In June 2019, Google announced plans to connect Africa to Europe through an undersea internet cable project named Equiano. As a techno-commercial platform, Google’s gesture warrants scrutiny and propels this essay’s analyses of the political connections of Internet spaces that also enable a visual turn in the scholarship of African history. Using the Google search engine and Facebook, Yékú and Ojebode stress the embeddedness of digital technologies in cultural meanings that include visual narratives that visibilize government’s ahistoricism. They conclude by foregrounding the digital labors of Nigerian digital subjects who deploy historical photographs on Facebook as expressions of performative nostalgia.

The recent racial reckoning has challenged scholars to recover Black voices that have been erased from historical accounts. This essay is my reflections on the challenges I faced in conducting research on African voices in politically and racially charged settings in Lesotho and South Africa over the past half century. After the political atmosphere began changing in South Africa in 1990, I served the individuals and communities I write about by rectifying historical injustices such as returning a holy relic to a religious group, the Israelites, and facilitating the return of remains of Nontetha Nkwenkwe from a pauper’s grave in Pretoria to her home.

At the turn of the 1960s, Léopold Sédar Senghor and John F. Kennedy vowed to radically transform African foreign policy. Through a close reading of a recently declassified correspondence and a historical analysis of two behind-the-scenes negotiations, Senghor’s first state visit to the U.S. and Kennedy’s support for the First World Festival of Negro Arts, Ripert examines the private and public concatenations that lead both statesmen to transform policymaking not by implementing new policies but by challenging inherited ideologies. Though their efforts did not always bring successful change in policymaking, the diplomatic correspondence between the two newly elected leaders reveals a more subtle and sustainable transformation: a decolonization of diplomacy.

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.”

In all Akan polities, ancestral Black Stools, which belong to the matriclan, are the source of political power and legitimize kingship. Due to the sacred and exclusive nature of stool rituals, Ampene argues that it is the performing arts which define and enhance the power of rulers in the public domain. This ethnographic narrative of the 2014 Grand Worship provides a rare opportunity for the performing arts to project the power and responsibility of the Asantehene when he participates in musical performances and dances.

Nature, climate crisis, and the Anthropocene have carved space in recent inter-, cross-, and multi-disciplinary humanities studies. In South Africa, such studies have barely touched literature in African languages. Nyambi and Otomo focus on the tropes of “lady nature,” nostalgia, and dystopia in Zulu writer Bhekinkosi Ntuli’s Imvunge Yemvelo to explore the complex ways in which these tropes test the normative epistemes of ecological crises. Beyond rejecting imperial distortions of indigenous environmentalism, Ntuli’s poems re-center local knowledge of nature in understanding its relationship with humans. That knowledge subverts epistemic structures of colonial conservation, revising and re-visioning racially geo-politicized knowledge hierarchies.

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.

During the early 1970s, the Sahel suffered from drought and famine. Previous research has emphasized how these factors weakened West African states. The drought, however, provided an opportunity for a transnational river organization in the Senegal River basin (the OMVS) to obtain financing for an integrated development program. Wall shows how the OMVS leveraged concern about famine to obtain funding. She uses digital text analysis to demonstrate institutional priorities shifting to focus on agriculture. This combination of document analysis with digital methods demonstrates how famine strengthened a multi-state organization, requiring a revision of how this event affected African political capacity.

Mozambique’s land law is notable for its intent to balance the recognition and protection of smallholder land use rights with attracting foreign and domestic investment to rural areas. However, the state’s legitimacy may be undermined through the process of recognition, as state actors and local elites circumvent the law for private gain. Walker focuses on two areas where the law has failed to protect smallholder rights: issues of women’s land rights, and the expansion of protected areas. These issues speak to the problem of recognition, revealing ways the state produces authority, but not necessarily legitimacy, in rural settings.

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.

The historical autonomy of the religious community of Medina Gounass in Senegal represents an alternative geographic territory to that of colonial and postcolonial states. The borderland location of Medina Gounass allowed the town to detach itself from colonial and independent Senegal, creating parallel governmental structures and imposing a particular interpretation of Islamic law. While in certain facets this autonomy was limited, the community was able to distance itself through immigration, cross-border religious ties, and smuggling. Glovsky’s analysis of the history of Medina Gounass offers a case study for the multiplicity of geographical and territorial entities in colonial and postcolonial Africa.

The negative environmental and social consequences of the major era of hydroelectric dam building in the 1950s and 60s generated social and political opposition to similar projects by the 1990s. In Ghana, hydroelectricity’s dependence on unpredictable rainfall also undermined the attractiveness of this source of electricity. The Bui Dam, Ghana’s third hydroelectric dam, faced considerable opposition until 2006, when the Chinese government loaned money for its construction. Gocking details how Chinese companies with similar funding, and constructing infrastructure projects in general in Africa, have contributed to a second era of major dam building in that continent, although there still remains considerable contestation.

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s 2018 novel De purs hommes fictionalizes recent incidents of homophobia in Senegal to interrogate the relationship between queer men and social dynamics in the country. This article demonstrates that the novel deploys multidirectional critical discourse and oblique narrative tactics to highlight the foundational role in Senegalese culture and society of the fraught dichotomy between private and public life. Bryson contends that the novel unearths these queer roots in order to incorporate all normative identities into queer existence, conceptually blurring the social barriers to LGBTQ+ agency in the country.