Tuberculosis transmission in South Africa is marked by significant disparities across gender, race, and class, with Black working-class men bearing a disproportionate burden. An eighteen-month ethnographic study in Modimolle utilizes Northern Sotho concepts of personhood to analyze the sociocultural structuring of tuberculosis infections. Findings indicate that men perform masculinity through ritualized sharing of alcohol and tobacco in male-dominated spaces. Although these practices promote comradeship and solidarity, they also increase the risk of tuberculosis transmission. Effective interventions should address the moral values underpinning masculine sociability to inform culturally relevant, gender-sensitive strategies aimed at reducing health disparities. By grounding tuberculosis risk in local understandings of masculinity, the article contributes to masculinity studies and, drawing from medical anthropology and sociology, deepens knowledge of infectious disease in global health and African studies.

Women are being appointed as cabinet ministers across West Africa in increasing numbers, albeit predominantly to lead “soft” rather than “hard” portfolios. The experiences of women cabinet ministers from five West African countries—The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria—help to nuance our understanding of women in cabinets around the world. Women cabinet ministers from these countries reveal a broader conception of “paths to power” taken by women ministers, a concern for gender parity in their own ministries rather than in cabinets, and self-perceptions of the impacts of important substantive and symbolic representation on their terms in office.

This article examines the formation of the first Luanda elites by exploring the trajectories of the members of the family configuration established by the matrimony formed by Juan de Viloria and Isabel de Oliveira in the early 1590s. By analyzing the evolution of the intricate web of interests that structured the Viloria family configuration between the 1590s and 1720s, the article probes how the early Luanda elites generated and mobilized social, economic, political, or symbolic resources that allowed them to establish ongoing partnerships with African, metropolitan, and Luso-Brazilian actors.

This essay examines the challenges and possibilities of mobilizing the African Diaspora as the African Union’s “6th Region,” drawing on the author’s diplomatic experience as Ghana’s Ambassador to Brazil accredited to twelve South American states. Using the Sankofa symbol as a conceptual framework, the paper explores the historical complexity of the African Diaspora, distinguishing among multiple diasporic formations shaped by migration, exile, and the transatlantic slave trade. It assesses institutional tensions between diaspora communities, civil society organizations, and formal structures of the African Union, in relation to the Pan-African Congresses and nation-state representation, arguing for stronger transnational engagement, institutional clarity, and sustained educational and cultural exchange to strengthen Global African solidarity.

Dans cet article, nous abordons la connaissance géographique de l’Afrique centrale aux 16e–18e siècles. Notre attention est portée sur les références aux lacs Zembre et Zaïre dans les sources écrites et cartographiques des 16e et 17e siècles. L’hypothèse avancée ici est qu’il s’agirait des lacs Tumba et Maï-Ndombe (ex-“Léopold II”) situés en amont de la région comprise entre le fleuve Congo et le Bas-Kasaï, en République démocratique du Congo. Malheureusement, ces indications géographiques ont été perdues par les différents auteurs anciens qui associaient ces lacs au Nil et à la région est-africaine. Ce nouvel éclairage sur cette énigme cartographique permet de souligner que l’espace géographique compris entre le confluent du fleuve Congo et la rivière Kasaï était connu au royaume Kongo, puis en Europe, avant les explorations de l’époque moderne qui ont conduit à la colonisation de l’Afrique centrale.

African cities are sites of intense contrast and contradiction. For urban residents, they are defined by opportunity and desperation, mobility and immobility, poverty and wealth, history and innovation, organization and disorder. For those who navigate these complexities on a daily basis the contradiction is often the rule. It doesn’t necessarily exclude or separate; it often enables in ways that defy the planning logics, development models, and academic theories of Western observers, international organizations, or bilateral donors. For those who live at the extremes, it seems like these contradictions represent “two worlds”—a physical manifestation of the extreme income inequality in which residents at different ends of the socioeconomic spectrum operate in spheres completely distinct from one another. If the poorest urban residents cannot afford to or don’t feel comfortable in elite spaces, the wealthiest can easily find themselves insulated from the realities of the streets, separated by a pane of glass, the comfort of air conditioning, and the sound of a radio or TV.

This article examines the distinction between dizi 弟子 and menren 門人 in early Chinese texts, with particular attention paid to the Lunyu 論語 (Analects of Confucius) and the broader Ru 儒 (“Confucian” or “Classicist”) tradition. Whether these terms designate identical or distinct groups of disciples has long been a matter of debate, beginning with early medieval commentaries and culminating in the interpretation that they refer to “first-” and “second-generation” followers. Advancing this discussion, the article offers a systematic analysis of menren across early Chinese sources and presents substantial, previously overlooked evidence supporting a meaningful distinction between the two designations. In doing so, it sheds new light on early conceptions of Confucius’s following and on the social organization of the Ru tradition more broadly. This article argues that menren are best understood not as “second-generation” disciples, but as “second-rank” students who, while occupying a formally subordinate position within an extended circle of adherents, nevertheless remained closely affiliated with their teacher.