The Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, founded in British India in 1889, has many followers in Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and other West African countries, and has fostered cultural transformations that have rarely been discussed in scholarship on African–South Asian interactions. Through a history of media produced by and about the Ahmadiyya, this article shows how black and white photographs shaped a vibrant visual economy that constructed West African–South Asian interconnectedness in the midst of difference and discord. While Indian Ahmadiyya missionaries first deployed images as evidence for their controversial beliefs and to prove their success at conversion, the absorption of these personnel and their productions into emerging West African media infrastructures – educational publishing and journalism among them – created a wider visual repertoire that evoked complex emotional registers, including fear and mistrust as well as familiarity and fondness. West African and South Asian media makers interwove dreams, religious and journalistic communications, and digital archives of photographs to reveal religious, racial and gendered differences that played out in print and circulated well beyond any single audience. Visual and print media worked to diminish the Ahmadiyya’s foreignness and accommodate their differences as familiar, and thus played a critical role in cultivating cultural pluralism in new postcolonial West African nations.

Projects seeking to indigenize STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) for the public have recently emerged in digital spaces in Africa. These ‘STEM-for-the-public’ projects are conceptualized within the framework of ‘indigenization’ that cuts across the STEM and social science fields. I identify two paradigms in the indigenization literature: the language (L) paradigm and the methodology–conclusion dyad (MCD) paradigm. Although STEM-for-the-public projects fall within the L paradigm, they sometimes exhibit the MCD paradigm by drawing on oral culture and other forms of indigenous knowledge. These projects constitute an attempt at a cultural solution to what I describe as ‘the problem of unequal access and relevance’ (Problem-UAR), which plagues a particular kind of society that I describe as ‘wholesale-origin societies’ (such as those of Africa, south of the Sahara). Based on a digital ethnography, I show that, although they have had some recognizable impacts, operating in different modes, using a variety of linguistic approaches, covering various STEM topics, and adopting different modality frames, STEM-for-the-public projects, in their current forms, are not the ultimate solution to Problem-UAR because: (1) they generally do not address the classroom side of Problem-UAR; (2) they largely exclude offline publics; and (3) they have reached only a significantly small portion of their target online populations.

Since the 1990s, there has been a proliferation of cultural festivals across West Africa. In this article, we argue that border festivals are distinctive. They take on the work of cultural codification in a context where borders often magnify differences between partitioned communities. They also help to shape border governance, because, as moments of exception, they provide a platform on which it is possible to variously criticize and lobby politicians. The article compares two festivals on the Ghana–Togo border – Agbamevoza in partitioned Agotime and Godigbeza in Aflao – and reveals contrasting dynamics. In Agotime, festival organizers (who largely reside in Accra) have managed to involve the border agencies. In a context where crossings have been relatively unhindered, demands have focused on external support to develop the kente weaving industry. In Aflao, by contrast, harassment by border officials, extended closures of the border and decisions to re-route traffic away from the border crossing with Lomé have created friction. In 2022, there were explicit demands for freedom of movement and for recognition of Aflao as a transnational community that embodied the spirit of regional integration.

Mauritania is one of the African countries where the phenomenon of contemporary slavery is most prevalent today. The historical particularities inherent in this practice have been shaped by ethnocultural differences that still persist. The fight against this reality has been led by abolitionist initiatives that have emerged within civil society since the late 1970s. The most prominent organization in the fight against contemporary slavery in Mauritania is the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement, better known as IRA Mauritania. This article examines the history, action and socio-political impact of this organization through the unpublished testimonies of some of its protagonists – direct victims of this reality. The analysis of oral memory presented here, based on various historically silenced voices, raises new hypotheses about the historical crossroads currently faced by a country where the phenomenon of slavery is linked to other emerging issues such as migration crises, gender issues and the climate colonialism of the twenty-first century.