ABSTRACT Nollywood is a rich cultural zone, especially with the rise of epic blockbusters in the 2020s. Some of these include King of Thieves: Ogundabede (2022), Aníkúlápó (2022), Elesin Oba: The King’s Horseman (2022), Mami Wata (2023), Jagun Jagun: The Warrior (2023), Orisa (2023), Ageshinkolé (2022), House of Ga’a (2024) and Lísàbí: The Uprising (2024). Using African feminisms as a conceptual lens, I interrogate how female characters are portrayed and note that Nollywood, although maturing and creating more nuanced female characters, is still tethered to patriarchal stereotypes of power distribution privileging men above women. I further argue that, although powerful women assert powerful personalities to a certain extent, thus demonstrating agency, their power is curtailed in the socio-cultural, domestic and political arenas, which ultimately creeps into the production culture of epic films, thus complicating women’s truest emancipation.

ABSTRACT The article attempts a philosophical exposition of the Oromo’s indigenous notion of Namummaa for the sake of conflict resolution/peacebuilding and common good in Ethiopia. As a relational philosophy, Namummaa explains the ontological conception of peace the Oromo people hold; it is embedded in their religious and communal sense of relationality and belonging. The study emphasizes whether this ontological ideal promotes nonviolence, renunciation of self-aggrandizement at the expense of the cosmos, community, or others, and bolsters mutual coexistence—all of which are essential for building peace and resolution of conflicts in contemporary Ethiopia. Thus, apart from the normative-philosophical theorisation of Namummaa, the article attempts to present a balanced and critical assessment of Oromo indigenous concepts and practices of human relation by making a qualitative reflection on their possible application as a conflict resolution and peacebuilding mechanism not only for the intra-Oromo but also for the inter-cultural relationships in Ethiopia today. After a thorough and systematic reading of available written and oral sources garnered from primary and secondary data, the study concludes that Namummaa, according to the Oromo perspective, is complex, connected to the strong quality of human beings and meaningful in terms of building intercultural dialogue for peacebuilding in Ethiopia.

ABSTRACT The history of African philosophy often begins with the quest for legitimacy, by which I mean the desire for it to be recognised, accepted and considered as critical thinking in the real sense of the word. This starting point, on the part of many African philosophy scholars, was due to the historical epistemic violence that Africans experienced as a result of the encounter with the colonisers. The nature of this encounter resulted in the debasement, neglect, and marginalisation of African philosophical positions. Plunged in this epistemic doubt, uncertainty, and imposed decadence, for centuries, many African philosophers grappling with the question, ‘Is there an African philosophy?’ The question does two main things: on the one hand, it seeks to validate philosophical positions that are uniquely African, and on another hand, the question searches for prescriptive philosophical paradigms for addressing African problems and analysing issues. Most African philosophical engagements do the former. Shedding new light to the question, I argue that a disposition to African philosophy that stems from a need to validate its existence risks being a mere reaction and/or mimicry, and as such, further perpetrates epistemic violence by removing Africa from its lived realities.

ABSTRACT The deepening economic and cultural convergence of Africa and China have opened new routes of trade. Coming on the heels of China’s policy of reform and opening up, exports from Africa to the Chinese market have increased. This article breaks new ground by interrogating the innovative agency and artistic imaginaries of individual dancers as players in reassembling, exporting, restaging, and circulating Indigenous dances as transnational performances in China. Using cultural commodification as a framework of analysis, the essay dissects the innovative nuances and entrepreneurial savvy of individual dancers as a practice that has advanced the aesthetical and commercial value of dance beyond their cultural confines. I frame individual dancers as embodied interlocutors in establishing and navigating the transnational economic supply chains of the dances. The work also attempts a closer reading of the body as a constellation of reproductions, packaging, and distribution of the dances within the imaginaries of transnational circulation. Further examination of aesthetical performativities is made to unpack their re/assemblages and the links they hold to the commercial dynamics within the Chinese market. The article unveils insights that provoke a robust broadening of discourse and theorisation on China-Africa cultural and economic relations to consider the performing arts and artists as drivers in facilitating and diversifying points of contact between Africa and China.

Since the era of decolonization, political parties have played a crucial role in shaping the national political landscape of independent Africa. They have served as vehicles for mobilization, governance, and opposition; provided platforms for the expression of diverse ideologies, aspirations, and interests; channeled patronage and resources; and attempted to hold governments accountable. Despite playing such a crucial role, however, the study of political parties in Africa has lagged significantly behind its counterparts in North America, Europe, and many parts of the Global South. In the immediate post-independence period of the 1960s, scholarly work largely assessed the continent’s nascent political parties through functionalist typologies, examining issues such as interest articulation, aggregation, and recruitment. Reflecting the rapid closing of democratic spaces, however, those who studied parties in the 1970s and 1980s came to assess them, where they still existed, as institutions of mobilization, development, and legitimation. Following the new democratic openings of the late 1980s and early 1990s, scholars scrambled to (re)assemble the concepts and analytic tools that had been evolving in the Global North since the early 1960s. Parties in the region have long been assumed to be weak, with many taking their ethnic nature and lack of organizational capacity as given. However, a newer literature has started to push back on some of these long-held assumptions and claims, questioning, for example, whether parties can really be weak if they possess the capacity to distribute gifts or coordinate government decisions with electoral considerations. Other works, similarly, have focused on the activities of opposition parties and the ways in which they have acted to stem the decline of democracy. Still others have complicated the relationship between parties and patronage. It is at this critical moment in the study of political parties in Africa that we offer this annotated bibliography—encompassing a range of classic and cutting-edge literature, and seeking to act as a guide to the state of the field today. It is important to note, however, that this bibliography is not intended to be exhaustive but rather to serve as a starting point for scholars and enthusiasts seeking a solid foundation in the study of African political parties. The selected resources are drawn from a diverse range of disciplines, including political science, African studies, sociology, and history, and cover a range of regions and electoral system types. Ultimately, this bibliography on political parties in Africa hopes to stimulate further research, analysis, and discourse on this crucial subject.

This overview of literature on the agricultural history of sub-Saharan Africa focuses on works that contribute to our understanding of changes in farming systems, crops, and tools. The time period considered here is after the introduction of farming and before colonialism, thus roughly corresponding to 500 to 1900 ce. Agrarian change during this period remains very little studied in comparison with other continents. Many works on African history take their point of departure in a timeless description of precolonial agriculture. Agriculture is then often described on the basis of late 19th- and early-20th-century ethnographic observations, and it is common to assume that little had changed since the introduction of farming. The few works that carry the title “Agrarian history of” or “Agricultural history of” different regions in Africa are, in contrast to similar works covering countries and regions in, for example, Europe and Asia, mainly short papers or pamphlets that focus on either colonial development or sketch a program toward a precolonial agricultural history. The precolonial agricultural history of sub-Saharan Africa is a true interdisciplinary endeavor, and the ideal researcher would have to master Arabic and Portuguese texts, agronomy, palaeobotany, archaeology, linguistics, and oral history. It is to a large extent on the cutting edge between two or more of these specialties that interesting new results have emerged. Works that give a significant empirical contribution to the understanding of agriculture in the period and region under study are included in this article.

In East Africa, here taken to comprise present-day Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, the term “settler” usually describes white people with livelihoods dependent on farming and closely related activities during the colonial period. Most settlers arrived in East Africa in the short time frame from circa 1900 to 1960. Although always small in number, settlers had significant and enduring impacts. The impetus for migration came from “push” and “pull” factors, working hand-in-hand in ways that could be hard to disentangle. The three-layered racial hierarchy of white, Indian, and African, as well as white identity, was highly politically charged. Settler farmers were generally the most conservative members of the white population, which also included traders, missionaries, and government officers. Settlers included wealthy aristocratic landowners in the Kenyan “White Highlands.” However, most settlers were undercapitalized, inexperienced, and farming unsuitable land. For some, survival was heavily reliant on an external income, such as an army pension. Reconciling settler ambitions of domination and self-rule, requiring African land and cheap labor, with the trusteeship of Africans supposedly undertaken by the colonial administration, was an inherent and intractable contradiction of colonial rule. Settlers bought into and perpetuated paternalistic versions of colonial racism as enunciated through the “white man’s burden” and “civilizing mission.” The heterogeneous settler communities became even more economically and socially diversified after World War II. Despite class, gender, and a significant town-country divide, settlers were united by racial solidarity. Their leadership tended to be English. The settler culture included beliefs and behaviors to subjugate the colonized, including a brutal violence inherent in interracial relations, and a premise that Africans were children requiring settlers and the state to act in loco parentis, plus the continuation of class attributes from Europe. Settlers considered maintaining white prestige, which also sought to instill among Africans a sense of inferiority and dependence on whites, to be their best protection from numerically dominant Africans. Apart from settler criticism that missions contributed to detribalization, religion is rarely mentioned in writing by or about settlers. Aristocratic and upper-class settlers have attracted disproportionate attention, marginalizing the large majority of settlers for whom life was economically very insecure and mundane. Although African agency and resistance to colonialism generally, and white settler domination specifically, was abundant, African voices and lived experiences have also been neglected in settler writings and literature on colonialism. There are more whites in East Africa today than at any time during the colonial period. Their lives reveal continuities with the colonial period as well as changes. They maintain standards of living far above national averages. Some possess considerable landholdings and business assets. Many settlers and their descendants were eager to reinvent themselves as “White Africans” in the newly independent states. Post-independence, by far the largest number of settlers and settler descendants live in Kenya, but, throughout East Africa, they are now dwarfed by other white residents.

ABSTRACT The post-apartheid South African cultural landscape is characterised by complex and contradictory dynamics. On one hand, it is a space where ongoing contestations, anti-racist struggles, and resistance against dominant ideologies persist, challenging the prevailing ways of thinking and perceiving the public sphere. On the other hand, this landscape is also susceptible to political manipulation and serves as a battleground for various class interests, power struggles, and attempts to control the state apparatus. This article employs a decolonising gaze theory to examine qualitative data collected from the former Groenkloof Nature Reserve to shed light on the challenges associated with preserving historical statues and monuments. Additionally, it seeks to understand the motivations behind the construction of statues and monuments commemorating former struggle icons at Groenkloof, despite the obstacles encountered. The findings of this study reveal that the presence of Groenkloof statues and monuments is an integral part of an ongoing resistance movement and contestation of colonial history. These monuments serve as a means of reconciling the past and the present, facilitating connections and exchanges, while also exposing the ruptures, struggles, and complexities that continue to shape South Africa’s deeply intertwined history.

ABSTRACT Solid waste management is a global concern that has been handled in several ways in different parts of the world. In cities of the Global North, measures meant to prevent or minimise solid waste generation and its associated challenges are based on the waste management hierarchy, whereas in cities in the Global South, the active involvement of the public and private sectors is well documented. Existing studies cover practices of solid waste collection, reuse, recycling and landfilling by private formal and private informal actors. The term informal actors has often been used to refer to itinerant waste buyers, waste pickers and recyclers. Local African institutions existing in marketplaces – such as women known as ‘market queens’ or ‘commodity queens’ and market chairmen, whose management roles are not necessarily geared towards livelihood creation – have, however, been neglected. This lack of attention to the roles of local institutions in solid waste management potentially undermines efforts aimed at waste minimisation and the achievement of policy measures such as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Sustainable Development Goal 11) that seeks to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Hence, based on the cases of the Kaneshie, Kantamanto and Madina markets in Accra, empirical evidence of the role that local market institutions play in solid waste management is provided. Based on this, an argument is made for removing structural barriers impeding local market institutions’ participation in existing systems for managing urban market environments.

ABSTRACT In 1989, Jean-François Bayart published the now foundational text, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, introducing the Cameroonian idiom ‘la politique du ventre’ (the politics of the belly), which draws on the idea that having a belly in the African context connotes not only wealth but also power. Lynn Thomas adopted Bayart’s idiom for her Politics of the Womb (2003, 3–4), flipping the idiom to explore ‘the particular capacities and powers attached to the female belly or the womb to demonstrate the centrality of reproductive struggles to African history’. While the politics of the belly confronts the propensity of political figures to hoard resources and the politics of the womb demonstrated young women’s autonomy over their own bodies, the politics of the penis expose how former South African president Jacob Zuma utilised his masculinity as a tool to fortify power and material wealth. From this vantage point, this paper explores the ‘politics of the penis’ that characterised Zuma’s presidency, deploying this phallic idiom to examine the consolidation of Zulu political tribalism, Zuma’s public displays of masculinit(ies) and heavily sexualised politics.