Between 2020 and 2022, sub-Saharan Africa witnessed a substantial increase in the number of military coups. The military interventions in Guinea (September 2021), Mali (August 2020 and May 2021), Chad (April 2021), Sudan (April 2019 and October 2021), and Burkina Faso (January 2022) contributed to democratic backsliding and authoritarianism on the continent. In addition, Niger (March 2021) and Guinea Bissau (February 2022) saw failed coup attempts. As a result of these five coups and two failed coup attempts, media reports now ask whether coups are making a comeback in Africa. As the extant literature about civil-military relations in Africa reveals, military coups were never absent. But the recent number and frequency of coups has led to a greater awareness of the threat that militaries pose to civilian rulers from the Atlantic coast (Guinea) to the Red Sea (Sudan).

The myth of Oxford, which echoes and replicates the ideology of an unchanging world of privileged white youth, is a common trope in many films and literary works. This vision is, however, overlaid and underlaid with counter-traditions that decenter Oxford and instead insert Oxford upside down into other epistemologies, geographies, and networks. Some attempts at the transformation of elite institutions such as Oxford inadvertently serve to continue the centering of these same institutions. Coetzee argues that, instead of focusing on the histories of ascendant Black/black excellence and achievement at Oxford University, a more powerful way to relativize and decenter the institution is to document and emphasize histories and accounts of Black marginalization, failure, and disconnection.

Postcolonial Ghana faced many challenges, which led to a hunt for saboteurs of Black liberation epitomized in anti-Americanism. In 1964, Adger Emerson Player, an African American, rescued the United States flag from a Ghanaian anti-American demonstration. The differing interpretations of Player’s deed by Ghanaians and Americans reveal the contestation between racial and national identities, which is also a facet of the broader diasporic African identity dilemmas. Amoh examines this incident within the context of post-independence Ghana and the U.S. Civil Rights struggle to highlight the complexity of diasporic Africans’ relations with Africa and ongoing debates on the substance of pan-Africanism and global Blackness.

The first generation of Ethiopian filmmakers produced significant fictional and documentary films inside Ethiopia from the 1960s to 1990s, but access to these films has been limited. Drawing on interviews with filmmakers, Kassahun and Thomas analyze this early production in its cultural context and compare it with Haile Gerima’s internationally celebrated Harvest: 3000 Years (1975), produced in the United States, to complicate the meta-narrative of Ethiopia’s film history. In the context of debates by intellectuals about art and politics, early Ethiopian filmmakers participated in an internationally conscious Ethiopian modernism across the political revolutions of 1974 and 1991.

With the enactment of anti-homosexuality laws in the 1960s, Cameroon’s government officially endorsed heterosexualist ideologies which legitimize the alienation and criminalization of minority and nonconforming sexual and gender identities. One group, the so-called garçons manqués, embodies the stigmatized masculine or “butch” lesbian identity. The political management of lesbianism in Cameroon is ambivalent, however, with respect to sport, and particularly regarding the national pastime, football. Whereas masculine lesbians are routinely branded as “butches” or “sexual predators” who threaten African hetero-patriarchy, “strong women"” (femmes fortes) are celebrated as pivotal to the national ambition. Cameroon’s government strategically amalgamates both heteronationalism and homonationalism in the interest of national pride.

Pleasure in language arises from the creativity of everyday life. Africa’s historical and ethnographic record is full of striking examples of linguistic play. Three scenes of Yorùbá linguistic creativity illustrate this: praise poetry in a small town, a traveling popular theater, and early Yorùbá newspapers. Each yields distinctive pleasures, but central to all of these is the act of mutual recognition of forms of words and attunement to the linguistic production of others. Barber suggests that verbal arts bring to consciousness the fundamental processes by which sociality is constituted and may thus provide a potential starting point for social theory from “within.”

Over the past two decades, transnationally networked actors have promoted a vision of transforming African agriculture from an object of poverty-alleviating development assistance to a motor of economic growth by integrating smallholders into markets and promoting agribusiness through multi-stakeholder initiatives. Munro and Schurman analyze the networking and communicative labor that key policy actors have performed to advance this vision. An institutional and ideational architecture for this project is created by defining agricultural challenges in specific ways, imbuing particular ideas with authority and establishing strategic institutional connections. This architecture constitutes an emerging governance regime for African agriculture, but its long-term prospects remain uncertain.

Advocates of the Green Revolution for Africa (GR4A) argue that the best way to address malnutrition is to incorporate smallholders into the global food economy via value chains involving the use of improved inputs, production technologies, and access to markets. Moseley and Ouedraogo critically assess these tactics using a feminist political ecology lens to analyze GR4A efforts in southwestern Burkina Faso which target female rice farmers. They examine the nature of the GR4A rice value chain, the degree to which a GR4A project is impacting the nutrition of participating women, and the influence of gender roles on GR4A rice project outcomes.

In many African countries, jokes represent one of the many means used by citizens to cope with a crisis. Chibuwe and Munoriyarwa explore how Zimbabweans utilize WhatsApp jokes, which are anchored in the concept of the “everyday,” to cope with pandemic-induced lockdowns. COVID-19 jokes provide citizens momentary relief from fear and function as a defense mechanism against COVID-19 and its effects, enabling citizens to confront and rationalize fear, death, and suffering. Chibuwe and Munoriyarwa argue that jokes are also a means of speaking truth to power by disgruntled citizens attempting to cope with a health crisis, in a context characterized by corruption, state repression, and bad governance.

Sequels, spinoffs, serials, and other kinds of generic works are prevalent in Nollywood filmmaking and popular with fans. These spinoffs and other generic works are characterized by a degree of familiarity, made evident in their repetitive and or affiliative dimensions. According to Adejunmobi, familiarity as a mode of media engagement in Nollywood generates specific pleasures connected to the repetitive dimensions of the films and television shows. These highly repetitive works also sustain a type of leisure activity for viewers without dedicated leisure time who combine Nollywood viewing with everyday work. This form of leisure is identified as a leisure of concomitance.

Politicized homophobia has become a dominant theme in the study of regime preservation tactics in southern Africa. However, a consensus on the potency of this tool has prevented researchers from fully exploring the conditions of its general success and occasional failure. Frossard de Saugy fills this gap with a thorough examination of the strategies of politicized homophobia deployed by the Robert Mugabe regime, their connection to hegemonic masculinity, the liberation war, and land questions, and the conditions which led them to lose their potency and ultimately fail to save Mugabe from mounting domestic challenges.

Gorée est un symbole et un lieu de mémoire de la traite atlantique et de l’esclavage en Sénégambie. Le 27 décembre 1996, le journaliste français Emmanuel de Roux a publié dans le quotidien Le Monde un article intitulé « Le mythe de la maison des esclaves résiste à la réalité ». Cet article mettait en cause la Maison des esclaves de Gorée qui, selon l’auteur, n’avait jamais hébergé d’esclaves issus de la traite négrière. L’article a donné lieu à un débat public mêlant histoire, mémoire et émotions. En 1997, des chercheurs et les autorités politiques sénégalaises ont organisé une rencontre scientifique pour contrer toute « tentative d’endormissement de la mémoire collective ».

The concept of “scaling up” value chains dominates the African agricultural development literature. Scaling up commonly refers to three inter-related objectives: increasing agricultural production and quality, expanding farmer engagement with markets, and adding greater value to commodities that benefits all actors. Bassett, Koné, and Munro provide a critique of the assumption of linear and progressive development embedded in the scaling-up concept and offer an alternative relational network approach that highlights the contingent and relational dynamics of agricultural value chains. The research compares the selling patterns of cashew growers participating in OLAM’s Sustainable Cashew Growers Program in Côte d’Ivoire during 2018 and 2019.

What have been the meanings and meaningfulness of pleasure in Yorùbá thought, practice, and history over the past eight hundred years? Ogundiran draws from literary, archaeological, myth-historical, and ethnographic sources to answer this question in two parts. First, he examines the ontologies, materiality, and sociality of pleasure at the levels of ordinary experience and institutional culture. Second, he demonstrates how pleasurable experiences and things were used to construct social order, define social difference, and build community. Ogundiran concludes that pleasure is not an autonomous experience. Rather, it is embedded in other domains of social life.

An analysis of the African Union approach to eliminating violence against women shows that while the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa (the Maputo Protocol) refined the culture/violence nexus, the subsequent regional frameworks reverted to culture-centered explanations. Tornius’s critical analysis reveals how the relationship between culture and gender discourses has changed over time, entangled with processes of colonialism, decolonization, emergence of African socialisms, the end of the Cold War, and the advent of African feminisms. Articulating gendered violence through undefined ahistorical and apolitical notions of “culture” has real life adverse effects for women through ineffective policy and development interventions.