For decades, African urban spaces have been characterized by rapid expansion, great transformation, vast economic growth, and experimentation with new material and spatial formats, developments famously inspiring The Economist to adorn its front page in 2011 with an ‘Africa Rising’ cover. Yet, we know that such developments have been very uneven – not just between cities and countries but also within urban orders.

In the spring of 2017, Somali(lander) social media played host to a heated debate about government corruption, socio-economic justice and the future of Somaliland’s democratic project. The debate took place entirely in verse and became known as Miimley (‘in/with m’), as all its poems alliterate in miin (‘m’). In an immediate sense, Miimley went viral as it became a forum for airing several simmering socio-political and economic frustrations and for discussing Somaliland’s democratic trajectory. Yet its popularity also rested on its poetic form: Miimley is a contemporary iteration of a poetry silsilad (chain), a long-established political-literary practice. This article and its accompanying poems introduce readers to Miimley and the current dynamics of Somali poetic debate. After contextualizing Miimley in a political and literary sense, I detail the biographies and contributions of six poets: Xasan Daahir Ismaaciil ‘Weedhsame’, Cabdullaahi Xasan Ganey, Daaha Cabdi Gaas, Deeqa Nuux Yoonis, Layla Cali Faarax ‘Layla Sagal’ and Ibraahin Xasan ‘Sangal’. In so doing, this work offers an insight into the political perspectives of a generation of social media-savvy poets who came of age after the collapse of the central Somali state, while also reflecting on the enduring yet evolving role of poetry in Somali political life.

This article examines the contradictory terms of ‘inclusion’ in market-led development through an ethnographic study of the Atlantis Special Economic Zone (SEZ) on the periphery of Cape Town, South Africa. Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork and over seventy interviews with zone officials, elected community representatives and residents, it traces how unemployed people are mobilized as ‘representatives’ in the SEZ’s community participation programme, which is meant to evidence the zone’s social licence to operate while providing little remuneration. Officials frame participation as shared value and market inclusion; participants experience it as unpaid labour and reputational risk; and residents often interpret it as an unfair channel to insider advantage. In a peripheral setting marked by chronic unemployment and long-delayed investment, these competing framings show how programmes promising inclusion demand new forms of labour – moral, affective and material work through which people seek recognition, belonging and livelihoods – yet often incur social and economic losses. Building on Africa-focused debates about market inclusion as adverse incorporation, and on the anthropology of volunteering, the article argues that contemporary inclusionary projects depend on the unwaged efforts of the poor and reproduce new forms of precarity – even as they sustain the fiction of the ‘inclusivity’ of markets on the continent.

Investors increasingly view enclaved private city development as an alternative to failed state-led urban planning in many African cities. One example is the Appolonia City of Light (ACL), a grandiose master-planned private city development project on the outskirts of Ghana’s capital city, Accra. Planned according to a philosophy of ‘development control’ – the strict enforcement of regulations on land use and the type and nature of housing, as well as spatial plans and standards – the project is marketed under the placemaking slogan ‘Live, work, play’, offering tenure, investment and personal security. This article explores the recently settled residents’ motivations for investing in housing in the ACL, and their material and social experiences of living there. Moving into the enclave represents aspirations for comfortable living and upward social mobility, which residents often depict as detachment from Accra’s congested, noisy and infrastructurally and administratively cumbersome housing conditions. Therefore, secure land titles and well-functioning basic amenities are crucial attractions. However, residents’ expectations of service delivery and security are unmet, as the private city cannot ‘control’ the infrastructural and institutional contexts in which it is embedded. Consequently, detached living in a private city requires resources through relational attachments beyond the enclave. Spatially exclusive urban development thus not only makes it impossible for the lower echelons of the growing middle class to ‘live the dream’ but also questions the long-term sustainability of private city investments in a context where such prospective home buyers find inclusive approaches offering individual and incremental house construction on titled land more achievable and appealing.

This article explores the impact of music streaming platforms on popular Afrikaans music. It sets recent technological developments in digital music distribution against the complex historical backdrop of the Afrikaans language and the histories of social marginalization affecting large parts of its linguistic communities. These patterns have shaped Afrikaans music production, consumption and gatekeeping since the first recorded Afrikaans music in the early twentieth century. A key question arises: how has the fundamental shift in the music economy ushered in by streaming platforms enabled previously marginalized Afrikaans artists – particularly from the Coloured community and speakers of vernacular forms such as Kaaps – to reach wider audiences, thereby breaking with historical patterns? This article draws on interviews with music artists, scholars, producers, mixing engineers, platform founders and executives, as well as analyses of publicly available data from platforms such as Spotify, YouTube and TikTok. The evidence suggests continuity at the centre: white Afrikaans pop still dominates discovery playlists and editorial spaces – whether curated by human editors, algorithms, or both. Yet the peripheries are stirring. The rise of Afrikaans gqom on the Cape Flats and the growing visibility of Koortjies within Coloured Pentecostal circuits show how streaming can surface alternative publics, vernacular aesthetics and new circuits of value.

The dire inequalities that characterize African cities are often described in terms of structural or neoliberal violence, and anthropological analyses typically depict disparate patterns of exclusion, dehumanization and violence – including urban patterns of ‘enclaving’. Even though such analyses are crucial, we argue that studies of Africa should also identify urban practices of relationality, mutuality and collectivity; we approach these practices as key forms of negotiating intimacy and detachment. Here, we explore such urban practices in Maputo in the guise of texts adorning both crowded minibuses and privately owned cars, as well as specific works of street art. While often leading to laughter, comments or discussions among passengers as well as passers-by, ambulating texts and pieces of art also communicate aspirations for novel forms of sociality, attack people’s separation and lack of empathy, and, finally, speculate about new futures. By mapping art, texts and the ambulatory in Maputo, we make two arguments: first, we underline the usefulness of generating understandings of African urban spaces that avoid emphasizing the ever increasing dynamics of atomization or that project necropolitics as the most important element of African cities. Second, we show how temporality, including what we describe as ‘futureless-ness’, is actively and critically engaged by this type of textual, artistic and interpretative practice.

This article examines the circulation, recording, preservation and archiving of music during the Eritrean liberation struggle from the 1970s to the 1990s, with a focus on the role of diaspora community support. It argues that the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) strategically leveraged music to foster a sense of national identity and unity, recognizing its powerful role in mobilizing support and galvanizing the Eritrean populace. Despite the challenges posed by war, the EPLF made significant efforts to record and archive music, understanding its importance for cultural preservation and morale. Post-independence, these efforts were continued through a digitization project, ensuring that the themes of national unity cultivated during the struggle persisted into the contemporary era. This article highlights the innovative strategies employed by the EPLF to utilize music as a tool for political and social cohesion, and the enduring impact of these efforts on Eritrean national identity. The preservation and digitization of liberation-era music not only safeguard a crucial aspect of Eritrea’s cultural history but also underscore the vital role of music in the broader narrative of the nation’s fight for independence and its ongoing journey towards unity and self-determination.

This article explores the increasing use of competitions to distribute scarce jobs among educated young people in urban Africa. Based on research on the entrepreneurship competition Mashrouy in Sudan and the government-run Concours in Mali, we explore how university graduates continued to join competitions despite considering ‘winning a proper job’ highly unlikely. Interweaving debates on neoliberalism in Africa with classical anthropological work on competitions as social forms, we remain critical of the ‘contestification’ of access to work, while showing how the graduates acted upon the structural oddities of competitions. We explore distinct modalities of attending and partaking in competitions as meaningful forms of participation that went beyond mere striving for success. The graduates’ narrowing of their efforts to formal registration and ‘good-enough’ engagement (to attend) is tied to their general scepticism around the selection procedures and prizes of these competitions. By contrast, partaking refers to practices of joining and valuing these competitions in other ways, as spaces to strengthen friendships and connections, and as spaces of work. By documenting the youths’ distinct practices of ‘competing’, we show how they were not just victims of misguided tools of governance, but used these events to reaffirm their value, exploring collective moral, expressive and futuristic potentials.

This article explores the connection between musico-poetic circulation and the ways in which conflicts are recounted and collectively given meaning in Ethiopia’s Amhara region. It highlights the key role mobile phones have come to play in social life. It contributes to current debates on how new information and communication technologies affect social relations, open up new communicative spaces or build on pre-existing modes of exchange. I focus on the possibilities that phones offer for producing, playing, exchanging and storing audio and video recordings of sung poetry. By revisiting the concept of ‘mediatized orality’, I analyse the relationships formed with and around these files, and trace their trajectories in two directions: spatially, connecting local affairs to national issues; and temporally, bridging past and present. I argue that this ‘regime of circulation’, which weaves the many voices of remembering into poetic circulation, is a practice of representing conflicts and fashioning the past – one that predates the arrival of new technologies, as evidenced by the Ethiopian historiographical tradition. What people do with phones and the files they carry draws on this tradition. It also transforms it, opening up ways of appropriating issues surrounding ethnicity, nation and history.

This article argues that Iyere, a community that participated in south-western Nigeria’s pursuit of colonial modernity, was hindered in its pursuit of progress by the Owo Native Authority Council, the powerful colonial authority that administered it. That hindrance fostered local feelings of marginalization among the people of Iyere. The community was among the peripheral communities reorganized and controlled by the traditional leadership of the Owo kingdom under the British system of indirect rule. But by 1967, it was no longer under the control of the Owo kingdom. The article examines the reasons for this change, focusing on the Iyere Improvement Society’s role in community development during decolonization and the factors behind Iyere’s political shift towards kingdom status. The case study of Iyere illustrates how local Western-educated African elites exploited the memory of colonial discontent in the periphery to continue pursuing modernity and progress after colonial rule ended.

Communities in peri-urban areas of major African cities, such as Accra, are subjected to land speculation and large-scale land acquisition to accommodate the growing urban population. Housing projects developed by real estate developers and private individuals are increasingly emerging on the outskirts of large urban areas, leading to land dispossession. While many studies have examined the financial trajectories, governance structures, rationales and physical spaces of these housing projects, empirical evidence on the livelihood transformations and coping strategies of residents on the urban fringes within specific local contexts remains limited. Building on the concept of accumulation by dispossession, this article argues that expropriating agricultural land, particularly for luxury residential purposes, entails a market-led dispossession that detaches residents from lands that had hitherto served as sources of livelihood. This land dispossession and the subsequent construction of ultramodern housing units are forms of detachment that disrupt land tenure arrangements and transform livelihoods in peri-urban Accra. Since detachment often comes with new forms of attachment, I further show that residents develop new livelihood attachments as they create and capitalize on new opportunities.

Over the past two decades, new high-end real estate developments have increasingly shaped Africa’s urbanscapes. Scholars have generally criticized such projects, arguing that they do little to serve the needs of the broader population. In accounting for the investment in high-end real estate, the existing literature has focused on the domestic incentives that shape their development, the desires of local elites and bureaucracies, and international capital’s search for new markets following the 2008 financial crisis. Interviews with investors suggest an alternative explanation: situated understandings of risk. Drawing on extended interviews with largely South African investors in urban real estate development and management in Africa, this article investigates how perceptions of risk, and the attempts to control it, shape investment. Faced with what they viewed as highly risky investment terrains, investors tried to recreate the financial environments they were familiar with through de-risking practices that sought to enclave projects from the geographies in which they were located. The result was investment in high-end real estate that was thought to be more controllable, calculable and, most of all, profitable. Enclaving is not just a growing characteristic of African urbanscapes; it is an underlying logic of the formal financial practices that produce them.

This article examines how three generations of jasare – Zarma genealogists and historian griots from Niger – have responded to the challenges of recording and digitizing their performances, from analogue archives to social media platforms. It explores the tensions between performance and fixation, the transformation and circulation of narratives, and the question of ownership in the context of mediated orality. The first generation resisted state-led archival initiatives in the 1960s. The second adapted their discourse to radio audiences, navigating censorship and self-regulation. Since the death of Jeliba Baaje in 2018, the third generation – no longer active performers – has grappled with the ethical and symbolic stakes of managing digital archives, especially as renewed interest in jasare narratives emerges on platforms such as YouTube and WhatsApp. Drawing on long-term ethnographic collaboration, the article analyses the aesthetic and political strategies employed to preserve control over sensitive narratives in contexts where audience composition is diffuse or unknown. These strategies are situated within broader transformations of patronage systems, memory politics and digital circulation. Ultimately, the article reflects on how oral knowledge systems engage with global regimes of authorship, highlighting the dynamic interplay between tradition, performance ethics and the logics of new media.

This article examines the production of luxury residential real estate advertisements in contemporary Johannesburg, South Africa. I focus on advertisements depicting the affluent northern suburbs of a city, and a country, structured socio-spatially by colonial and apartheid segregation policies. Between 2019 and 2022, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork among estate agents and property photographers who, through the staging and capturing of images, aim to cultivate polished, albeit contested, representations of the properties for sale. I argue that, through these advertisements, the estate agents promote what I call ‘detached intimacy’. Detached intimacy is an advertising strategy that promotes a state of urban dwelling that is at once connected to the people and infrastructure of the city, and yet distanced from its highly racialized and unequal property market. In advertisements, this intimacy is characterized by harmony with local nature, shared off-grid solutions, and enclaved lifestyle communities commonly referred to as ‘live, work, play’. The detachment is characterized as a distance not only from inequality and crime but also from familiar emerging middle-class anxieties related to routine water shortages and electricity blackouts. Detached intimacy in real estate advertising harks back to past spatial imaginaries, while signalling new South African futures for urban dwelling.

This article explores the impact of mobile phones on entertainment practices and electoral communication among pastoral communities following constitutional reform in Kenya in 2010. It examines the digital dissemination of music files among Samburu mobile herders, emphasizing the role of communication technology in shaping political identities and ideologies. Specifically, this analysis considers how the two main contenders for the governorship of Samburu County in the 2022 elections engaged with the content-exchange networks generated by the digital circulation of raid songs among pastoralists. The recording and dissemination of these repertoires via mobile phones fostered new patterns of interaction and entertainment, which in turn provided channels through which election songs could circulate in rural areas. By mobilizing these songs, candidates sought to project a more authentically pastoral identity, thereby appealing to rural voters. The analysis presented here unveils a consolidating form of rural populism grounded in pastoral political categories, institutional decentralization and the use of digital technologies. It situates mobile herding societies within larger global trends of digitally mediated politics and new forms of consensus building, shedding light on the changing foundations of Kenyan democracy.

Despite two hundred years of interethnic coupling and domestic migration into the Betsiboka valley in north-western Madagascar, Sakalava are still considered the autochthonous ‘masters of the land’ (tompontany). Some migrant families whose ancestors from the central highlands settled in the valley broke custom by burying kin in new tombs near their residence rather than returning them to ancestral tombs upcountry, in their purported place of origin. In so doing, these settlers disembedded themselves from the social and financial expectations of distant kin in the highlands. While new tombs reinforced their claims of belonging in the valley, neighbours understood these families’ actions as paradoxically signifying lowly social status and possibly enslaved origins. These migrants doubled down on their outsider ethnic identity rather than attempting to incorporate themselves into host communities. Ritual and kinship techniques such as new tomb construction and heterosexual marital alliances with Sakalava women allowed this allochthonous community to master the land and the cash crops that it produced. These migrant families reversed the well-established model of ‘autochthonization through incorporation’ commonly described in scholarship on African agrarian societies by refusing to become absorbed into the first-comer Sakalava communities. In gaining symbolic and political ascendancy over the Sakalava, these migrants achieved allochthonous dominance and challenged prevailing assumptions about the directionality of assimilation and belonging.