Male singleness and childlessness are sensitive issues in many patriarchal societies because they unsettle the idea that men have the sole responsibility of securing lineage. They also challenge forms of masculine authority that are tied to reproduction and marital status. Single and childless men, whether through choice or other reasons, deviate from normative pathways, and their identities often become sites of cultural anxiety and moral scrutiny. This article considers how the Ndebele of Zimbabwe navigate these tensions through the strategic use of proverbs. Proverbs offer an indirect and socially acceptable way to discuss matters that are difficult to confront openly. Building on Helen Yitah's work on the use of proverbs as discursive tools for negotiating gender and gendered relations, the article traces how proverbs mediate anxieties around masculinity through singleness and childlessness. The article demonstrates the role of proverbs as flexible cultural resources through which gendered subjectivities are produced, regulated and occasionally contested in contemporary Ndebele communities.
During the 1950s and 1960s, a period marked by Cold War tensions and the African national liberation movement, socialist China and African countries, based on their common goal of "opposing imperialism and colonialism" and the vision of equal cooperation, embarked on the foundational process of establishing modern diplomatic and cultural interactions. This article examines the dissemination of Chinese films in Africa from 1956 to 1965. It systematically examines the core paths, content logic and historical value of this phase of dissemination. The research finds that the dissemination of Chinese films in Africa during this period was deeply integrated into China-Africa diplomatic strategy. In terms of content selection, films focused on revolutionary narratives and socialist construction. These practices achieved remarkable results in laying the foundations for Sino-African cultural exchanges. They provided a typical model for cultural cooperation among "South-South cooperation" countries during the Cold War and left a historical reference for contemporary Sino-African film and television communications. (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)20(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)"(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)"(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)1956-1965(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic),(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)"(sic)(sic)(sic)","(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)","(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)","(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)","(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)"(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)"(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)"(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).
This article introduces "lharba" (escape or flight) as a central yet understudied vernacular formation in North African migration discourse, demonstrating how Moroccan youth articulate sophisticated critiques of necropolitical governance through everyday language practices. Drawing on digital ethnography of Facebook communities (2017-20) and auto-ethnographic engagement, the research grounds "lharba" as simultaneously a theological innovation, a political practice and a framework for collective identification that transcends physical mobility. The analysis advances three interconnected arguments: first, that lharba discourse operates as vernacular necropolitical theory through which abandonment produces social death in non-conflict settings; second, that theological innovations such as "lharba liman istataa'" (escape for those who are able) constitute autonomous political practices wherein excluded populations claim interpretive authority over Islamic tradition to justify migration as religious obligation responding to state failure; and third, that collective identification emerges through shared articulation of alienation rather than completed mobility, creating communities encompassing migrants, aspiring migrants and those who remain. By centring vernacular knowledge systems, the article demonstrates how migration scholarship gains analytical precision by attending to how subjects themselves theorise the conditions that produce their movement.
This article examines a Cokwe folk song recorded in northeastern rural Angola during the 1950s under Portuguese colonial rule. The aim is to understand how the relationship between the so-called "traditional authorities" and the colonial administration was mediated through music. I analyse the interplay between African popular culture and structures of power, as manifested in the relationships among African traditional chiefs (sobas), Portuguese colonial officials (chefes de posto), and African populations. The article draws on historical archival research and multisited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2014 and 2015 in Portugal and Angola. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach - drawing on anthropology, history, ethnomusicology, and postcolonial theory - to amplify African voices and sounds silenced within colonial archives. Moreover, it seeks to challenge established binary narratives of oppressor and oppressed, fostering a deeper understanding of the entangled dimensions of colonial history, power, and culture. In this article, I argue that African music was appropriated by African populations as a complex and sophisticated strategy to deal with the multifaceted forms of violence experienced during Portuguese colonial rule in rural Angola. Este artigo analisa uma can & ccedil;& atilde;o popular Cokwe gravada na d & eacute;cada de 1950 nos territ & oacute;rios rurais do nordeste de Angola durante a ocupa & ccedil;& atilde;o colonial portuguesa. O objetivo & eacute; compreender as formas como a m & uacute;sica mediou a rela & ccedil;& atilde;o entre as designadas autoridades tradicionais africanas e a administra & ccedil;& atilde;o colonial. Analiso a correla & ccedil;& atilde;o entre a cultura popular africana e as estruturas de poder, tal como se manifestava nas rela & ccedil;& otilde;es entre os chefes africanos (sobas), os funcion & aacute;rios coloniais portugueses (chefes de posto) e a popula & ccedil;& atilde;o africana. O artigo baseia-se em investiga & ccedil;& atilde;o arquiv & iacute;stica hist & oacute;rica e em trabalho de campo etnogr & aacute;fico realizado em Portugal e em Angola entre 2014 e 2015. A abordagem & eacute; interdisciplinar, atravessando a antropologia, a hist & oacute;ria, a etnomusicologia e a teoria p & oacute;s-colonial, tendo como objetivo amplificar as vozes e as sonoridades africanas silenciadas nos arquivos coloniais. Al & eacute;m disso, o objetivo & eacute; questionar as narrativas bin & aacute;rias de opressor e oprimido, com o intuito de promover uma compreens & atilde;o mais profunda da dimens & atilde;o entrela & ccedil;ada da hist & oacute;ria colonial, do poder e da cultura. Neste artigo argumento que a m & uacute;sica africana foi apropriada pelas popula & ccedil;& otilde;es africanas como uma estrat & eacute;gia complexa e sofisticada para lidarem com a viol & ecirc;ncia multifacetada vivida nos espa & ccedil;os rurais durante a ocupa & ccedil;& atilde;o colonial portuguesa de Angola.
Cultural and literary representations of albinism and people with albinism (PWA) take many forms and appear across various media. Apart from written fiction and life narratives, technological advancements have led to platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, which provide a solid foundation for sharing these stories. Guided by ideas from life narrative theorists, disability studies and documentary or film studies, this study explored how two YouTube short (auto)biographical documentaries depict social (dis)approval of albinism and persons with the condition. It focuses on the discursive representation of the lived discriminatory experiences of children with albinism and their relational others. It also scrutinised commentary by actual - or rather, digitally verifiable - YouTube viewers of the two documentaries. It argues that the films' narrators discursively cultivate social empowerment of PWA by representing subjects' negated sociality and humanity. Furthermore, the study analysed YouTube comments as a discursive public space where viewers can educate themselves and others about albinism, critique social exclusion and voice rights claims for PWA. The analysis revealed that comment sections are heterotopic spaces capable of cultivating discursive empowerment among PWA, even as they evidence non-uniformity in viewers' responses, with some using the platform to spread misinformation.
This article explores how haunting and mourning in creative productions - states signifying "sitting with" rather than moving on - create queer potentialities of being in the face of homophobic violence and Black death. The enduring legacies of racial and sexual violence, alongside calls for decolonisation, shape the work of queer Black artists in South Africa. Although religion plays a significant role in shaping attitudes to race and sexuality, its presence in creative works by queer Black artists remains relatively underexplored. Through an analysis of South African producer, director and actor Enrico Hartzenberg's film and theatre work, I explore how engaging with the gothic through depictions of death, grief and revenge expands the sacred resources available in navigating queer Africanness. By challenging Christian-centric, reconciliation-focused narratives, Hartzenberg critiques the post-apartheid nation-state's emphasis on reconciliation. His invitation to sit with queer grief and trauma reimagines queer Black futurity decoupled from colonial modernity's notions of progress.
From 1933 to the 1950s, the male students who attended the William Ponty Normal School wrote essays in French on a variety of ethnographic topics. The 1944-45 cohort were invited to write a memoir on dreams, a topic which one student characterised as "one of the most delicate in the life of the native". In this article I explore the "delicacy" of dreams at the close of World War Two as seen through the notebooks of three Ponty students from Niger: Gouro Soumana, Mossi Amadou and Issaka Kok & eacute;, who focused upon Fulani, Cadot/Zarma and Hausa cultures respectively. The three essays reveal the interplay of multiple ways of interpreting dreams, the resilience of ideas about the unseen world, and the strategies these young Africans adopted in these colonial auto-ethnographies. The memoirs capture the predicament of students called upon to mediate between the world of the French administration and that of their home communities.
The history of male dominance and masculinised aesthetics in hip-hop has been well documented. The global trajectory of breakdance and its adaptation to cultural contexts has continued to carry traces of this hypermasculinity. This article offers a critical gaze on the marginal positionalities of three female breakdancers, who self-identify as pioneer B-girls in male-dominated breakdance scenes, revealing how they frame embodied practices, map imaginaries and assert agency to contest male domination, circumvent alienation and shift their marginalities in Kampala City. Data was collected through relational story sharing and storytelling with the three B-girls. The analysis reveals how the B-girls have shifted marginalities and decentred breakdance masculinities by asserting their embodied agency, constructing breakdance identities, and activating their experimental imaginations through breakdancing. Engulfed by socio-cultural stereotypical expectations that dissuade women from practising dance forms seen as masculine, the B-girls have deployed their bodies in battles, cyphers and other performative scenes and spaces to break free from such marginalisation, claim equal visibility and affirm their identities as breakdancers. The article provokes debates on how the embodied practices contest gender stereotypes, assert gender advocacy and activate critical action geared towards empowerment, transformation and emancipation.
Although marriage was highly valued in Shona traditions, missionary Christianity introduced a much more rigid, monogamous marriage in which women were domesticated as (house)wives and mothers and economically dependent on their breadwinner husbands. African feminisms, which emerged in response to Western feminist hegemony, have not always adequately interrogated this norm of marriage and its impact on women. Sidelining single women, especially divorced ones, in the African feminist agendas in the 1980s meant that many social worlds and realities remained hidden from scrutiny. This article asks: What does it mean for African feminist understandings of "African women" when the voices of divorced women are foregrounded? How do these voices complicate and challenge commonly accepted ideas relating to gender, marriage and family life in contemporary Africa? To answer these critical questions, I discuss the narratives of 44 divorced Shona women, which were gathered through life story interviews conducted during fieldwork carried out between August 2023 and March 2024 in areas of Zimbabwe predominantly occupied by the Shona people. By foregrounding the voices of divorced women, the article expands African feminist discourses and studies of singlehood through a decolonial lens.
This article listens to amapiano not simply as a musical genre but as a form of Black theorising in motion - a practice of survival, aspiration and world making in the afterlife of apartheid. Tracing its genealogy from kwaito, I read amapiano as both a continuation and a transformation - a sonic grammar through which Black life in South Africa persists, reinvents itself and speaks back to history. Building on research undertaken for a master's degree - which explored kwaito as a space for radical Black performativity - I question whether such performativity is possible and how it endures and reconstitutes itself in sound. Drawing together cultural history, close listening and critical theory, I situate amapiano within a lineage of Black sonic production grounded in township aesthetics, hustling economies and diasporic rhythm. Engaging thinkers such as Paul Gilroy, L & eacute;opold S & eacute;dar Senghor, Timothy Mitchell, Paulin Hountondji, Archie Mafeje and Fred Moten, I argue that amapiano is both local insurgency and planetary vibration - an aesthetic of joy, refusal and endurance. Ultimately, it is a living archive of the present, a sonic philosophy through which Black South Africans continue to think, feel and imagine otherwise.
This article explores how musicians in Equatorial Guinea navigate a deeply authoritarian and oil-dependent political economy through everyday practices of hustling and adaptation. It examines how artists engage with state and non-state institutions to access resources, maintain livelihoods, and assert claims to redistribution under oppressive conditions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article focuses on musicians' interactions with bureaucratic structures - such as the Ministry of Culture and foreign cultural centres - as well as their informal strategies, including cultivating patronage networks, praise singing and seeking financial support through kinship and personal connections. These practices, while often morally ambiguous, reflect a form of "distributive labour" that emphasises survival over production. By foregrounding the ambivalence, fluidity and creativity with which musicians engage the state, the article highlights how cultural workers assert agency within highly constrained environments. It argues that such tactics represent small-scale, everyday extraversion - efforts to exploit dependence on the state while demanding a share of its wealth. Ultimately, the article contributes to broader debates on cultural production under authoritarianism, the role of bureaucracy in everyday life, and the political economy of music in Africa.
In Inga, dreaming is a symbolic practice for women to both escape and exercise control over their social world. Women in Inga utilise connections with men to accomplish their dreams and aspirations. In Camp Plateau, women are often well educated and capable of pursuing fulfilling careers but are restricted by Inga's geography and moral scrutiny. Mostly confined to the home, where they conduct household tasks and care for children, they find ways to escape Inga's boredom while managing religious and social expectations. In Camp Kinshasa, women enjoy a different kind of socio-economic freedom and agency, spending much of their time working outdoors. These women can more freely seek connections to improve their circumstances, though this comes with greater vulnerability and judgement from others. Women in both camps share the dream of a different life. In that sense, Inga is experienced as a temporary space, characterised by waiting and longing. While unmarried women await economic and romantic opportunities, they create lives where dreams and imaginations flourish. Daytime reveries find their way into nighttime dreams that are spiritually interpreted and alter people's destinies.
What critical role did the Nigerian media play in enabling and legitimising the CBEX crypto scam that defrauded investors of over (sic)1.3 trillion (approximately US$800 million)? The article answers this question by utilising critical discourse analysis to unravel how the Osun State Broadcasting Corporation (OSBC) and the Independent NG deployed linguistics in trust fabrication. It reveals that, while OSBC broadcasted a collectivist wealth rhetoric, Independent NG deployed an elitist narrative to resonate with the masses. These approaches exploit Nigeria's postcolonial political economy, where predation is framed as unavoidable technological progress designed for large-scale poverty alleviation of African society. The article contends that institutional underfunding serves as the bedrock of media connivance, while techno-optimism functions within a neoliberal spectrum of fraud naturalisation in the global South. To this end, the article suggests legislating media accountability and the promotion of financial literacy at the grassroots level. Thus, it contributes to the discourse on understanding the intrinsic nexus between media and financial exploitation, advancing the need for systemic reforms to disrupt fraud ecosystems.
In the highly stratified Yoruba society, individuals are positioned along a rigid seniority axis, distinguishing egbon (senior) from aburo (junior). This hierarchy regulates access to power, prestige and resources, sustaining a cultural orthodoxy that privileges the senior and subordinates the junior with the promise of eventual ascension. However, this article examines how juniors navigate and sometimes subvert these rigid structures through ohun - a culturally embedded, agentive speech style rooted in traditional Yoruba discursive and combative practices. Rather than waiting passively for their turn, juniors employ ohun both as a mechanism of resistance against societal oppression and as a strategic tool to accelerate their social mobility. The article explores how ohun, once marginalised and associated with the street and the socially low, has evolved into a potent medium for empowerment, enabling juniors to acquire the symbolic and material elements of the "Yoruba good life". By analysing examples from everyday life, Yoruba films and hip-hop music, the article reveals ohun's dual function as both a subversive act and a legitimising force, enabling juniors to reframe their social identities and contest established power structures, thus transitioning from aburo to egbon, bypassing await-your-turn pathways.
This article is about how young Congolese artists use performative ambiguity to navigate a political landscape of state surveillance and restrictions on civil liberties. It highlights how early-career painters, photographs and slam poets purposefully embed ambiguous meanings in their performance to protest political oppression. While such forms of performance operate from a covert and subtle repertoire of protest against the political restriction of civil liberties, the article interprets them within the broader theoretical framework of political resistance. The analysis makes a critical reappraisal of Georges Balandier's concept of evasion, which he originally developed to understand how African societies reorganised themselves, through indirect and concealed tactics, to resist colonial rule and its prohibition. This study reinterprets evasion in a contemporary postcolonial context, and it argues that performative ambiguities are politically oriented to challenge the authoritarian status quo. They represent symbolic forms of political subversion through which the artists assert agency, reclaim public space and catalyse social change. Under conditions of political duress, Congolese artistic production is transformed into a critical space of negotiation between power, identity and freedom.
Drawing cultural evidence from literary writing and electronic media, this article focuses on how a "befitting" burial nurtures feelings that allow survivors to complete, as Freud would say, the work of mourning. The central question is posed thus: does the welfare of the deceased motivate acts and explanations of "fitting" as mourners insist? Phrasing the problem this way allows the following discussion to weave together the many elements of social life, including constantly evolving beliefs and cultural habits of acknowledging loss, that celebratory funerals distil. What is to be gained if, as West African death-ranking funeral practices suggest, a ripe death, or loss generally, is construed as a distinct kind of bequeathed achievement that only survivors can mark? Critical studies might realise that, although curating convivial motions is taxing, the fellow feelings generated during elaborate funerals loosen grief, and the goodness that comes with survivors not being alone mitigates the general anxiety of "what comes next" that ordinarily attaches to either loss or achievement. This article suggests that celebratory funerals iterate essential features of life-perpetuating strivings in palpable social forms.
This article tracks the dynamics and aesthetic transformative potential of "jazz crazy Highlife" in the 1950s. Drawing on ethnographic research and knowledge production on Highlife with Highlife-makers as well as in-depth archival research on recorded music, photographs and newspaper articles not yet read in investigations on Highlife, the article offers a reading of how colonial elite press discourse articulates changes in sentiment and meaning related to popular music as the Gold Coast approaches political independence. Although full of contempt, these accounts grant a special insight into the process of decolonising the aesthetic-political regime of the colonial class and at the same time reveal a dynamic history of popular Highlife-making and its interrelated aspects of dance-band formation, cultural agents, institutions and modern media dissemination, contextualised through ethnographic research. This all suggests a subtle aesthetic-political process at work in which structures of feeling from below became structures of power and decolonisation through popular music effects on social transformation. The article draws attention to two critical forces in this process neglected so far: the sound of Highlife and, as these changes appear as the outcome of black Atlantic music culture, the transnational entanglement of Highlife as Anglophone West Africa's first modern popular music.
In 2008, the government of Botswana launched the President's Day Cultural Competitions with the dual objective of strengthening unity in the diversity of the country and promoting economic diversification. Since its inception, this competition has become the country's premier cultural event, annually bringing together thousands of artists from across the nation. This article traces the emergence and institutionalisation of the tsutsube, a San (Basarwa) traditional dance performed during the competition, examining how the word and the reality it has come to designate function as performative sites, actively shaping the reality in which they circulate. Based on observations and interviews conducted among performing Naro (San) artists in Ghanzi District, Botswana, it further explores how this neologism enables a transfer of expertise and a deterritorialisation, enabling its circulation beyond the original communities. These processes are shown to fuel a sense of cultural dispossession among Naro communities, while also giving rise to new claims of ownership and authority over the practice.
