Africa Spectrum, Volume 59, Issue 1, Page 3-9, April 2024 ..read more

Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. Land and agrarian reform in former settler colonies is an overlooked aspect of social policy, especially in the African context. This is, however, changing with the recognition that it is a policy instrument with functional equivalents to other conventional forms of social policy. Since the cataclysmic COVID-19 pandemic exposed the shortcomings of conventional social policy approaches, a renewed interest in land and agrarian reforms has emerged. Increasingly there has been a call for the decolonisation of social policy in Africa and for transformative social po ..read more

Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. Using interview data collected from communities in Cameroon's Cross River region, this study examines the experiences of “slave descendants” in their marriages/attempted marriages with “freemen.” Using theories from Mary Douglas and Erving Goffman to analyse their stories, I demonstrate that while “slave descendants” are legally permitted to marry members of “freeman” origin, in practice, some cultural privileges are stripped from those who choose to intermarry, especially impacting those of “freeman” origins. Among “freeman” individuals, beliefs exist that mar ..read more

Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. This article analyses the role of religious symbolism and religiosity during The Gambia’s autocracy (1994–2017) and its democratic transition (2017–2023). Former autocratic ruler, Yahya Jammeh, exploited religious symbolism to legitimise his authority, leading to crackdowns, extrajudicial punishment, and political repression. Drawing on community engagements and interviews with 61 civil-society members, political actors, community stakeholders, and girls in rural and urban areas across The Gambia’s West Coast Region, the findings highlight the influence of cult ..read more

Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. There are multiple initiatives and efforts to grant African scholars “global visibility” – as part of the decolonisation agenda. These efforts have included aiding and enabling African scholars to publish in journals of international renown, speaking or curating courses at Ivy League universities, and being experts on issues about Africa in international media. Other efforts include collaborations and citations in discourses about Africa. While these efforts and opportunities are intellectually and practically irresistible to a scholar from the subaltern world ..read more

Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. With most existing research on party switching concentrating on the drivers of defection and the electoral performance of defectors, this research sheds light on the events that occurred after MPs switched parties but before voters sanctioned them in the next election. Using Nigeria as a case study, I discover that instead of establishing their own parties and banking on their personal popularity for electoral victory as some have speculated in new democracies, switchers strive to stay within the dominant parties, thereby challenging generalised narratives of w ..read more

Africa Spectrum, Volume 58, Issue 3, Page 191-200, December 2023. Contemporary forms of precarity, migration, connectivity, and sociality have transformed what it means to be a man in many African communities. Responding with agency and creativity to various incentives and constraints, Africans have adapted practices pertaining to labour, marriage, and sexuality to the exigencies of modern life amid the impacts of European colonialism, rapid urban growth, economic hardship, and political conflict. Drawing upon ethnographic and historical research to study settings in East, West, and Southern A ..read more

Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. Since the early 2000s, armed attacks and inter-ethnic violence have increased in parts of northern Kenya's Baringo County. This article examines how the Maa-speaking Il Chamus men respond to the growing insecurity as they draw on long-standing notions of morality and on the Kenyan state. In contrast to tropes of (agro)pastoralist northern Kenya being plagued by inter-ethnic animosity, lawlessness, and absence of governance, Il Chamus men situate inter-ethnic violence and gun ownership in notions of peace, prosperity, and security and engage the Kenyan state in ..read more

Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. Between the 1850s and 1950s, when abolitionism masked neoslavery and engendered displacement and forced labour migration in West Africa, Africans used forgery as a survival mechanism. They forged legal documents, claimed multiple forms of citizenship and belonging as Afropolitans, and manipulated kinship and imperial bureaucracy in the quest for freedom. One arena of forgery examined in this article entailed the invention of “husband” as “wife-owner,” within a context of gendered aspirations for social reproduction in the age of abolition. Southeastern Nigerian ..read more

Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. African youth became a central research theme in anthropology and related disciplines in the early 2000s, drawing renewed attention to the lives and aspirations of a segment of the continent's population that, since the independence era, has become increasingly demographically dominant but socially and politically marginalised. Reflecting on an extended case study of male ex-combatants in urban Burkina Faso, this paper offers a critical reading of the anthropological scholarship on African youth, emphasising, first, that much of this literature is most usefully ..read more