In the 1630s, a young traveller by the name of Ṣägga Krәstos (1616–38) crisscrossed Italy and France, claiming to be the heir of the late Ethiopian Emperor Yaʿǝqob and pledging to return to Ethiopia at the helm of a Catholic mission. While in Rome, intent on convincing the papacy of his identity, he authored a lengthy autobiographical statement that included a precise dynastic claim, an account of his father’s rise and demise, and an itinerary of his own journey from Ethiopia to Rome. Later, as he continued his journey, Ṣägga Krәstos shared his statement with his European acquaintances; once in Paris, he published it, dedicating it to Anne of Austria, Queen of France. This article sketches the contours of Ṣägga Krәstos’s journey and identity and offers a comprehensive genealogy of the autobiographical statement’s many extant versions. It also discusses the transfiguration that both his reputation and statement underwent after his death. Ṣägga Krәstos’s is the earliest known autobiography voluntarily written and published in Europe by an African-born author. Following this article is a complete annotated translation – the first in the English language – of what is likely to be the earliest extant version of the statement, followed by excerpts from later versions. A complete transcription of the source is available with the online supplementary materials published with this article.

This article is concerned with science and sexuality, and the possibilities and pitfalls of using the former to change minds about the latter, taking as its main source of data a report released by the Academy of Science of South Africa in 2015, Diversity in Human Sexuality: implications for policy in Africa. I frame the report in terms of co-production – borrowed from science and technology studies – and a theory of publics – taken from literary criticism and queer theory. I first describe how science has played a role in recent queer politics before showing how the report intervenes by appealing to a particularly African public. Thereafter, I describe how the choosing agentive subject disappears in the report’s depiction of the legitimate sexual citizen. Such a framing of citizenship raises several possible problems, some of which I address in the final section. These are described as potential confounders inhibiting the success of the report, preventing effective co-production or the summoning of a public. The article’s goal is not to discredit the report; rather, in pointing out how the report might fall short of its goal, it is directed towards a more reflexive activism.

Thanks to oil revenues, since the end of the war in 2002, Angola has largely eschewed the usual donor conditionalities in its state-led reconstruction process; the 2014 oil price drop, however, revealed the limits of this economic miracle. Coupled with a long-overdue political transition inside the ruling party, this moment of designated crisis has opened up spaces for elites to inject their continued projects of accumulation with the moralizing language of neoliberalism – talk of efficiency, responsibility, and the proverbial tightening of the belt. Based on fieldwork around the recently modernized transport hub of Lobito, the article examines how these tropes have been deployed and adapted, first to position Angola as a ‘business-friendly’ environment, and then to justify largely self-inflicted austerity measures. By examining the everyday working of real existing neoliberalism through the eyes of the port’s users, the article suggests that Angola’s turbulent history provides a fertile ground to advance, in this moment of crisis, agendas of capital capture, cloaking them in the mantle of common-sensical reasonableness and national solidarity.

Neoliberal ideologies have not only transformed the Namibian economy but also reconfigured some of the most intimate domains of everyday life. In the course of the last forty years, marriage in Namibia has changed from a widespread and affordable life transition to a costly celebration of middle-classness. To be married today is a sign of middle-class achievement, lifestyle and prosperity. The downside of these accomplishments is the middle classes’ fear of failing, especially through divorce. Although Namibian divorce rates are low, most middle-class couples interviewed in 2015–16 in Windhoek were anxious about such an end to marriage. In order to prevent divorce and the loss of a middle-class lifestyle, middle-class couples neoliberalized their marriages. With often cruel determination, many worked as hard as they could to optimize themselves, their marriages and their kin relations. They trimmed their bodies, enhanced their communications skills and supported their kin. As it remained unclear, however, how much optimizing would indeed be enough, their attempts at self-formation had a Sisyphus-like quality. This article builds on the growing literature on the lived experiences of the African middle classes, focusing on how the neoliberalization of Namibian marriages is shaping a new ethics of personhood.

This article tells one of the many stories that remain largely untold despite the vast literature on colonial Lagos history. Although the social history of Lagos has witnessed increasing interest on the part of historians and scholars from other disciplines and has been told in relation to sex, childhood, social welfare, state, gender and elitism, many personal renditions of the city’s history are hidden from mainstream narratives. The article examines one such personal history. In particular, it exhumes narratives from the phenomenological content of Adunni’s story – of teenage and early adult years, largely lived in the late colonial period. Adunni’s personal experiences speak to those of other living (though few) individuals whose status as living archives often enriches scholarly interrogations but who are regarded as sources of history rather than history itself. This article presents Adunni as a telling example of this neglected aspect of colonial Lagos history.

This article analyses how the circulation of ideas and hybrid rituals between Shia Muslims and Christians reveals a much more intentional political process whereby minority religious groups consciously create shared experiences and a sense of commonality in the face of political marginalization in northern Nigeria. One example is the Shia invention of Jesus’s Mawlid (Jesus’s birthday), which they perform in a different way from the conventional Christmas but that is attended by some Christians. Also, some Christians participate in the annual celebration of Mawlid al-Nabiy (the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday), organized by Shias. Despite the adherents of the two religions participating in mixed religious practices, they continue to see themselves separately as Muslims and Christians. Reactions to these hybrid rituals impact relationships among the mainline Sunni groups. Sufis (Tijanis and Qadiris), who were previously united in the face of the anti-Sufi reform movement (Izala), now diverge over how to respond to Shia Islam. While they disagree with Shias intellectually, not everyone supports the attacks against Shias by Salafi activists. These dynamics add to the understanding that the concept of ‘tolerance’ is not sophisticated enough to capture all forms of religious coexistence in Nigeria.

The introduction of Ugandan Sign Language in Acholi, northern Uganda, was part of a growing internationally linked disability movement in the country and was set within the framework of development policy and human rights-based approaches. In this context, Ugandan Sign Language appeared as a technology of development. But how did the appropriation of Ugandan Sign Language change deaf people’s lives, their being-in-the-world, in Acholi? In using the theoretical approach of existential and instrumental perspectives on technologies by Martin Heidegger, this article analyses the complex transitions following the appropriation of Ugandan Sign Language on international, national and local levels. The disability movement – including Ugandan Sign Language projects – reached Acholi during the time of war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and Ugandan national forces. Displacement brought scattered deaf people together in towns and camps, where Ugandan Sign Language was introduced through workshops and institutions including churches. This created new forms of communication and possibilities of sociality. After the war, gender differences emerged, as many deaf women returned to rural homes where they had few opportunities to communicate with other sign language users.

In Uganda’s refugee policy framework, food aid targets the most vulnerable – among them people with disabilities – using a categorization system. This article explores the entanglements of this technology of food distribution with disabled people’s socialities. It reveals that the system does not achieve its proposed rationale of creating equal opportunities for people who are disadvantaged within Uganda’s refugee policy of self-reliance, and that it falls short in enabling disabled people to fulfil roles and responsibilities. Nevertheless, food aid is a significant contribution that allows refugees with disabilities to cultivate family and non-kin relationships. Exploring these interdependent relations around food aid calls into question the ideas of equality and independence as fundamental principles of living together.

The Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria (MSSN) is a movement that promotes the Islamic identity of Muslims in Nigeria’s educational institutions. Despite promoting the same objectives around the country, a comparison of the MSSN’s activities between the northern and southern regions of Nigeria suggests that the success of the movement varies in many aspects. This is because there are two main types of regional variation relating to the MSSN: the success of Christian opposition to the MSSN’s objectives; and the attitude of many Muslims and the government to those objectives. For example, in the Muslim-dominated northern states, the call by the MSSN to let Muslim girls wear the hijab in schools and the MSSN’s support for the reintroduction of sharia were welcomed by the state governors. However, in the south-west region, where the populations of Muslims and Christians are roughly equal, the MSSN struggled to get the state governors to accept the hijab and the call for sharia was rejected. This article thus argues that, despite envisioning the same notion of Islam for all Muslim students in Nigeria, the MSSN’s activities do not produce a monolithic Islam, and that this reflects differences in the practice of the religion across the country.

This article considers the uptake of Achille Mbembe’s article ‘Provisional notes on the postcolony’ (1992), the book De la Postcolonie: essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporain (2000) and its translated version, On the Postcolony (2001), in Congo studies. ‘Congo’ here is a shorthand for the current Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly known as Zaire. The article is concerned with the ways in which these two English-language texts (and their original French versions) figure in the social sciences and the humanities, specifically in the field of study relating to Zairian/Congolese society and culture. It becomes clear that the theme of mutual entanglements of commandement (power) and citizens not only influences political studies but also structures Congo scholarship on economy and governance, popular culture and erotics. The article ends with some reflections on academic writing about Congo, the limited uptake of ‘Provisional notes’ and On the Postcolony in religious studies, questions about ethics and scientific writing about political postcolonial cultures, and especially the necessity to historicize the postcolony.

In 2010, Kenya introduced a gender quota to boost women’s political representation. The quota mandated that a single gender should not hold more than two-thirds of elective and appointive positions in public bodies. When few women won seats in elections in 2013 and 2017, political parties fulfilled the gender quota by nominating hundreds of women as members of county assemblies (MCAs). Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2019 in one of Kenya’s county assemblies, this article shows how nominated female MCAs participate in transactional relationships with the public. Like male politicians, they are often called on to contribute to fundraisers and to meet the needs of constituents. Female politicians also accompany their giving with political rhetoric in support of female leadership. I argue that, through their giving, female politicians use money as a tool to champion women’s political leadership. Their matronage – a term I use in lieu of patronage to emphasize the role of women in transactional relationships – ultimately shows how gender quota legislation can go only so far in increasing women’s political representation. Instead, political actors also rely on informal mechanisms in order to achieve gender equality in politics.

This article analyses the debates surrounding the ʿawra (nudity or nakedness in Arabic) of the female voice – what I call here vocal nudity – and the public presence of the female voice in Nigeria. It focuses on the preaching activities of two Muslim female preachers, Malama Khadija Gambo Hawaja and Malama Dr Zahrau Muhammad Umar, who present tafsīr (Qurʾanic interpretation; Hausa: tafsīrin azumi) to the public during Ramadan and rose to prominence through the publicity of their audio and video sessions and fatwas offered to women. I discuss their interpretation of verse 33.32, the only verse that refers to the female voice in the Qurʾan, their understanding of vocal nudity, and how they use the interpretations to reshape the concept of a righteous woman (Hausa: mace ta gari) in twenty-first-century Muslim West Africa.

Can the African novel work as interlocutor for anthropologists studying Africa’s postcolonial politics today? Conversely, is there a role for the African literary imagination in our renewed efforts to decolonize anthropology? This article draws on Chinua Achebe’s fictional representations of the postcolony in two novels, No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People, to discuss the value of the African literary archive for an anthropological interest in elites, corruption and postcolonial decadence in the early postcolony. This African literary archive has contributed enormously to Achille Mbembe’s critique of power in the postcolony. Here, I argue that, in contrast to anthropologists of the late colonial and early postcolonial moment, African writers such as Achebe mobilized fiction as a powerful form of critique to address early signs of postcolonial despair and disillusionment in Africa.

The Ugandan effort to provide AIDS education for the entire population raised questions about how to reach people with disabilities. Based on semi-structured interviews and participant observation with Deaf people in Kampala, this study examined how communication technologies are used in general by Deaf people, and what is specific to communicating about HIV and AIDS. It found that communication technologies, whose purpose is to mediate information, are themselves mediated by social relations. Two contrasts are apparent: between types of technology and types of relationships. The ‘old’ technologies – broadcast and print – often depend on mediation by hearing people, who create the messages and explain audio information to Deaf associates. The ‘new’ digital technologies in the form of smartphones allow Deaf people to communicate directly with one another and facilitate new forms of Deaf sociality, both online and in person. They convey information about AIDS prevention directly, obviating the need to discuss sex with family members of the parental generation, which is culturally sensitive. Smartphones are highly appreciated by Deaf people but the costs of obtaining and using them exclude many.

This article explores the conceptual and practical meanings of fahafahana (‘freedom’ in Malagasy) in the Highlands of Madagascar, a context where the legacies of past forms of slavery have left deep marks both in local memories and in social and economic hierarchies. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which specific notions of freedom have been elaborated against the background of the local history of slavery and emancipation; how these concepts have been charged with different meanings in different periods of Malagasy history, becoming an arena for the elaboration of different political agendas; and how people of different status, class, gender and age reframe the concept of freedom in their everyday lives. Local notions of freedom emerge as part of the local political commentaries through which power positions are accepted, renegotiated or contested, and they intersect deeply with local notions of honour and respectability. The idea that freedom is somehow related to issues of genealogical purity and to the ability to maintain and improve the wealth and dignity of the family continues to characterize local understandings and representations of this notion, signalling that the legacies of what it meant to be ‘free’ when slavery was still a legal institution still inform and shape current power structures and local social commentaries.

Recent studies of migration into artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) have explored the motivations, strategic agency and professional trajectories of women and men miners who move to mine. In this article, I seek to shift the focus from the ‘push/pull’ factors in migration to consider the varied entanglements of mobility with authority and power relations pervasive through rural institutions. The importance – or lack of importance – of being a ‘migrant’ in these mining sites rests largely on the particular gendered cultural politics shaping livelihoods in the area. Drawing principally on ethnographic research in Tonkolili District, Sierra Leone, this article examines how migrant status for men and women working in the gold sites who came from other parts of the country is more marked than for Zimbabwean migrants working in artisanal gold mines in Manica, Mozambique. I argue that migrant status is marked by various authority and power relations in artisanal gold-mining sites when those controlling access to mining livelihoods, including access to residency in the mining communities, are able to emphasize contingent forms of belonging by migrants compared with those defined as ‘locals’. Critical to these differential forms of valuation is the particular organization of labour.

Nigerian Muslims have undertaken the hajj for centuries. As Nigeria approached independence in the 1950s, Muslims began to discuss and debate this practice on a national scale, through Islamic associations and political committees and in the Nigerian press. At the same time, Muslim politicians began to publicly don the ‘Mecca uniform’, the white robe (thawb) and black cord (‘iqāl) common to Saudi Arabia. While Nigerian pilgrims had worn these garments for decades, their conspicuous adoption by the political elite was novel. This sartorial link between politicians and the East was amplified by photographs and commentary circulating nationally in the press, and generated a mix of admiration and concern. Christians (and some Muslims) questioned whether a secular state ought to oversee the hajj. Within roughly a decade, politicians ceased their official use of the Mecca uniform as the press became saturated with exaggerated stories of ‘corrupt’ pilgrims engaged in smuggling and other crimes. The proliferation of other mass media, such as radio and novels, contributed to this critique. This was not the end of the Mecca uniform’s public life, however, as others – such as Yoruba women in the south-west – continued to employ it in self-fashioned public images, including obituary notices. The transformation of the Mecca uniform into an object of national discourse engaging a range of Muslims and also Christians speaks to the complex dynamics shaping Islam in modern Nigeria.