How do African urban residents, who are conventionally assumed to operate within parochial, highly localized confines, operate at larger scales? How do they reach a “larger world”? The article looks at some of the overall effects on African cities and their residents of a global process of scalar recomposition and the reconfiguration of social cohesion that ensues. By examining renovations in a traditional Islamic institution, zawiyyah, an example is provided of ways in which urban Africans attempt to act effectively within larger domains.

This article focuses on the activities of women smugglers in Cameroon in the 1990s, the period during which the national currency was devalued. Despite the generally negative connotations of smuggling, it argues that this unorthodox form of trade has had certain positive effects on the lives of individual female entrepreneurs, if not on Cameroonian society in general. Usually marginalized economically, women in Cameroon—including, in many cases, former prostitutes—are able through smuggling to support themselves and their children, make up the deficit in the household budget, and attain a respected status in society. Through their contacts with beach worker assistants and government officials, they also have contributed, for better or worse, to the blurring of lines in Cameroon between the formal and informal economy.

This study analyzes the transformations in the relations among masculinity, sexuality, and femininity for the youth born after independence in Dakar (Senegal), where the constitution of recreational sites and of play have always been controlled by the state and maraboutic Islam. Following the multiform crisis, the youth—boys and girls—have innovated new forms of sexuality, while deconstructing the old forms and opening themselves to cosmopolitan ones

This paper is an analysis of state practice in respect of racial classification and its epistemological underpinnings in twentieth-century South Africa. It shows how apartheid racial categories—drawing heavily on those enacted by the segregationist state—were wielded as instruments of surveillance and control by a state animated by fantasies of omniscience as much as omnipotence. The architects of apartheid racial classification policies recognized explicitly that racial categories were constructs, rather than descriptions of real essences—a version of the idea of race which enabled the bureaucratization of “common sense” notions of racial difference and which contributed direcdy to the enormous powers wielded by racial classifiers. If constructs, these categories were powerfully rooted in the materiality of everyday life. The ubiquity of the state's racial designations, and the extent to which they meshed with lived hierarchies of class and status, meant that apartheid's racial grid was strongly imprinted in the subjective experience of race.

This article focuses on constructions of whiteness in South African autobiographies and other narratives of the self. It attempts to understand how the category of whiteness—racial, social, political, and economic—is given meaning in this context. The essay departs from US- and British-based studies of whiteness, as well as from African studies of “settlers.” It aims to draw out the particularities of the South African context and the ways in which whiteness emerges within the tropes of looking, watching, masking, concealment, transfiguration, and secrecy in these texts. It shows that the play between visibility and invisibility emerges as a central paradox in this body of writing. Thus it attempts to shift contemporary South African discussions away from racism per se toward a discussion of how race works in psychical, symbolic, and political terms. It considers amplifications of whitenesses which may have been at odds with official and critical orthodoxies in order to approach registers out of which whiteness may come to be situated differently in this context.

The islands of the Indian Ocean offer a space from which postcolonial scholars might revise African and European metadiscourses. Africa has been looking west and north since the first deportation of Africans. I propose to look east and head south, to the Indian Ocean, the seas and the lands, a site of intercontinental trade and travel, conversion and conquest, migration and creolization. Mapping the Indian Ocean reveals a cartology of transoceanic transactions and exchanges, past and present. Africa meets India, South and East Asia, the Islamic world, and the islands. It is a cartology of trans-South flows: East Asia/Africa, South Asia/Africa, Islands/Africa, and of connections with the Americas and Europe.