding of what music means when it simultaneously reflects and shapes society.

Pentecostal charismatic churches that preach prosperity gospel in Zimbabwe have attracted a youthful membership. In the context of a deeply uncertain economic future, young Pentecostal Christians devise performativity strategies for optimizing their chances of converting prosperity gospel into material prosperity. These strategies include sartorial elegance in adorning counterfeit suits, the performance of obedience, and the use of social media technologies. The picture that emerges is a complex and at times contradictory one in which the potential realization of upward spiritual and social mobility rests, ultimately, on the transformative and volatile nature of value. Data for this project was collected in Harare through ethnographic research and interviews over a year-long period.

In this presidential address I offer a critical examination of how Africa was misrepresented in the Global North’s imaginations and media reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such biased imaginings of Africa as a site of inevitable catastrophe account for the racialized under-accounting of the history of African scientists’ pioneering success in biomedical research and with epidemics. The global archives of COVID-19 pandemics must acknowledge these scientists, as well as the humanistic contributions of African artists who collaborated with health experts and produced poetic/musical performances in local and world languages to tackle biomedical and social pandemics.

Vernacular discourse about science reveals theorizations of it as a power-laden, morally charged experimentation with the world guided by (often implicit) ethical orientations. Applying these vernacular theorizations to interpret professional class science on the continent, the author argues that this science has been shaped most profoundly by the politics of independence. While indigenous projects, European imperialism, and neoliberalism shape scientific institutions, African independence continues to inform the moral and political ends toward which science is thought to work. Understanding the alignment of professional class science with nation-building can help guide the recalibration of science toward the goal of substantive independence.

In recent years, there has been a noticeable uptick in efforts to address the ethical, methodological, and security challenges of conducting field research. In fact, an entire scholarly community has emerged from different pockets of area and conflict studies to develop and share a body of literature and foster interactive forums to advance this important area of study.1 Much of this work builds on the influential accounts of individual researchers (Wood 2006), which has developed into more systematic categories for the myriad issues of fieldwork (Sriram et al. 2009), as well as frameworks to understand researcher-related, subject-related, and result-related problems (Baele et al. 2018). Some have noted that the challenges associated with ethics, security, and methods are “amplified in conflict zones” (Cramer, Hammond, and Pottier 2011). Others have observed the African context in particular may require its own approach (Thomson, Ansoms, and Murison 2013), prompting the journal African Affairs to dedicate space to a series of research notes that tackle fieldwork in particular (Cheeseman, Death, and Whitfield 2017).

A gathering of African intellectuals in 2016—Ateliers de la Pensée I [Workshops of Thought]—aimed to be a “renewal of French-speaking Afro-diasporic critical thinking; it also served as an impetus for generating new perspectives concerning … Africa’s future” (2). Somewhat ironically, the participants—some of whose essays appear in To Write the Africa World—seem to have widely accepted one key idea as a significant part of their thinking: double consciousness. First clearly articulated more than a century before by W.E.B. Dubois, that awareness reverberates through many of their twenty-one collected articles. Yet only one among them, Hourya Bentouhami, actually mentions “DuBois’s reflections” on the subject, describing them “as a strange and painful cognitive disjunction … in the dialogue of the soul with itself”(125). Another contributor, Benaouda Lebdai, instead credits Sudanese born British writer Jamal Maljoub with integrating “his status of being double” as part of his authorial identity (53). Other writers of essays included in the book merely assume an understanding of the concept as fundamental to their thought and, perhaps more importantly, in conveying a concept of Africa to the wider world.

Irregular migrants’ flows have, for several years now, been making the news headlines and are at the core of political debates. In a context of polycrisis—characterized by the post COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and its devastating impacts; the disruption of labor markets caused by the fourth industrial revolution and artificial intelligence; or geopolitical tensions in different parts of the globe that threaten the livelihoods of many communities—the desire to move from the developing and emerging world to the West can increase.

The apartheid experience in South Africa was a horrendous one for mankind, in which humans unleashed all sorts of evil on one another due to unfounded categorization based on color. This led to a superiority complex where a class saw another as not worth the treatment their dogs received. The fact is that black color was an adaptive one, given the environment of the possessors; the melanin which is the pigmentation that makes the skin black is meant to prevent the skin from cancer emanating from radiations from the sun. It shouldn’t be a thing of social disequilibrium. Following the release of Nelson Mandela from jail in 1990 and the demise of the apartheid system of rule, South Africa became a free country, which provided the ground for South Africans and others to embark on penning books of personal histories of these painful experiences under apartheid.

In Amilcar Cabral: The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist, a translation and revision of his earlier Portuguese edition, Antonio Tomas addresses what he sees as a gap between the reality of the armed struggle in Guinea and the ways in which it has been discussed by all previous writers on the subject. He claims to base his critique on newly released archival information and recent publications on Cabral, Portuguese colonialism, and its anti-colonial movements in Africa.