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.

Around the world, armed conflict is increasingly occurring in capital cities and governments are relying on pro-government, rurally recruited, militia to suppress anti-government political violence. Pendle and Maror draw lessons from South Sudan where recruits from rural areas were brought to Juba to help defend the government. Drawing on ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews with combatants, this article uses “rural radicalism” to argue that patterns of violence by these rurally recruited forces were shaped by histories of rural violence over previous decades and can be read to include a political objective that challenges the inequities in safety and security between rural areas and the capital city.

Many studies on China-Africa encounters have demonstrated the significance of ethnic and racial identities in these encounters. I reverse this perspective and ask: in what circumstances are China-Africa encounters shaped by identities other than racial and ethnic ones? Drawing on my ethnographic research in the construction industry in Congo-Brazzaville, I argue that the actions of many Chinese are often more influenced by their economic roles, such as workers, managers, and entrepreneurs than by their ethnic identity. Their identities are thus realigned in the economic encounters which I term “project assemblages.” This concept highlights the fluidity of multiple identities in economic encounters and shows that China-Africa encounters are a fertile ground for producing theories, beyond the China-Africa framework, on lived experiences of economic relationships.

Post-cessation nationhood in South Sudan presented a paradoxical situation: a country united during struggle is fragmented after independence. Among the triggers for this scenario was the death of Dr John Garang de Mabior—the country’s founding father. This article is a multidisciplinary semiotic critique of Akuol de Mabior’s film, No Simple Way Home (2023), against the history of South Sudanese nationhood. Without claiming a political scientific analysis, the author proposes that South Sudan’s crisis of nationhood is symptomatic of a quest for a unifying icon. He theorizes the protagonist’s quintessence of motherhood as a semiotic gesture of her de jure iconicity of unified nationhood.

Scholars have emphasized the importance and autonomy of African intermediaries in European imperial projects. However, intermediaries have not been studied as founders of (proto) colonial administrations. Between 1840 and 1874, the inchoate British establishment on the Gold Coast was largely a project of Anglo-African merchants, rooted in their political visions of “progress.” Merchants like James Bannerman provided infrastructure, institutions, and material form to the administration and intended it as a force for development. Ultimately, the British administration exercised its hegemony through Euro-African infrastructures, spaces, and ideas. Consequently, merchants like Bannerman undermined their local networks, rulers, and dependents who opposed British domination.

In the African Studies literature “transformation” emerges as a capacious discursive field and project of state power. In this Keyword article, I move from postindependence questions of transformative social change to violence as a transformative project of the nation-state, examining its imbrication with questions of transition and state aftermaths. I analyze transformation as a promise of worldmaking around horizons of the “post”: postapartheid, postconflict, and postcolonial. I then consider textures of transformative urbanism in changing African cities, and analyze processes implicated in reclaiming forms of discard, positing transformation as recuperation. Transformation is ultimately a multidirectional conceptual field capable of remaking personal worlds and theoretical orientations.

Sesay draws from three hinterland protests against multinational corporations in the mining and agricultural sectors to examine how global capital influences central/local politics in postcolonial Sierra Leone. Focusing specifically on the mediating role of traditional rulers—a strong legacy of British colonial indirect rule—Sesay argues that hinterland protests not only enable the relative autonomy of rural citizens to (re)negotiate with the state outside existing political arrangements but also challenge the broker authority of these rulers in center/peripheral relations. While some protests form new alignment of interest with traditional rulers, others allow rural citizens to bypass their chiefs to summon the attention of central authorities. In either of these processes, the local constituents question the position of chiefs in the indirect governance system and shape the governing strategies adopted by the central government to rule over the hinterland.

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.

Local state officials impact authoritarian systems through the mediation they perform. Desrosiers and Mahé argue that these local functionaries fulfill a number of mediating functions, including translating and representing authoritarian systems at the local level. By enacting these two roles, however, local officials do not straightforwardly reproduce the system. Instead, their interpretations and choices fundamentally influence the imprint authoritarianism has on society, from how the regime is experienced at the local level to its groundings and resilience. They demonstrate this argument by looking at pre-genocide Rwanda and Sudan under President Omar al-Bashir.

Collaborative autoethnography can function as a means of reclaiming certain African realities that have been co-opted by colonial epistemes and language. This can be significant in very concrete ways: northern Uganda is suffering a catastrophic loss of tree cover, much of which is taking place on the collective family landholdings that academia and the development sector have categorized as “customary land.” A collaboration by ten members of such landholding families, known as the Acholi Land Lab, explores what “customary ownership” means to them and their relatives, with a view to understanding what may be involved in promoting sustainable domestic use of natural resources, including trees.

The concept of the organic serves as a keyword capturing emerging practices and epistemologies through which Africans navigate increasingly toxic lifeworlds. Noting a growing preoccupation with this term, the authors unpack its meaning based on their ethnographic fieldwork concerning two East African idioms: kienyeji and kiasili. What it means to be(come) organic is tied to older notions such as life flow, tradition, and the natural. Tracing how this concept engages with central themes in Africanist debates, the authors demonstrate that an Africanist theorizing about it foregrounds critical claims about the vitality of bodies and the viability of environments.

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.

Instead of being merely a historical occurrence, colonization is a structural feature of civilizations that have been touched by colonialism, which affects the prospects for the colonial subjects. This process is still ongoing in various forms among the so-called postcolonial societies today. Therefore, decolonization is a response to both the negative stereotypes and falsehoods about Indigenous peoples and cultures as well as the structural injustices of colonially impacted society that disproportionately afflict Indigenous peoples. Even though decolonization is a hot issue in academia right now, Indigenous peoples have been fighting against colonialism for millennia and claiming their own spaces, sovereignty, and right to self-determination ever since they first came into contact with colonizers.

Through ethnography of a performatively Western-inspired coffeehouse in a “traditionally” identifying town of Hargeisa in Somaliland, Serunkuma uses Cup of Art Italian Coffeehouse to debate the political-conceptual dilemma—and potential dangers—of the renewed longing for cultural authenticity and “total revolution” in post-colonial Africa. While acknowledging the failure of the dreams that animated the anti-colonial struggle, manifest in the collapse in public service delivery, governance challenges, and civil war, Serunkuma contends that taking this to be the product of the “legacy of late colonialism,” and thus seeking to protect supposedly “authentic” African traditions and religious practices from Western corruption is itself a poisoned chalice. Using Cup of Art, Serunkuma urges humility toward the permanence of a colonial modernity and constant awareness of the new “problem space,” in which actors exercise their agency.

The empire-building phase of the European powers in Africa, which spanned several centuries, had its climax at the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, where the colonizers carved up and allocated the African continent among themselves as their respective colonial projects. They would subsequently invade virtually all of the continent based on this arbitrary partitioning—which, among other things, created Africa’s colonial condition. Mention must be made of the fact that uncountable numbers of artworks and artefacts were looted by the invaders from various parts of Africa during those invasions and the de facto occupations that ensued. These looted treasures were scattered all over Europe and elsewhere in museums and private collections, where they currently remain largely unaccounted for.

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).

In 2020, Nigerian youths took to the streets to demand the disbanding of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a unit of the Nigerian Police with a long history of extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, extortion, torture, and other atrocities. The Nigerian government created the division in 1992 following the killing of an army colonel, under the pretense of fighting a crime wave which was sweeping the country. In the “societies of enmity” (Achille Mbembe, “The Society of Enmity” [Radical Philosophy Vol. 200, No. 1], 23–25) we live in today, the growing militarization of law enforcement in the context of the “war on crime” has put even solid democracies in grave danger and continues to justify authoritarianism and military regimes worldwide. The expansion of state powers through the violent exploitation of its growing “margins,” (V. Das and D. Poole, eds., Anthropology at the Margins of the State [School of American Research Press, 2004]) tarnished with the signs of danger, illegality, and precariousness, has shown that bureaucratic power and state violence walk hand in hand in instituting highly unequal but economically viable social orders in postcolonial Africa and elsewhere. Those movements configure an emergent threat coming from a tactical level of political action and show that contemporary political power can indeed emerge from the tip of a machine gun, proving Walter Benjamin’s critique of Hannah Arendt’s famous image (“Critique of Violence” in Deconstruction, a Reader [Routledge, 2017], 62–70).

The emergence of African philosophy as a systematic field of inquiry can be traced to the trailblazing work of a few figures. Paulin Hountondji occupies a special place among these trailblazers. A true exemplar of the field, Hountondji’s work is neither limited by the linguistically circumscribed mapping of African philosophy nor the dichotomies and quarrels arising from methodological and stylistic difference in doing philosophy. I reiterate the crucial challenge he poses to current and future generations of scholars by reflecting on his approach to philosophy and the critical insights he offers on fundamental questions about the nature, conditions and fate of freedom in Africa.

This review essay focuses on electoral politics and the African accountability struggle, which has gained interest and scholarly attention following the third wave of democratization. Before the Namibia Constituent Assembly elections in November 1989, many would agree that elections were neither acknowledged nor considered appropriate for selecting governmental and national leaders. However, the democratic wave in the early 1990s marked a substantial political shift in Africa. Elections, once rare, are now frequent, serving as a crucial tool for both development and accountability. In this new era, citizens have a rare opportunity to hold their leaders accountable and exert control over their behavior. This review specifically addresses two volumes: Electoral Politics and Africa’s Urban Transition: Class and Ethnicity in Ghana by Noah L. Nathan and Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa, edited by Wale Adebanwi and Rogers Orock. Specifically, these volumes delve into topics concerning electoral politics and Africa’s challenges in achieving accountability.