Much of how we understand present day Rwanda is either through the singular lens of its 1994 genocide, or as a praiseworthy model of African development ever since. Filip Reyntjens offers a critical corrective to such views by systematically exposing Rwanda's underbelly, marred by authoritarianism and structural violence. Largely descriptive and quite readable, the book is an ample empirical reservoir and a suitable primer for those studying contemporary Rwandan politics. Yet it also misses the mark in some respects. Reyntjens neatly arranges the book into both historical and conceptual categories. The first three chapters map the RPF's consolidation of state authority from mid-1994. This begins in Chapter 1, where postwar order came about by imposing political and territorial hegemony through the “RPF-ization” and the “Tutsization” of the state (p. 15). Chapter 2 shows how electoral politics provided a veneer of democratic legitimacy while the “RPF cartel” shelved or devoured Rwanda's political parties (p. 41). Chapter 3 then describes how the RPF created an absolutist “for us or against us” vision of Rwandan civil society (p. 61) by bolstering the tools of coercion and purging internal dissidents.

This research note reflects on the challenges of conducting research on issues framed by multiple epistemic regimes. Using insights drawn from my work on the 1988 murder of 28-year old British tourist Julie Ann Ward in the Maasai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya, I discuss the problem of opacities created by a combination of uncritical embrace of received knowledge about Africa/ns and cultural illiteracy in competing knowledge systems around which Africa/ns frame their worlds. I also examine rumour as an influential genre of knowledge production, contestation and critique in African societies—what has been termed a form of ‘community intelligence’—that challenges single-lens conceptions of credible knowledge. The research note argues for a more attentive grasp of Africans’ fluid self-conceptions as both ethno-cultural citizens of particular epistemic communities and as citizens of the modern state with its attendant institutions. Serious engagement with Africans’ shifting senses of themselves and the epistemic and ethical protocols they deem themselves subject to, under different circumstances, can have productive implications for our understanding of Africans’ lives, options and choices.

The political settlements approach emerged out of a critique of new institutional economics developed by Mushtaq Khan in the 1990s. Since then, the political settlements approach has proliferated in donor programming and academic scholarship on African countries. This has led to some confusion about its core conceptual and methodological features. This Research Note starts by setting out our understanding of political settlements and provides an overview of existing political settlements literature on African countries. The note then explores how the key concept of 'holding power' has been employed in varied ways in the political settlements literature, which in turn has led to various methodologies to study power. The note discusses a number of these methodologies, including studying political ruptures as a window into analyzing the distribution of power in African countries, and emphasizes the importance of studying economic structure, ideology, violence rights, and rents as sources of holding power. The overall contribution of the note is to illustrate the varied strategies used in studying political settlements and to place them in conversation with one another.

This article shows how bureaucratic discretion in the implementation of Nigeria's power-sharing institutions, the Federal Character, has led to the formalization of local informal norms on belonging. Under the Federal Character, Nigerians have to be 'indigenes' to access certain economic and political opportunities at the federal as well as state and local government levels. However, what makes a person indigenous is not formally defined, leaving street-level officials free to decide how to allocate indigeneship certificates. Using original qualitative and quantitative data on Kano, northern Nigeria's largest city, this article shows that local officials faced with this discretion often turn to locally salient norms on belonging. In Kano, several of these norms set ethnic and religious criteria for belonging, particularly those that prioritize the rights of the 'native' over those of the citizen. The article demonstrates how street-level bureaucrats use these ethnic and religious criteria to allocate indigeneship certificates, prioritizing Kano's 'natives' over other Nigerian citizens. This dynamic may be mirrored across Nigeria, depending on the norms on belonging that are locally salient. While the article suggests a simple technical solution – formally defining indigeneship on the basis of residence – it also shows the deep political barriers to its implementation.

International organizations are increasingly paying attention to the problem of sexual violence. One outcome of this attention has been the adoption of instruments that call on states to punish perpetrators of rape and end impunity for this crime. The reporting of rape to law enforcement agencies is key to formally holding perpetrators account- able. This article examines the influence of police officers and gen- darmes and of social forces on survivors’ decision to report rape in post-conflict Côte d’Ivoire. It also investigates the challenges that con- front those who choose to seek redress from the state. It argues that the Ivorian conflict contributed to fostering a preference for redress from the state over informal justice mechanisms. On the other hand, the blaming and shaming of rape survivors was pervasive and discouraged them from reporting. Support from friends and relatives increased the likelihood that survivors would report rape but negative social reactions had adverse psychosocial effects on them. The article explores the implications of these findings for ending impunity and for post-conflict gender relations.<br/>

This article tells the story of the urban Karura forest in Nairobi in order to explore access to and control of green spaces in an African city at a time of rapid, haphazard urbanization. Using insights from critical legal geography, it shows that although in strictly legal terms Karura forest remains properly gazetted public land, it continues to exclude citizens in important ways. This is because of a neoliberal conception of security that has promoted the exercise of significant private power over public space. The article examines the powerful ideas that were deployed to achieve the enclosure of the forest. Ideas of ecological guardianship were mobilized in tandem with arguments that the forest must be made ‘safe and secure’. A number of devices (fences, paths, trails, and signposts) played important property functions. This case study provides important insights into the politics of access to green space and to questions of social justice at a time of rapid urban change, not just in Kenya but more widely.

Antiretroviral treatment (ART) has become a ubiquitous feature of South African life. By early 2015, three million people had begun ART in South Africa. In the light of widespread positive responses to the availability of treatment, early ethnographies that stressed suspicion, fear, and resentment need to be revisited. In this article, I re-examine my own data on an early encounter between the technologies of ART and the population of a rural district in the Eastern Cape province. I also return to Didier Fassin's ethnography in which he placed ordinary people's responses to AIDS in a history of suspicion and resentment. The article focuses in particular on the support groups that ART users formed and argues that they were the sites of creative responses to ART in which ordinary people, primarily women, bent the new technologies and esoteric languages they encountered to an array of endogenous purposes. The article concludes that ART was incorporated into a politics of hopeful expectation rather than a politics of resentment.

This bibliography lists items noted between April and June 2016. This issue of the journal contains the last iterations of the bibliography and list of periodicals. They have been an integral part of the journal over many years, and have no doubt been useful to many researchers. As editors, we wish to thank and pay tribute to the work of Terry Barringer, and we point our readers to the annual African Bibliography where similar information will continue to be published: http://africabibliography.cambridge.org/ Bowcock, Philip. Last guardians: Crown service in Sudan, Northern Rhodesia and Britain. (London: Radcliffe Press, 2015). 384 pp. £27.50. Brautigam, Deborah. Will Africa feed China? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). xv + 222 pp. £18.99. Harrison, Graham. The African presence: Representations of Africa in the construction of Britishness. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). x + 222 pp. £17.99. Kennedy, Dane. Decolonization: A very short introduction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). xvii + 116 pp. £7.99.

The long rivalry between Britain and Egypt over control of Sudan – which took institutional form in the Condominium of 1899–1956 – has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention over the years. The English-language literature has tended to focus on understanding British policy, or an analysis of the consequences of this rivalry for Sudan itself – for, of course, the ironic result of this imperial wrangling was the emergence of Sudan as a separate state. Academic work on Egyptian policy towards Sudan has been much more limited, both because of the language skills required to study this and because of difficulties in accessing Egyptian archives. A study of Egyptian economic policy towards Sudan is, potentially at least, a welcome and important contribution to our understanding – a possible window on how Egyptian politicians, civil servants, and entrepreneurs understood their interests in Sudan in the context of their own extended struggle to escape from a pervasive British dominance that endured long after the nominal independence of 1922.