In the 2016 Abiola Lecture, Mbembe argued that “the plasticity of digital forms speaks powerfully to the plasticity of African precolonial cultures and to ancient ways of working with representation and mediation, of folding reality.” In her commentary, Pype tries to understand what “speaking powerfully to” can mean. She first situates the Abiola Lecture within a wide range of exciting and ongoing scholarship that attempts to understand social transformations on the continent since the ubiquitous uptake of the mobile phone, and its most recent incarnation, the smartphone. She then analyzes the aesthetics of artistic projects by Alexandre Kyungu, Yves Sambu, and Hilaire Kuyangiko Balu, where wooden doors, tattoos, beads, saliva, and nails correlate with the Internet, pixels, and keys of keyboards and remote controls. Finally, Pype asks to whom the congruence between the aesthetics of a “precolonial” Congo and the digital speaks. In a society where “the past” is quickly demonized, though expats and the commercial and political elite pay thousands of dollars for the discussed art works, Pype argues that this congruence might be one more manifestation of capitalism’s cannibalization of a stereotypical image of “Africa.”

This article explores questions of decolonization, in part through analyzing Belgium’s Africa Museum. Bernal considers the role of academia and knowledge production, as well as the technological developments that may create new concentrations of power faster than decolonial projects can dismantle established hierarchies. She concludes that decolonization must address material questions of reparations and restitution, and that digital media have been transformative in ways that bring northern models of social existence closer to African ones. Having lived under colonizers, despots, and states of exception, Africans bring important knowledge and experience to twenty-first-century global struggles.

This article is an examination and extension of concepts that Achille Mbembe presented in his 2016 African Studies Association Abiola Lecture. In particular, “cognitive assemblages” are elaborated upon to consider how a shifting understanding of media has become part of a neoliberal digital media platform promoted by the Ghanaian state in association with Malaysia. Mbembe’s invocation of the “injunction to decolonize” is also discussed through information capture and data mining to consider the extent to which the promise of a digital future is a form of neo-colonialism or an opportunity for an expanded digital commons.

Inspired by Mbembe’s emphasis on plasticity as a hallmark of African forms of knowledge, Geschiere notes the risk that this leads to a celebration of Africanness, sliding into culturalism and identity politics. But Mbembe relates this plasticity also to the continent’s position as the last frontier of capitalism. Such a historical view converges with Joseph Tonda’s work on éblouissement (endazzlement) as a global phenomenon. Everywhere people are now being blinded by an overproduction of images. However, Africans have a long experience of living with multiple realities and “alternative facts.” Is this relevant for dealing with the risk that we all become blinded by the images we ourselves have created?

In this article Newell uses two case studies to explore one of the central threads of Mbembe’s Abiola lecture, the idea that there is a relationship between the plasticity of digital technology and African cosmologies of the deuxième monde. One case concerns the viral YouTube video #sciencemustfall, in which students at the University of Cape Town criticize “Western” science and demand that African forms of knowledge such as witchcraft be incorporated into the meaning of science. The second case considers fieldwork among the brouteurs of Côte d’Ivoire, internet scammers who build intimate relationships on false premises using social media. They acquire shocking amounts of wealth in this way which they display on their own social media accounts. However, they are said to use occult means to seduce and persuade their virtual lovers, trapping their prey in the sticky allure of the world wide web. Newell uses both examples to highlight the overlaps between the transformational efficacies embedded in both occult ontologies and digital worldings, calling for the possibility of using African cosmologies of the second world to produce a ‘theory from the south’ of virtual sociality.

The human body is a central entity and analytic within African life and Africanist scholarship. The source of perception and the seat of animation, of life, it grounds experience of the world while also providing a rich set of symbols from which humans draw in political, social, and religious life to create and communicate meaning. Livingston reviews approaches to the body as a key concept in Africanist scholarship, tracing regimes of bodily representation ranging from the deployment of bodily symbolism in ancient smelting furnaces to the hypervisibility of the black female body in the European colonial imagination. She discusses a welter of bodily experience, from the pain of childbirth and the vulnerabilities of illness and accident to the sensorium or the kinesthetic power of movement and dance. In the process, Livingston considers developments within the field of African Studies via the body.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic had claimed over one million lives globally by late 2020, Africa had avoided a massive outbreak. Patterson and Balogun analyze pandemic responses by the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and various states collaborating with civil society. They argue that responses display forms of agency rooted in contextually relevant expertise, pan-African solidarity, and lessons learned about health messaging and community mobilization from previous health crises. Yet collaboration has not always been harmonious, as actors have adopted various approaches in their interactions with global health institutions and civil society partnerships, and they have actively debated the use of traditional medicine as a COVID-19 treatment.

Parts of northern Nigeria are becoming enclaves of banditry for gangs of cattle rustlers who maraud largely ungoverned forests. Extant studies of banditry shy away from serious interrogation of cattle rustling and ungoverned forest spaces in northern Nigeria. Onwuzuruigbo investigates the connection between cattle rustling and ungoverned forest spaces, highlighting the role of criminal groups in creating their own governance structures. The upswing in cattle rustling may thus be attributed to poor forest governance, which effectively keeps the government and its agents away from forests. Inclusive forest governance is one path toward addressing cattle rustling in northern Nigeria.

For all the academic and policy interest in Nigeria’s Boko Haram insurgency, the coping strategies of civilians who survive amid everyday violence have received relatively little attention. Focusing on the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), a pro-government militia fighting Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria, Agbiboa explores how and why the group emerged, the nature of its relationship with the state and local communities, and how counterinsurgent vigilantism affects the prospects for peace. A focus on vigilantes and civil militias vis-à-vis the state points to the vital role of civil-military cooperation for effective counterinsurgency campaigns and for reducing state violence against civilians. At the same time, it underscores the precariousness of protection both in terms of increasing the targeting of civilians by vengeful insurgents as well as the tendency for civilian defense groups to “turn bad” and become threats to the communities they were expected to protect.

During Africa’s anti-colonial movements, women in French colonies were less politically active than women in British colonies. Hern examines how differences in British and French education policies in the Gold Coast and Senegal between the 1920s and the 1950s shaped women’s opportunities for participating in nationalist activity and becoming involved in early-independence politics. Compared to girls’ education in Senegal, girls’ education in the Gold Coast was more widespread, came from a variety of providers, and was less focused on domesticity. Women in the Gold Coast were thus more likely to be mobilized as political agents during the nationalist movement and integrated into Ghana’s new independent government.

Rehabilitating the legacy of deceased leaders is a phenomenon particularly salient in Southern Africa, insofar as memories of liberation wars provoke considerable debate. After a protracted civil war, Angolans remain divided about the contributions of their historical leaders. Jonas Savimbi sits at the center of this division, a binary representation of both heroism and villainy. Martins demonstrates how Savimbi’s memory is invoked both as a moral source of hope for an alternative Angola—one imagined and disseminated by Savimbi and UNITA and appropriated by social protest—and as a technology of fear and control employed by the MPLA to assert political dominance.

In this interview with the Nigerian filmmaker, Tunde Kelani, film scholar Tunde Onikoyi explores the universe of Kelani’s cinematic vision, particularly as it relates to Thunderbolt (2002) and Dazzling Mirage (2014). Although produced twelve years apart, what binds them is a common humanitarian narrative temperament. Onikoyi and Kelani discuss his films in broader terms, exploring literary references, Kelani’s interest in health, and how cinema convey his creative tendencies. The interlocutors investigate the effects of “magun,” male chauvinism, and patriarchal idiosyncrasies in contemporary Nigeria. Kelani shares his filmmaking vision, and reflects on the future of Nigerian cinema in framing African story-telling.