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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.