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.

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.

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).

The anti-apartheid movement and Save Darfur campaign were important moments of African American activism towards Africa. Howard University played a central role by divesting from both South Africa and Sudan. This article examines each divestment within Howard University’s history of engagement with Africa. While each divestment was linked by a concern to support oppressed African peoples, the roles of race and racism operated differently in each action. Such an analytic provides space to reconsider the role of US higher education in African-facing human rights activism during the age of Black Lives Matter.

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.