Why did Ebola response initiatives in the Upper Guinea Forest Region regularly encounter resistance, occasionally violent? Extending existing explanations concerning local and humanitarian “culture” and “structural violence,” and drawing on previous anthropological fieldwork and historical and documentary research, this article argues that Ebola disrupted four intersecting but precarious social accommodations that had hitherto enabled radically different and massively unequal worlds to coexist. The disease and the humanitarian response unsettled social accommodations that had become established between existing burial practices and hospital medicine, local political structures and external political subjection, mining interests and communities, and those suspected of “sorcery” and those suspicious of them.

This article considers what African Studies needs to look like in order for it to retain its disciplinary relevance for the next generation and in the larger context of the Black Lives movement globally. It asks questions about where we have come from in terms of race consciousness in our discipline and why this issue matters today. It begins by tracing the development of African Studies’ epistemic journey, and follows this with an examination of the recent Black student movements in South Africa and the U.S. It concludes by suggesting where we should be going.

The DR Congo embarked upon decentralization reforms in 2006 to improve governance and accountability, undermine predation, corruption, and personal rule, bring government closer to the people, and promote local development. As of 2014, despite some regional variations, Congolese decentralization had instead increased the degree to which the state extracts the resources and incomes of its citizens. It had also fostered provincial centralization at the expense of local governments, produced largely unaccountable provinces governing with little transparency, and unleashed self-serving provincial elites. After providing original empirical evidence for these claims, this article suggests that decentralization was thwarted by the failure of formal reforms to affect informal ruling institutions and by an erroneous diagnosis of Congo’s governance failures that singled out the abuse of elites without identifying the generalized nature of the instrumentalization of sovereignty by officeholders at all levels of the state. The article concludes by using Congo’s experience to illustrate important flaws in decentralization reforms in Africa.

For several years, local radio stations in Uganda have broadcast “come home” messages that encourage the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army to demobilize. Since the rebels began carrying out attacks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Central African Republic, several international actors have introduced the same messages to these regions. This new effort has internationalized radio programming, benefited local radio stations, provided new forms of messaging, and functioned in collaboration with military actors. This article provides an overview of how “come home” messaging functions in different contexts, examines the effects of these actions, and calls for research into an important shift in military–humanitarian relations.

In the last years of Idi Amin’s reign, modern dance was introduced at Namasagali College, a Catholic boarding school in rural Uganda, as a means of encouraging modern, liberal self-awareness in students. Drawing on interviews with Namasagali’s former headmaster, teachers, and students, this article offers the first scholarly consideration of this important school, and contextualizes its modern dance curriculum within Africa’s historical modernity/modernization problematic. The school’s progressive educational program, with its focus on creative exploration and ownership of the body, was framed within a neocolonial regimen of discipline and punishment that aimed to drill modern behavior into students. In its clashing modes of government, this school exhibited contradictions that have perennially troubled Western liberal intervention in Africa.

Today, high-tech surveillance seems omnipresent in Niger, particularly because of the conflicts in neighboring Mali, Libya, and Nigeria and efforts by the U.S. and France to boost local security agencies. However, Niger is not a very efficient “registering machine,” and the gendarmes have very limited knowledge of the communities in which they work. The key to overcoming this problem of knowledge—to “see things,” as the gendarmes put it—is the nurturing of good relationships with potential informants. But as the gendarmes depend on the knowledge of locals, the power relationship between the surveillers and those observed proves far more ambiguous than generally assumed.

This article argues that one way in which internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees from Timbuktu, Mali, negotiated and made sense of the occupation of northern Mali in 2012 and the hardships of displacement was through joking. A genre of unofficial communication, joking asserted local truths and produced counternarratives. Sharing in this humorous reproduction helped to alleviate some of the anxieties of displacement and strengthen interpersonal relationships. The result was a communitas that reproduced the local Timbuktian community in exile.

This paper advances a resource mobilization perspective on the 2011–12 electoral protests in Senegal based on social movement theory. Motivational explanations, in the form of grievance accounts, have already been used to explain successful protest mobilization in this case. Here the emphasis is placed on organizational efforts and the financial and human resources behind social movements. Using this approach to analyze the rise and fall of the social movement created to protest against President Abdoulaye Wade reveals its strategic role for opposition parties and their leaders. These findings add nuance to the perception of a democratic revolution in Senegal.

Challenging the scholarship on the relationship between natural resources and civil society, this article advances a framework that differentiates the various types of protests surrounding mineral extraction in sub-Saharan Africa and explains how this extraction encourages contentious activity. On the basis of protest event data from thirty-nine countries in SSA for the 1990–2006 period, as well as available survey data, the article provides confirming evidence that mineral wealth increases protest activity.

Academic discussions of development continue to grow, yet critical engagements with communities affected by development interventions remain limited. Drawing from life history interviews conducted in southern Tanzania, this article details the varied experiences of development interventions among older people and how these affect broader understandings of progress. Many juxtapose their negative views of ujamaa villagization with more positive recollections of previous interventions (especially the Groundnut Scheme), which are infused with what is described here as “development nostalgia.” Perceptions of the past clearly inform the social, political, and economic aspirations forwarded today, with the richness of the constructed narratives adding further nuance to existing depictions of Tanzanian historiography.

By tracing the Rwandan state’s “mundane sights”—everyday forms of presence and monitoring—the article sheds light on the historical development and striking continuities in “interactive surveillance” across a century of turbulent political change. It considers three emblematic surveillance technologies—the institution of nyumbakumi, the identity card, and umuganda works (and public activities more broadly)—which, despite their implication in genocide, were retained, reworked, and even bolstered after the conflict ended. The article investigates what drives the observed continuity and “layering” of social monitoring over time, highlighting the key role played by ambiguity and ambivalence in this process. The research expands the concept of political surveillance, moving away from the unidirectional notion of “forms of watching,” and questions any easy distinctions between visibility and invisibility in the exercise of power or its subversion.

Boundaries are technologies of power and knowledge that shape spatial and social realities and our understandings of them. This article examines the effects of boundary-making between Kenya and Ethiopia, and investigates the effects of borders on states of peace and conflict among Turkana, Samburu, Borana, Gabra, and Dassanetch of northern Kenya. If borders divide people, people benefit nonetheless from the environmental, social, and political entropy that borders generate by using the energy of spatial differences to advance their own individual and collective life projects.

During a 2014 security operation in Kenya known as Operation Usalama Watch, Somali refugees spoke of money as their only valid ID, knowing that only cash, in contrast to identity documents, would be accepted by police and military. The article argues that such extortion should not be interpreted uncategorically as an example of refugees’ exclusion from state-derived citizenship rights. Rather, by paying bribes to resist forced removal from Nairobi, Somali refugees constructed a global diasporan identity tied to free flows of capital. By using money as a substitute for identity documents, refugees appealed to a notion of rights untethered to the state. At the same time, by speaking of money as their government, they articulated a critique against a political system that excluded them.

In January 2012, six months after the declaration of independence, South Sudan introduced a state-of-the-art biometric identity management system to handle its citizenship and passport databases. Scholars have shown that despite the remarkable failures of biometric schemes, states maintain their belief in high-modernist technologies. This article argues that South Sudan introduced biometrics to convey an image of a “non-failed” state to the international community, while effectively doubling the bureaucracy to keep all important decisions about inclusion and exclusion in the hands of the military elites. This duplication of the office reveals a great deal about the fundamental nature of the South Sudanese state. Citizens of any state tend to imagine the nation through their relations to bureaucracy, and identity documents act as a new kind of evidence of a successful negotiation between them and state agents. This situation creates a constant state of citizenship limbo for the South Sudanese.

Joel Barkan’s interest in Kenya as a high school student inspired a lifetime’s commitment to the country and wider East African region, reflected in his three edited volumes comparing political, economic, and policy developments in Kenya and Tanzania, his work as USAID’s Regional Democracy and Governance Advisor in the early 1990s, and his continuing engagement with the country’s political development through his work at CSIS and his role as founder and chair of the Kenya Working Group, the Washington, D.C.–based lobbying group.