In spite of the growing recognition of the agency of youths in volatile societies, youths continue to be an under-utilized resource in conflict management. Thus, drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Nigeria, Adzande examines how youths are contributing to the management of farmer-herder conflicts. This study shows that youths are involved in informal policing as community vigilantes, as well as participating in mediation and the enforcement of restorative justice. A new initiative which is yet to be evaluated is the community-based security architecture in which youths can work with other actors to facilitate early warning, prevention, and resolution of conflicts between farmers and herders.

This Presidential Lecture explores the ways in which African orality provides the means for a sentimental education in an era of crisis. Quayson notes how the essentially polysemic character of the genres of orality have influenced the ways he understands both literature and the African city, two areas of keen interest. After tracing the texture of Accra’s trotro (passenger vehicle) slogans and the continuity of sentimental education from orality to social media, Quayson concludes by calling for a new interdisciplinary paradigm that would explore the polysemy of African orality alongside the hypertextual algorithms behind today’s social media and the internet.

The explosion of Ghanaian Reggae-Dancehall reflects the influence of Jamaican-inspired popular culture in Ghana today. This subculture is championed by local Rastafarians and by youth from the zongos (internal migrant, largely Islamic, unplanned neighborhoods). Suffering social alienation, many zongo artists have adopted postures similar to their Jamaican counterparts—mirroring Rasta and rude identities as counter-hegemonic resistance. Alleyne explores several artists variously located between the zongo, the Reggae diaspora, and the Ghanaian state, examining how subjects rework Jamaican tropes and voice their aspirations within a globalizing Ghana and rethinking the zongo as space of rousing diasporic consciousness.

In the first two months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Senegalese musicians produced a large body of songs addressing the coronavirus. These songs engage with prophylaxes, symptoms, instructions in case of infection, and metaphysical conceptions about the origin and meaning of the pandemic. These songs are part of a national strategy aimed at containing and eradicating the coronavirus by developing “COVID-literacy”: knowledge about the pandemic which is spread through music. In this article, we examine a socio-local history of music’s use during health crises, its place in local religious communities, and how its use interlaces linguistic, traditional, and metaphysical tenets.