In Nakuru, a secondary city in Kenya, the city’s future is explored multi-sensorially. In this article, I argue that Nakuru residents explore urban futures through the taste of different kinds of foods. I examine how the relational power of taste not only triggers visceral imaginaries of greener and ‘cooler’ futures in which bodies and landscapes grow more ample, lush and healthy but also invokes memories of, and nostalgia for, pasts in which the entanglements of foods were configured differently, often explained as more ‘authentic’ and ‘clean’ (safi). I argue against vision as the most important sense-making tool to look back at lost pasts and to ‘imagine’ healthier urban futures. Instead, I demonstrate how futures in Nakuru are experienced and given shape by engaging in critical gustatory explorations of the real, tangible materialities of different kinds of food that flow through the city.

The history of the human–technology relation points to binary (positive and negative) evaluations of technology’s role. One reason for this binary is the limited view of technology in terms of physical and tangible devices. Another is an extreme global view of the relationship, which neglects global diversity. However, technology includes non-physical devices such as speech. Moreover, people hold different intellectual, historical and philological assumptions as the bases for their rule over technology. This article emphasizes the importance of language and global diversity as crucial dimensions of the human–technology relation. It is through language that humans are able to rule over technology, rather than being dominated by it. Taking language as a focal point, I expose the neglect of pre-literate orality as a way of engaging with technology and I espouse an orality perspective on our rule over technology. This perspective foregrounds human mindfulness as a basis for oral engagement with technology. It is developed based on analysis of historical data on oral language use by pre-literate Akan people of Ghana to rule over the musket. The article characterizes technology overrule according to a four-stage process: image recognition, technology reduction, technology reposition and image reproduction.

Africa’s regional archives offer crucial records to explore the continent’s postcolonial past. Although these archives are often difficult to locate and access and are exposed to several challenges that might even threaten their existence, this article presents a solid case for reconsidering their importance. Recent trends, aptly labelled ‘postcolonial African archival pessimism’, have mainly pointed to problems and often to the limited accessibility of state archives in some regional and local contexts. This article instead engages with their potential, discussing four case studies in Benin, Cabo Verde, Ghana and Congo-Brazzaville. Results stemming from these case studies are brought into contact with wider debates on custodial cultures and the regional archives’ role in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. The intention is to provide a more positive and empirically based overview of research possibilities at regional archives and ultimately to change the nature of our approach to these resources.

Muslim aid organizations are relatively new actors in the Western aid industry. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research with the UK-based NGO Islamic Relief, I explore the organization’s engagement with a school in need of repair in southern rural Mali that is also the site of a sacred shrine of importance to locals. I examine the contextual global logics of racialization that undergird different interpretations and practices of what it means to ‘do good’. Situating an understanding of ‘development’ in an analysis of global racial capitalism, I argue that, as an Islamically inspired aid organization based in the UK, Islamic Relief is both subject to anti-Muslim racism and complicit in a white-adjacent racialized project of ‘development’ in Africa. I foreground the whiteness of development to show how modernist development practice makes it impossible to see other ways of conceptualizing ‘doing good’ that are also deeply grounded in Islam.

This article argues that, despite techno-utopian narratives of digital self-directed learning (through content freely available on the internet) and its proposed opportunities for upward social mobility, digital learning is and remains a highly contextual practice, rooted in local realities and aspirational trajectories. Through learning with a community-based organization (CBO) that offers tech training to youth from low-income neighbourhoods in Kibera, Nairobi, I argue that digital learning does not replace formal education but rather is strategically incorporated into already existing learning practices. Although Nairobi has been extensively studied as a frontrunner in technology uptake and development in Africa, it is crucial to also look at technology practices and uptake away from elite design and use, to extend and deepen our knowledge of how the digital realm plays out in the lives of the majority of urban residents.

This article provides the first systematic exploration of the ideas on inequality of the two Ghanaian women’s rights advocates Annie Jiagge and Florence Dolphyne, who were both part of the Ghanaian National Council on Women and Development during the 1970s and 1980s. Zooming in on their work and writings during this time, I challenge the view offered by some scholars that these decades were ‘apolitical’ and shaped by ‘quiet activism’ with regard to the Ghanaian women’s front. I show how Jiagge and Dolphyne actively rearticulated womanhood in postcolonial Ghanaian and African societies, placing women’s ‘issues’ and rights within the framework of an unequal world order. In doing so, I argue that they vernacularized the contemporary global discourse on women’s rights, shaped by the UN Decade for Women (1976–85), in a Ghanaian context, evoking what postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha has called an in-between ‘third space’ through which the many intersecting and ambivalent aspects affecting the lives of women in postcolonial Africa, and the so-called Third World at large, could be articulated.

This article considers the materiality and substance of the built environment in Nairobi in light of concerns about surface, depth and the power of the unseen. Taking Nairobi’s high-rise construction boom and a recent spate of collapsed buildings as its starting point, it examines how longstanding ideas about the hidden and invisible dynamics of African cities do not operate in a realm distinct from the material world, but often stem from it: the stuff from which the city is made generates thought and action. High-rise buildings are sometimes described as ‘icebergs’ (structures where much of what is going on is under the surface) or as ‘fakes’ (buildings that superficially promise something, but that are qualitatively and morally suspect). Exploring Nairobi’s construction industry from sites of building collapse, I show how an emerging vertical materiality in the city’s built environment drives debates about deception, (im)moral economies and popular suspicions of power, complicating discourses about the relationship of surface to underneath. I examine how Nairobi’s frail buildings induce anxieties about the seen and the unseen, illuminating how the materials of verticality are entangled in economies of deception.

It has become a well-rehearsed truism that the growth of sub-Saharan African cities is the result of an amassing of persons, things and knowledge that takes place in the absence of centrally planned development initiatives and without any tightly orchestrated coordination of social life. Under such conditions, the argument goes, urbanites make do with whatever resources are available while increasingly chaotic cities expand beyond their social and material capacities. The question is, however, whether weak – and even absent – systems of urban management can be taken to signify a lack of coordination and planning of urban development. Might it not be, for instance, that cities organize and model themselves through means other than those afforded by formal urban planning schemes? Based on ethnographic data from Maputo, Mozambique, this article explores the shifting material forms of what are locally described as ‘bedroom drawer blueprints’ as an acutely potent type of urban modelling. Current and prospective house builders in Maputo exchange and share blueprints and physical and virtual models of houses that they plan to eventually build. Considered by residents as valuable social and material assets, such blueprints and models also offer an opportunity for experimenting with new forms of aesthetic organization of the city. Comparing the ongoing transactions and sharing of bedroom drawer blueprints with the increasing global circulation of middle-class architectural urban models, in this article I argue that it is the capacity of the former to move between different material forms and modalities that gives them their particular aesthetic potency and drive.

Drawing on research conducted in southern Benin since 2000, this article explores the entanglements between grief, social status and funerals, and accounts for the conditions and the motives of the massive and multifarious investments – inextricably psychic, social and economic – in funerals that can be witnessed locally. I argue that, far from being mere ‘conspicuous consumption’, funeral expenses should be understood as the product of a number of intersecting dynamics, as the lavishness of these events cannot conceal the burden they represent and the anxieties they feed. In fact, filial duties and politics of reputation often entwine to give an existential dimension to these occasions, reinforcing one another to lead social subjects to engage important economic means and to bury their dead ‘at all costs’. In fact, as internalized norms and social pressures finally convince most mourners to organize obsequies beyond their means, the psychic and social tensions of funerals regularly constitute the all too common hidden face of the more commonly reported lavishness.

Changing practices of motorized mobility in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have given rise to what residents call the ‘accidenté’: a victim of a traffic accident, often involving the city’s increasingly ubiquitous motorcycles. This article explores the significance of the accidenté in Kikwit’s social universe and considers how everyday urban mobilities are imbued with a sense of bodily exposure, risk and the threat of broken bones, so much so that ‘fracture’ has come to be seen as an urban condition. This entanglement of perceptions of mobility, risk, fracture and urbanity represents both a particular spatialization of risk in relation to city life and a critique of how corporeal vulnerability is tied into other vulnerabilities in the daily lives of urbanites. By analysing how one can become an accidenté and what trajectories of care transpire after the moment of injury, this article reveals how this new patient subjectivity necessitates a confrontation with potentially enduring motility limitations and risky navigations of the city long after the accident.