Since the late 2010s, Rwanda has advertised its Visit Rwanda logo on the jerseys of prominent European football teams and has built new sports stadiums to host international sports competitions. Such strategies reflect the practice of sportswashing, which refers to the utilization of sports by political actors to gain global legitimacy while diverting attention from unjust processes occurring in their home countries. Dubinsky analyzes the effectiveness of Rwanda’s sportswashing through the concept of authoritarian image management, arguing that the mutual interests shared between authoritarian and Western actors facilitate the country’s sportswashing, despite the critiques it attracts.

Slavery persisted in Morocco well into the twentieth century and throughout the French Protectorate (1912–56), long after it was abolished in other French-occupied territories (1848). While work by historians has illuminated a previously shadowy history of race and slavery in Morocco, less attention has been paid to the growing corpus of literary texts representing enslaved subjectivities under the Protectorate. Through their literary excavations of the slave past, such works retell the history of Moroccan slavery from the perspective of those most affected. This essay takes translator Nouzha Fassi Fihri’s Dada l’Yakout (2010) as a case in point. Although marketed as a novel, the text is also a dense oral history that channels the voice of an enslaved woman who really existed: Jmia, who was abducted as a child at the beginning of the twentieth century and died in 1975. Considered as “Moroccan other-archive” (El Guabli 2023) and imaginative archeology, literary works chart a way forward for reckoning with the enduring legacies of slavery and the slave trade in Morocco.

Both armed groups and civilians have evoked historical memory in the Katiba Macina and Boko Haram related conflicts. Although not a cause of the conflicts, historical memory informs the perceptions and choices of both fighters and civilians. Based on interviews with members of the armed groups and local civilians, the authors demonstrate that how an individual perceives their own positionality within society and how they perceive their ancestors’ positionality affects how that person reacted to the armed groups’ evocation of historical memory, how they interpreted the source of greater threat, and their own self-protection strategies.

The “revolutionary script” of Leninism was foundational to how the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC) and Amilcar Cabral imagined the course of decolonization. Under-utilized archives and party documents highlight that the impact of the political-organizational model of Lenin was an early source of inspiration for PAIGC leaders, a fact which historians have not investigated in detail. The manner in which Leninism influenced the PAIGC was neither linear nor dogmatic, however. Dating from early exposure to Marxist texts in underground study circles to aborted attempts at launching armed struggle, party leaders constantly improvised upon the script with which they based their anti-colonial revolution.

The three books under review converge around state fragility, security concerns, and governance deficits as their organizing theme. This theme, which can be deployed to describe the current cadence of politics in several sub-Saharan African countries, proceeds from the nature of African states and the dynamics of political power as exemplified in the cases of Ghana and Nigeria in the three books. The first, edited by Usman Tar and Bashir Bala is a twelve-chapter anthology on rural violence in Nigeria. The second, which is edited by David Ehrhardt, David Alao, and Sani Umar, is also composed of twelve chapters and explores traditional authority and security in contemporary Nigeria. The first two works illuminate the dimensions of ecoviolence, including farmer-herder violence, banditry, terror, and other forms of conflicts in Nigeria. The third book by Barry Driscoll is focused on Ghana and concentrates on power relations in the decentralized local state. Ghana is a stable state with a subtle but deep-running powerful clientelist network that weaves its operations around party politics.

The paper critically revisits Chinweizu’s contributions to Pan-Africanism and African sovereignty, focusing on his analysis of Arab and Western imperialism, internal complicity, and the concept of “culturecide.” His call for a distinct Black African identity is explored as a foundation for reclaiming sovereignty, while also addressing critiques of nativism and essentialism. A nuanced approach to decolonization is proposed, emphasizing its relevance in today’s globalized world. Chinweizu’s ideas challenge a rethinking of the intersections between history, culture, and power in the ongoing quest for African autonomy.

We trace the formation of the Kadehine, a Mauritanian cultural and political movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with a focus on aspects of the “political underground” central to the movement’s strategies and organizing principles. As an anthropological history of the Kadehine, we focus on the organizing perspective afforded by its sources (largely interviews and movement literature). These sources emphasize the importance of clandestinity, as well as the influence of New Left ideas. We then develop a concept, “political underground,” describing the importance of clandestinity and its relationship to the radical politics of its time.

Recent disruptions in technology, geopolitics, and the environment have contested what it means to be human, a source of social and political anxiety about the future. Taking inspiration from African and African diaspora writers and scholars, Lee attends to theories of the human that emerge from contemporary experiences on the African continent. The essay provides a countercanon by centering debates about the human and their attendant attempts to transcend it (more-than-human, posthuman) in African experiences and knowledges. Doing so offers alternative conceptions of human–nonhuman relations that unravel the co-imbrication of colonialism, capitalism, and anti-Black racism that undergird the modern condition.

In the development discourse, there has been a tendency to frame the Global South, especially Africa, as a perpetual recipient of ideas from the Global North. This has led to the implementing of “development” initiatives based on the unsuccessful modernization paradigm and the associated Washington Consensus. Despite the emergence of counter theories such as dependency and underdevelopment theories, they share similar assumptions with the modernization paradigm. These assumptions include the belief that historical change brings development or progress, the sidelining of noneconomic factors like ethnicity, race, and gender, and the sole emphasis on economic growth as a measure of development. Both models assume that the state should primarily drive advancement. To address the weaknesses of these development models, alternative perspectives such as women and development, women in development, and gender and development were introduced. However, these perspectives would be integrated into the mainstream development discourse, diluting their impact.

Towards the end of his book, African Philosophical Adventures, John Murungi laments the injurious impact of Western epistemological hegemony on the humanity and well-being of non-Western peoples and societies, especially Africans. He describes the ensuing situation as a crisis about what it means to be called human or to have the right to exist as human in the twenty-first century: Today, human rights are in a state of crisis and this crisis is fundamentally the crisis of being human. … [The] planetary mode of being has fallen under the tyrannical regime of Euro-Western anthropology. The voice of African anthropology, as is the case with other non-Euro-Western voices of anthropology, remains muted. Africans, particularly, have been reduced to beggars in matters of hermeneutics and understanding of being human. They have been compelled and are even today compelled to look up to Euro-West for assistance in self-understanding. In matters that pertain to self-understanding they look for foreign aid. …Having been voided of what they [Africans] are and of the ability for self-understanding they are compelled to look outside themselves to make sense of themselves. (142–43)

This article reconsiders V.Y. Mudimbe’s contribution to “decolonial” impulses that are central to current preoccupations in fields such as postcolonial studies. It argues that key concepts developed by Mudimbe, such as the “colonial library,” have been overlooked in these discussions. Further, the article provides insight into important aspects of Mudimbe’s thought on the colonial library by reminding readers of the genealogy he excavates in describing the contours of the colonial library and its continued influence (likened by Mudimbe to a lingering odor) that is still to be dismantled.

Knowledge of African history aptly suggests that the quest for political independence in the continent is generally driven by the idea that such independence leads to statehood. By statehood, here, I refer to the ability of a sovereign country to exercise effective control over its territory, govern its people, and engage in international relations. Yet, political independence in Africa seldom leads to statehood without the experience of internal conflicts such as coup d’état or civil war. The three reviewed books, The Politics of Fear in South Sudan: Generating Chaos, Creating Conflict by Daniel Akech Thiong, When Peace Kills Politics: International Intervention and Unending Wars in the Sudans by Sharath Srinivasan, and Leadership, Nation-Building and War in South Sudan: The Problems of Statehood and Collective Will by Sonja Theron, attempt to explain why the quest for statehood in Sudan and South Sudan is characterized by diverse forms of conflicts and how the seemingly unending conflicts could be resolved. While the primary focus of each of the books differ, their respective positions concerning the key factors and actors fueling and sustaining violent conflicts in both Sudan and South Sudan are complementary.

In his book Seeing Like a State, James Scott writes, “We have repeatedly observed the natural and social failures of thin, formulaic simplifications imposed through the agency of state power” (1998, 309). State and top-down planning lacks mētis, or the common sense and practical experience that people on the ground possess of their everyday environments. Instead, Scott proposes a focus on practical knowledge, which “depends on an exceptionally close and astute observation of the environment” (1998, 324).