This article examines the volatile relationship between corporate logistics and state sovereignty in Lomé’s transformation from colonial harbor to global transshipment hub. Focusing on concession contracts and vertically integrated shipping conglomerates, it argues that privatized container terminals do not simply erode state power but rearticulate it through enclave-like regimes of operational governance. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, it shows how the port becomes a chokepoint where control over circulation is a key site of rent extraction, political negotiation, and labor contestation, as state and corporate actors continually enable, constrain, and renegotiate one another.

The July 2011 viral video from the University of Benin and its violent aftermath reveal how “lesbian” sex, digital voyeurism, and so-called corrective rape become public sites for contesting sexual citizenship and personhood in Nigeria. Through digital circulation, intimate queer pleasure is transformed into moral evidence, rendering embodied aliveness perilous under conditions of surveillance and communal judgment. Grounded in online commentary and Igbo moral philosophy, the concept of mmadu (personhood) illuminates how visibility authorizes discipline and extrajudicial violence, reframing queer pleasure not as transgressive resistance but as a condition of personhood itself.

In this article I suggest looking at memory as a symbolic field animated by the emotional tensions that emerge from popular interpretations of state hegemonic narratives. These affective engagements challenge the binary framings of memory as a contested project between the elite’s script and the resistance from below. Using the iconography of the Brazza Mausoleum, I argue that colonial memory in Congo acts as a spectral force through which the grievances from the colonial past convey meaning to the frustrations experienced through the postcolonial state. Colonial history returns as a phantom haunting the unfulfilled promises of the independent state.

This essay problematizes the place of “culture” in Africa-China studies whereby culture is often sidelined as the devalued supplement to political-economic data. Instead, cultural narratives and processes are inseparable from how knowledge and Africa-China relationality are made. We consider how multi-directional reflexivity about the production of a knowledge object (“Africa-China/China-Africa”) intervenes in both outdated forms of Cold War-inflected area studies and emergent hawkish nationalist scholarship. This essay considers Africa-China as method, an approach based in transregional theorizing and relational analysis that attends to the politics of knowledge production and resists instrumentalization of scholarly findings by imperialist or ethnonationalist agendas.

Women’s labor in African urban centers permeates every sphere of urban life, yet its full scope remains understated in scholarly accounts. Akinwole introduces “holistic articulation” as a method for reading African women’s discursive labor. Holistic articulation names an analytical strategy of linking discursive fragments about women’s labor across multiple archives: social history, African literature, popular journalism, mythography, and everyday expressions. By tracing these connections, holistic articulation highlights the breadth of African women’s space-making and performative labor. This approach extends existing frameworks for analyzing African women’s labor by foregrounding its discursive and imaginative dimensions.

In the early postcolonial period, Eastern Nigerian women increasingly entered the sex industry because of poverty, the Civil War, and limited employment opportunities. Drawing on archival records, oral histories, and newspapers, I examine local and transnational sex work among Eastern Nigerian women, highlighting their strategic decisions—from migrating to lucrative urban centers to developing social skills to attract clients. By framing sex work as labor rather than moral decadence, I challenge dominant moralistic discourses, positioning sex workers as economic agents who accumulated wealth and invested in businesses and property.

In Zambia, religious nationalists exploit legal and policy ambiguities to construct abortion and LGBTI+ rights as un-Zambian and un-Christian. This delegitimization narrows the scope of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) to family planning. Drawing on forty-five in-depth interviews with Zambian stakeholders and international aid officials, we argue that while these ambiguities constrain reproductive justice, they also allow activists to advance SRHR by building coalitions that connect advocacy for abortion rights, LGBTI+ rights, and reproductive justice to promote health service access and bodily autonomy for all. In Zambia and elsewhere, such activism and coalition building merit greater attention and support.

Transnational cultural encounters between Africa and China, such as Chinese artist Pu Yingwei’s exploration of Kenya’s dam infrastructure and the reception of French-Senegalese director Mati Diop’s film Dahomey on African artifact repatriation among Chinese youth, generate new sites of knowledge circulation and epistemic inquiry. These exchanges exemplify an approach of “reflexivity,” which emphasizes critical reflection on one’s own positionality, research processes, and the broader conditions shaping knowledge production. Oriented toward mutual reference and epistemic affinity between Asia and Africa, this approach promotes a relational mode of knowledge-making attentive to both shared historical legacies and existing structural disparities.

This article offers new insights on Africa-China relations and discourses of authenticity and intellectual property by examining the trade and consumption of Chinese-made fashion goods in Mozambique from an ethics perspective. Ethnographic fieldwork in southern Mozambique between 2017 and 2024 shows that many traders and consumers see Chinese counterfeits as beneficial and desirable, enabling them to participate in fashion systems from which they have long been excluded. For traders and consumers in Mozambique, it is ethically right to supply and purchase functional, adequate-quality, and aesthetically pleasing counterfeits. These goods are evaluated less in terms of legality than through pragmatic, everyday judgments about quality, care, and access. The Mozambican case complicates dominant narratives of Chinese-African trade and global intellectual property governance, showing how ethics of access and quality shape everyday globalization.

Women are being appointed as cabinet ministers across West Africa in increasing numbers, albeit predominantly to lead “soft” rather than “hard” portfolios. The experiences of women cabinet ministers from five West African countries—The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria—help to nuance our understanding of women in cabinets around the world. Women cabinet ministers from these countries reveal a broader conception of “paths to power” taken by women ministers, a concern for gender parity in their own ministries rather than in cabinets, and self-perceptions of the impacts of important substantive and symbolic representation on their terms in office.

In South Sudan, the rumor that the Murle people suffer from infertility evolved into a politically instrumental myth used to justify child abduction, securitization, and systemic exclusion. Rooted in colonial misrepresentations, the claim pathologizes Murle reproduction and legitimizes violence. Drawing on ethnography and archival, medical, and humanitarian sources, the article conceptualizes this narrative as a rumor-myth: a necropolitical discourse that transforms speculation into governance. Though lacking evidence, the infertility narrative endures through repetition and political utility. Counter-oral histories challenge these racialized fictions, revealing how communities contest exclusion and expose the broader structures of power that sustain scapegoating, violence, and inequality.

Studies on Chinese cultural and religious engagement abroad are often framed through the lens of state-driven soft power. Drawing on the case study of the Zambia Shaolin Cultural Center (ZSSC), I challenge this state-centric interpretation, emphasizing the collaborative, relational, and fluid nature of China–Africa cultural and religious encounters. Inspired by “assemblage thinking” and based on fieldwork observation and interviews, I examine the heterogeneity, fluidity, and adaptability of Shaolin’s operations in Zambia. I argue that ZSCC should be viewed as an evolving assemblage where diverse actors and elements interact and co-create meaning through adaptation and negotiation.

Colonialism and a male-dominated print culture in the early twentieth century have occluded a vibrant tradition of Xhosa and Zulu women’s poetry and song. Hidden behind a focus on male practitioners of praise poetry are women’s everyday genres, like songs of marriage and initiation that are archivally present in oral recordings, interviews, and fieldwork notes. These domestic performances have a profound social weight and are a vital political act of remembering and source of cultural power. The lens of curation reveals how voices brushed aside later re-emerged, inspiring contemporary women poets who harness inherited performance practices to transcend the printed page.

Washington’s leverage over political and military actors in post-Bashir Sudan has been limited. There is little agreement on whether this results from changing international and regional geopolitics, America’s foreign policy priorities and its miscalculations, or a combination of all these factors. Moving beyond these explanations, I argue that the US approach remained deeply shaped by long-standing dilemmas in its democracy promotion doctrine, bureaucratic dynamics, and the decline in domestic advocacy. Understanding these variables contributes to broader debates on US Africa policy and to democracy promotion scholarship by foregrounding domestic drivers and the limits of external support for democratic transitions.

Tuberculosis transmission in South Africa is marked by significant disparities across gender, race, and class, with Black working-class men bearing a disproportionate burden. An eighteen-month ethnographic study in Modimolle utilizes Northern Sotho concepts of personhood to analyze the sociocultural structuring of tuberculosis infections. Findings indicate that men perform masculinity through ritualized sharing of alcohol and tobacco in male-dominated spaces. Although these practices promote comradeship and solidarity, they also increase the risk of tuberculosis transmission. Effective interventions should address the moral values underpinning masculine sociability to inform culturally relevant, gender-sensitive strategies aimed at reducing health disparities. By grounding tuberculosis risk in local understandings of masculinity, the article contributes to masculinity studies and, drawing from medical anthropology and sociology, deepens knowledge of infectious disease in global health and African studies.

This essay examines the challenges and possibilities of mobilizing the African Diaspora as the African Union’s “6th Region,” drawing on the author’s diplomatic experience as Ghana’s Ambassador to Brazil accredited to twelve South American states. Using the Sankofa symbol as a conceptual framework, the paper explores the historical complexity of the African Diaspora, distinguishing among multiple diasporic formations shaped by migration, exile, and the transatlantic slave trade. It assesses institutional tensions between diaspora communities, civil society organizations, and formal structures of the African Union, in relation to the Pan-African Congresses and nation-state representation, arguing for stronger transnational engagement, institutional clarity, and sustained educational and cultural exchange to strengthen Global African solidarity.