The emergence of the Indian Ocean region as an important geo-political arena is being studied across a range of disciplines. Yet while the Indian Ocean has figured in Swahili studies and analyses of East and Southern African diasporic communities, it has remained outside the mainstream of African Studies. This introduction provides an overview of emerging trends in the rich field of Indian Ocean studies and draws out their implications for scholars of Africa. The focus of the articles is on one strand in the study of the Indian Ocean, namely the role of print and visual culture in constituting public spheres and nationalisms in, across and between the societies around the Ocean.

The themes addressed unfold between Southern and East Africa and India as well as along the African coast from KwaZulu-Natal through Zanzibar and Tanzania to the Arab world. This introduction surveys debates on print culture, newspapers and nationalism in African Studies and demonstrates how the articles in the volume support and extend these areas of study. It draws out the broader implications of these debates for the historiographies of East African studies, Southern African studies, debates on Indian nationalism and Islam.

In post-colonial Namibia public memory of the liberation war prioritizes the armed struggle from exile. This master narrative of national liberation, having become the new nation's foundation myth, legitimizes the power of the post-colonial SWAPO elite as the sole, heroic liberators from apartheid and colonialism. It has not remained uncontested, however. The article develops the complex transfigurations of liberation war memory, culture and nationalism in post-colonial Namibia around a discussion of two memory sites. The National Heroes’ Acre near Windhoek, inaugurated in 2002, appears as the cast-in-stone nationalist master narrative, aimed at homogenizing the multi-faceted agencies during the liberation war, whereas the Heroes’ Memorial Shrine at Eenhana, constructed in 2007, expressly recognizes the heterogeneity of war-time experiences. The Eenhana site further gives visual expression to recent Namibian unity-in-diversity discourses, which have followed, and partly been running alongside, a period of ideational emphasis on nation building, based on a national culture supposedly forged through the nation's joint struggle against oppression and colonialism. I argue that the social processes of remembering and forgetting political resistance, on the one hand, and those of cultural reinvention in the new nation on the other, are entangled, and that both registers of imagining the Namibian nation have shifted since the country's independence in 1990.

Despite its manifest, if largely undocumented, histories of menacing violence and perilous politics, the thrust of popular memory in the former apartheid bantustan of KaNgwane insists that it was a peaceful, even apolitical, place. In a contemporary South African memorial culture that idealizes memories of victimization by (and resistance to) apartheid and its political violence, why would some in KaNgwane persistently narrate the past through tropes of peaceful order and disavowals of the political? Are these mnemonic effacements in KaNgwane best conceived of as forms of forgetting? This article challenges such a proposition. First, it recovers the hitherto unrecognized politics and violence in KaNgwane, in part (and paradoxically) out of the very same narratives that deny such histories. Second, it explores the dialectical co-implication of remembering and forgetting, and of memory and history, in KaNgwane's supposed anamnesis. And third, it proposes that the occlusions and assurances of memory in KaNgwane are structured by a localized semiotics in which politics is retrospectively signified by order and restraint, and negated by disorder and revolt. In this ‘memory work’, KaNgwane's past is anaesthetized of violence, and heroism is recovered not from rehearsals of victimization and resistance, but from memories of pacified civility instead.

This article examines how the Gujarati-speaking Muslim trading class in South(ern) Africa was linked as a reading public through a newspaper, Indian Views, which had been founded in early twentieth-century Durban in opposition to Mahatma Gandhi's Indian Opinion. Under the editorship of Moosa Meer (1929–63) it was a conduit for sustaining existing social networks as well as offering common narratives that galvanized an idea of community embracing its geographically disparate readership. Between 1956 and 1963, Zuleikha Mayat, a self-described housewife born in Potchefstroom but married to a medical doctor in Durban whom she ‘met’ through the newspaper, wrote a weekly column that represented one of the first instances of a South African Muslim woman offering her ideas in print. She spoke across gender divides and articulated a moral social vision that accounted for both local and diasporic concerns. This article provides a narrative account of how Mayat came to write for Indian Views, a story that underscores the personal linkages within this diasporic community and, more broadly, how literacy and the family enterprises that constituted local print capitalism provided a material means of sustaining existing networks of village and family. It also reveals the role of newspaper as an interface between public and private spaces in helping to create a community of linguistically related readers who imagined themselves as part of a larger print culture.

There is an assumption that the photographic iconography of the South African struggle against apartheid is universally known and familiar. It is however dominated by certain tropes and categories that obscure the many complexities and nuances of its origins, its practitioners and its effects. This article focuses on one photographer, Omar Badsha, and explores his own narrations about city and family life in the Indian Ocean port city of Durban, and the artistic and political trajectories in which he was embedded that gave rise to his own photographic work and the organization of other photographers into the collective known as Afrapix. Badsha grew up in ‘the imperial ghetto’ of Grey Street in Durban within a rich legacy of radical political and cultural debate, becoming an artist and later a trade union organizer. It is the imperatives of the latter work that pushed him into photography as a medium of literacy. Many of his own photographs started as a personal visual diary when he re-explored the spaces of his childhood as an adult, and in the process became increasingly sensitized to the parallels between political and religious ritual. In particular he was fascinated by the dynamics between the leaders and the led, and the techniques and theatricalities of the different genres of mobilization. His work and the multiple forces and influences at play suggest that there were (and are) plural and competing aesthetic regimes during (and after) apartheid that are little recognized, mostly due to a deeply entrenched (and ongoing) separation between the domains of aesthetics and politics in South Africa and elsewhere outside the African continent.

In this article, I argue that the praise of legal and political analysts who perceive Rwanda's gacaca courts as a model of locally grounded and culturally relevant transitional justice is unfounded without consideration of the broader power dynamics in which justice is delivered. Drawing on life history interviews with 37 Rwandan peasants resident in the south-west of the country, I argue that the claims of the Rwandan government that its gacaca courts are promoting peace and reconciliation must also assess the impact of local justice mechanisms on those subject to its demands, namely ordinary people. In the case of Rwanda's gacaca courts, local-level analysis illuminates a darker and largely unexamined aspect of transitional justice – the playing out of local power dynamics and the social and political inequalities masked by the pursuit of justice and reconciliation. My study cautions against a wholesale endorsement of the gacaca courts as an effective and legitimate form of transitional justice. Instead, it is a mechanism of state power than works to reinforce the political power of the ruling RPF and to ply international audiences with the idea that Rwanda is ‘a nation rehabilitated’ from ‘the scourge of genocide’.

This essay presents Lanrewaju Adepọju, whose work and ideas have been very influential on contemporary Yoruba poetry, as a local intellectual. In estimating his contribution to modernising ewì, an open poetic form that inhabits the interface between the oral and the written, the essay draws on biographical information, an extensive personal interview and relevant textual illustration. It correlates Adepọju's vision of poetry with the development of his creative consciousness and draws attention to aspects of his poetics and politically implicated poetry that deserve closer engagement. The article also offers a translation of a sample poem by Adepọju, while the online version of the essay offers more of his poems as well as an interview.

Intra-state conflicts in Africa have been attributed to various factors such as the end of the Cold War, globalization, sustained population growth, environmental scarcity and violent youth culture. Extracts from these dominant global perspectives, collocated and mixed with the economic crisis thesis at the national level, constitute the mainstream analytical scheme for understanding the proliferation of communal conflicts in Nigeria. However, the relevance of horizontal inequality in accounting for the multitude of communal conflicts in Nigeria has been glossed over by scholars. This article highlights local narratives of inequalities and how they provide impetus for communal conflicts in Aguleri and Umuleri communities of south-eastern Nigeria.

This essay presents a history of the mikiliste, the high-living bon vivant who travels to Europe and is a central figure in Kinois urban mythology. It looks in particular at the highly theatrical exchanges engaged in by the mikiliste, which relate especially to music patronage and to designer clothing. I show how these exchanges have evolved over time, both shaping and being shaped by the political economy of Kinshasa. The essay shows how such aesthetic performances should not be discussed in isolation from wider political-economic considerations. Those who participate in economies of prestige must be connected to a material base, and the ruling class, with their access to the resources of the interior, have become ever more important participants in the mikiliste rituals of largesse. Recently, the violent contestation of mikiliste exchange, both in Europe and in Kinshasa, indicates that such moments of largesse may be involved in reproducing political-economic relations in the Congolese capital.

The collapse of the mining company La Générale des Carrières et des Mines (GECAMINES) in the 1990s forced many unemployed workers in Lubumbashi to look at alternative means of survival. The post-GECAMINES era was characterized by acute economic crisis at a time of rapid population growth and increasing urban poverty. The object of this article is threefold: to demonstrate how Lubumbashi residents resorted to agricultural activities within and around the city; to identify reasons for success and failure from three case studies; and to categorize the types of agriculture that emerge. Data were collected by means of semi-structured interviews, in-depth questions and observation. One hundred farming households were selected and interviewed between November 2004 and March 2005. Data were analysed using thematic content analysis for qualitative aspects and SPSS for the quantitative information. Though the living conditions of 75 per cent of urban farmers declined despite the practice of urban agriculture, these conditions might have worsened without it. However, 20 per cent of the households in the sample succeeded in stabilizing their living conditions, even though they were unable to alleviate poverty completely. A few farmers (5 per cent) became food-secure through the practice of urban agriculture.

This article examines the history of two Indian newspapers, Tanganyika Opinion and Tanganyika Herald, to demonstrate how business considerations provided both the opportunity for East African Indians to make public arguments and the central limitation on the arguments that could be made. Founded on the inspiration of mass nationalist action through a territorial hartal, the Tanganyika Opinion and later the Herald blazed the trails that articulated ‘Greater India’ among the Anglo-Gujarati reading public in Tanganyika. But growing conservative sentiments within this vulnerable minority, along with rising sectarian division, reduced both the patronage and audience for a singular ‘anti-colonial’ politics by the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, as a marginal print node along the Indian Ocean littoral, the Opinion and Herald came to rely on an opportunistic mixture of wire services and consular propaganda to keep abreast of regional and international news developments. Ultimately, the shrinking market for Anglo-Gujarati newspapers and rising opportunities in Swahili-language journals had sealed the doom of these and similar Indian newspapers by the time ‘African’ political independence arrived in the early 1960s.

The formal labour markets and economies of many cities in sub-Saharan Africa have been very weak for decades and this has led to significant adaptations in the nature of the livelihoods of most urban households. The lack of formal and reasonably paid jobs has also had a strong impact on population growth in cities, although this is often not recognized. This article reviews some of these trends and illustrates them with case study material from Harare, Zimbabwe. There, many urban residents have increasingly struggled to get by and their perceptions of the city and their future within it show a strong negative trend. Links to rural areas and the possibility of making livelihoods there in the future have become more important. These adaptations build on the long history of rural–urban linkages in sub-Saharan Africa but contemporary practices, including patterns of circular migration, are influenced by the harsh realities of African urban economies. The decisions and future plans of some migrants may not, therefore, fit with their aspirations – and the degree and nature of this mismatch are influenced by factors such as gender, age and position in the urban household, and links to rural areas. It is suggested that it helps to analyse the consequent migration patterns in terms of a framework in which migrants’ decisions to stay in the city or leave it are conceptualized as either willing or reluctant.

This article primarily concerns the intersection of the changing management of death with the problems and possibilities presented by the growing mobility of the African, and specifically Xhosa-speaking, population in South Africa from the latter half of the twentieth century to the present day. I am interested in how shifts in the practices and beliefs around death are mediated by individuals, households and businesses who have an historical affinity towards movement, particularly across what has been called the ‘rural–urban nexus’. In what ways has this more mobile orientation influenced the perception of rites and responsibilities surrounding death? And how have more mobile ‘ways of dying’ in turn created new subjectivities and new ways in which to imagine relations between the living and the dead? I argue that African funeral directors based in Cape Town and the rural areas of the Eastern Cape – a steadily more numerous and prominent group of entrepreneurs – are well-placed to shape these processes, through their role as cultural mediators and technological innovators, and their particular emphasis on maintaining a flow of bodies (both dead and alive) between rural and urban areas. I focus on two aspects of contemporary South African funerals – embalming and exhumations – that are suggestive of how the migration dynamic, and the continuing demands from mobile mourners for innovations via the funeral industry, have encouraged new perceptions of and relations to the dead body.

Brand marketing in its latest global advances offers ideologies of public participation and the audience–‘provider’ relationship that many in the developing world are finding compelling, even when consumer capitalism fails to produce its promised rewards immediately. Strategies of ‘branding’ are being explored in combination with older performance strategies, with new syncretic branded arenas emerging as a result. In Africa, music and dance have always been important for establishing certain arenas and mediating transactions within them. In the era of post-independence nationalism, ‘traditional’ dances were itemized and made more disciplined and spectacular to give new states an aura of inclusiveness, rigour and historical depth. As the image of a powerful African state declines, these same dance traditions are being hitched to commercial brands, and to the globalized consumerist/entreprenurial dream. This article considers the Senator National Cultural Extravaganza, an annual traditional music-and-dance competition sponsored by East Africa Breweries Ltd, which requires participants to compose ‘local’ songs and dances in praise of Senator Extra Lager. It focuses on the spatial and temporal architectures of events and the way these channel, and are complicated by, the energies and significances of dance. The ‘textbook’ brand–consumer relationship does not, it is argued, survive wholly intact.

This essay considers the role of Hindi films in urban Tanzania in writing new chronologies of Indian Ocean world history. Examining films and movie theatres through overlapping local, national and transnational lenses, the article contributes to our understandings of the encounter between the Indian diaspora and nationalism in East Africa, and extends the history of Indian Ocean world connections into the second half of the twentieth century. In order to escape the historiographical dialectic between nation and diaspora which splits scholarship on Hindi films overseas, cinema needs to be denationalized, and everyday social histories of urban cinema halls can then be framed within the Indian Ocean world. To do so successfully, however, we must challenge scholarship which asserts the collapse of this world in the early modern or colonial period (at the latest), in order to extend an Indian Ocean scale to capture the vibrant twentieth-century creation of a regional popular culture. The history of Bombay films in urban Tanzania thus enables a viewing of the transnational production of culture, and the ways in which cross-cultural flows are part of the construction of important categories like race and nationalism across the history of East Africa.

This article analyses the historical roots of decentralization, a policy which is presented in the development world as the miracle cure to Third World evils. The text is based on the current literature on the topic as well as field research carried out in Mali in the Office du Niger region, which, already in the colonial period, represented a particular decentralization challenge. It offers a critical perspective on the concept of decentralization, which some trace back to the Middle Ages, and examines colonial experiences. How can the Malian state, inherited from the colonial state, decentralize everything whilst adopting the policy according to which the lands of the central delta of the Niger have been state-owned property since 1935? The aim is to show the analogy between problems encountered by the French colonial state and those that plague the Malian post-colonial state, whilst guarding against the sirens of a false authenticity reeking of neo-traditionalism.

This article focuses on a number of Ga spirit mediums located in Teshi, a neighbourhood of the Ghanaian capital, Accra. These individuals host foreign spirits from areas north of Ga territory, such as the modern Ashanti, Gonja and Dagomba regions. Such encounters of cross-cultural spirit possession have often been analysed in the scholarly literature as an embedded history of contact between peoples. These histories of ethnic or cultural contact – which inform cross-cultural spirit possession – are constantly re-imagined by spirit mediums and the broader community they service. How this re-imagination occurs, in conjunction with developments in the contemporary political and public spheres, is a theme that remains understudied. The perceived shifts in the contours of ethnic alliances and rivalries on a national scale, against the backdrop of modern Ghanaian party politics and the ever-changing relationships between the Ga and their northern neighbours, led to a thematic reconfiguration of possession practices in 2004. This ethnographic vignette details how spirit mediums were able to apply the ethnic and conceptual cultural divisions intrinsic to this corpus of ritual practice to a critique of national political events, producing a commentary, through possession, on the changing discourses on ethnicity and ethnic relations in the Ghanaian state.

This article is a preliminary discussion of the circulation of textual material in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Zanzibar. Three main contentions are made in the article. First, that this corpus of texts constituted a public sphere that was intimately connected with the western Indian Ocean, primarily Arabia, but with branches to Egypt where much of the material was printed. Second, that the transition from manuscript mode of transmission to printed texts upheld the same principles for circulation. Finally, the article also points to how the use of this scriptural material as a basis for Islamic learning was expanded into new types of reading, reference, interpretation and copying. The article examines cases from Zanzibar, both manuscripts and printed books, from the point of view of the lifespan of the texts.

Rural–urban migration and networks are fundamental for many livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa. Remittances in cash and kind provide additional income, enhance food security and offer access to viable resources in both rural and urban areas. Migration allows the involved households to benefit from price differences between rural and urban areas. In this contribution, I demonstrate that rural–urban networks not only contribute to poverty alleviation and security, but also further socio-economic stratification. This aspect has been ignored or neglected by most scholars and development planners. Using ethnographic data from Namibia, I have adopted a translocal perspective on migration and stratification, focusing on the resulting impact in rural areas where modern urban forms of stratification, induced by education and income from wage labour, are on the increase.