African newspapers have been the subject of scrutiny from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. However, comparably little attention has been paid to the early visual archives produced by these presses. This essay mines the pages of West African Pilot and other newspapers to explore the genesis of the practice and profession of press photography in Lagos, Nigeria. Over the course of three defining historical moments, press photographs became a record and consequence of the ways that professional, legal, and political contours of visual freedoms were defined in an increasingly anti-colonial city and nation-state.

In Nairobi, water rights emerge not through legal recognition alone but through relationships with infrastructurally powerful actors. Residents must engage with specific individuals across institutional levels who control urban water distribution. This explains neighborhood disparities in water access and why some residents secure better supplies than others. The fragmentation of water control challenges traditional legal and normative frameworks of water rights. Understanding how rights are embedded in everyday socio-material relationships is crucial for comprehending how people establish water access and thereby concretize their right to water in practice.

It is widely accepted that social class in Africa is defined not just by economic metrics but also by social perceptions and individual identifications. Yet less has been written about the mechanisms through which people form these class perceptions and identifications. This article explores how the sociopolitical and physical architecture of schools affects people’s understanding of social class. Using participatory methods with students complemented by architectural studies, focus group discussions, and interviews, Manful shows how young Ghanaians find and place themselves in social classes and other hierarchies through their perceptions and usage of school buildings.

Associational life in Cape Town is a mechanism for migrants from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to find belonging in South Africa. We trace the internal politics of associational membership from 2000 to 2019 to illustrate how membership in eastern Congolese associations has minimized community ties to other foreign Africans and South Africans. An increase in election violence in the DRC, divided into pro- and anti-combattant camps, and the threat of xenophobic violence in South Africa have led to a closing of ranks that presumes only other eastern Congolese can be trusted. In tracing gender, class and language cleavages, we find that eastern DRC associational life reproduces the xenophobia associational membership is intended to ameliorate.

Since the late 2010s, Rwanda has advertised its Visit Rwanda logo on the jerseys of prominent European football teams and has built new sports stadiums to host international sports competitions. Such strategies reflect the practice of sportswashing, which refers to the utilization of sports by political actors to gain global legitimacy while diverting attention from unjust processes occurring in their home countries. Dubinsky analyzes the effectiveness of Rwanda’s sportswashing through the concept of authoritarian image management, arguing that the mutual interests shared between authoritarian and Western actors facilitate the country’s sportswashing, despite the critiques it attracts.

Recent disruptions in technology, geopolitics, and the environment have contested what it means to be human, a source of social and political anxiety about the future. Taking inspiration from African and African diaspora writers and scholars, Lee attends to theories of the human that emerge from contemporary experiences on the African continent. The essay provides a countercanon by centering debates about the human and their attendant attempts to transcend it (more-than-human, posthuman) in African experiences and knowledges. Doing so offers alternative conceptions of human–nonhuman relations that unravel the co-imbrication of colonialism, capitalism, and anti-Black racism that undergird the modern condition.

Towards the end of his book, African Philosophical Adventures, John Murungi laments the injurious impact of Western epistemological hegemony on the humanity and well-being of non-Western peoples and societies, especially Africans. He describes the ensuing situation as a crisis about what it means to be called human or to have the right to exist as human in the twenty-first century: Today, human rights are in a state of crisis and this crisis is fundamentally the crisis of being human. … [The] planetary mode of being has fallen under the tyrannical regime of Euro-Western anthropology. The voice of African anthropology, as is the case with other non-Euro-Western voices of anthropology, remains muted. Africans, particularly, have been reduced to beggars in matters of hermeneutics and understanding of being human. They have been compelled and are even today compelled to look up to Euro-West for assistance in self-understanding. In matters that pertain to self-understanding they look for foreign aid. …Having been voided of what they [Africans] are and of the ability for self-understanding they are compelled to look outside themselves to make sense of themselves. (142–43)

In his book Seeing Like a State, James Scott writes, “We have repeatedly observed the natural and social failures of thin, formulaic simplifications imposed through the agency of state power” (1998, 309). State and top-down planning lacks mētis, or the common sense and practical experience that people on the ground possess of their everyday environments. Instead, Scott proposes a focus on practical knowledge, which “depends on an exceptionally close and astute observation of the environment” (1998, 324).