Focusing on the first decades of the twentieth century but acknowledging longer-term patterns of circulation, this paper discusses how cattle, historically occupying important meanings and roles in the lives of African agropastoralists, was commodified and marketed in southern Mozambique just as Lourenço Marques became the new capital of Mozambique. Highlighting the relations that consolidated between the capital and surrounding cattle-rich areas in a period marked by cattle disease but also the First World War and the Great Depression, the paper looks at the role of different agents and bodies involved in the emerging beef market. Ultimately, the paper shows how African agropastoralists, the main cattle producers in the region, resisted these conditions and tried to engage with markets on their own terms, even in the face of their dwindling control over the different factors that influenced the size and quality of their herds.

This article analyzes the transformation of an image of ritual violence on the Kenyan coast from the sixteenth century to the present. Drawing on a range of sources, it shows how understandings of “mung'aro” — a ritual of senior male initiation among Mijikenda-speaking peoples — changed as it became an object of inquiry for generations of missionaries, explorers, colonial administrators, local intellectuals, and foreign historians and anthropologists. In the mid-twentieth century, mung'aro became a key feature of Mijikenda traditions of origin in Singwaya, but in such a way that it reversed the direction of a specific form of ritual violence described in nineteenth-century traditions. By focusing on the transposition and recombination of ritual motifs across practical and discursive modalities (namely, ritual and narrative), this article offers a new approach to “the limits of invention” regarding traditions of origin.

To provide protection against harm caused by defective, unsafe products and to promote product safety, the law of product liability has developed as a specialized area of the law of delict (tort). The vexing question is, who should bear such liability? This contribution interrogates the notorious EU development risk defence, which exonerates manufacturers that meet certain stringent requirements for undiscoverable development risks in products that consequently inflict harm on consumers. In particular, it considers the election by South Africa, which recently adopted a “strict” product liability regime with the introduction of the Consumer Protection Act 2008, not to adopt such a defence. The purpose of this contribution is to consider the nature and scope of the development risk defence as contained in article 7(e) of the European Union (EU) Product Liability Directive and to determine whether it was prudent for South Africa to steer clear of incorporating a similar defence in its new statutory product liability regime.

A gathering of African intellectuals in 2016—Ateliers de la Pensée I [Workshops of Thought]—aimed to be a “renewal of French-speaking Afro-diasporic critical thinking; it also served as an impetus for generating new perspectives concerning … Africa’s future” (2). Somewhat ironically, the participants—some of whose essays appear in To Write the Africa World—seem to have widely accepted one key idea as a significant part of their thinking: double consciousness. First clearly articulated more than a century before by W.E.B. Dubois, that awareness reverberates through many of their twenty-one collected articles. Yet only one among them, Hourya Bentouhami, actually mentions “DuBois’s reflections” on the subject, describing them “as a strange and painful cognitive disjunction … in the dialogue of the soul with itself”(125). Another contributor, Benaouda Lebdai, instead credits Sudanese born British writer Jamal Maljoub with integrating “his status of being double” as part of his authorial identity (53). Other writers of essays included in the book merely assume an understanding of the concept as fundamental to their thought and, perhaps more importantly, in conveying a concept of Africa to the wider world.

Certainty is a cornerstone of every criminal justice system. In instances where controversy arises as to the application of any law, it is essential for it to be addressed promptly. Contrary to this need for certainty, there is judicial ambiguity regarding the mens rea for the offence of attempted murder in Botswana. There are cases which hold that the mens rea required is a specific intention to kill, and that nothing else suffices. However, some cases hold that an intention to cause grievous harm and recklessness are also sufficient. Unfortunately, the Court of Appeal, the apex court in Botswana, has made decisions that support each of these divergent positions. This article addresses the controversy of the mens rea for attempted murder in Botswana and argues that the Court of Appeal should resolve the issue by specifically overruling some of its previous decisions.

In the African Studies literature “transformation” emerges as a capacious discursive field and project of state power. In this Keyword article, I move from postindependence questions of transformative social change to violence as a transformative project of the nation-state, examining its imbrication with questions of transition and state aftermaths. I analyze transformation as a promise of worldmaking around horizons of the “post”: postapartheid, postconflict, and postcolonial. I then consider textures of transformative urbanism in changing African cities, and analyze processes implicated in reclaiming forms of discard, positing transformation as recuperation. Transformation is ultimately a multidirectional conceptual field capable of remaking personal worlds and theoretical orientations.