Using new interpretations of oral traditions written in older documents, this article changes the origin of complex societies and larger kingdoms. Showing that the Kingdom of Kongo, presently believed to be the origin of large kingdoms actually achieved it status by conquering an existing kingdom, called Mpemba, the author reassigns both the date and origin point of kingdom level polities there. The author further points to new interpretations of documentary evidence to demonstrate that Mwene Muji and Kulembembe, located to the east and south of Kongo were also early large scale polities at a date as early as Kongo.

In rural Uganda, pregnant women struggle to access clinical care because of limited access to transportation and other barriers to travel, including delays in the maintenance and modernization of rural road infrastructure. This article analyses one community-led effort to address these gaps by providing free motorbike transport to pregnant women during labour. The programme is considered alongside broader trends in global health funding, in particular the rise of ‘appropriate technologies’, or the promotion of cheap, adaptive and flexible interventions that stand in contrast to an earlier focus in international health on building and modernizing state infrastructures for all. Drawing on anthropological studies of infrastructure, this article explores how qualities such as flexibility, improvisation and collaboration may radically expand healthcare infrastructure while also creating conditions of uneven use and inconsistencies of access that expose the limitations of targeted interventions. In its focus on the political and relational nature of infrastructures, this article highlights how healthcare projects are dependent as much on access to ‘hard’ healthcare resources (ambulances, medical technology) as they are on historically rooted, deeply localized and unevenly accessed webs of relations that shape access and connection to such resources, and that extend beyond clinical spaces.

In this article I endorse the contention that humour presents a window onto the complicated social relationships and consciousness of speakers and listeners. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, I observe that improvised joking and the telling of standard jokes have proliferated over the past three decades. I suggest that we can understand both forms of humour as bids to construct intimate interpersonal relations, based on mutuality, in times of increased precarity. There are, nonetheless, important differences between these forms of humour. In Bushbuckridge, a long tradition of spontaneous and improvised joking between certain categories of persons stood at the very heart of kinship. The association of such joking with intimacy was evident in the general rule that one was only allowed to joke, particularly about sexual matters, with persons one was allowed to see naked. By engaging in such joking, villagers reinforced mutuality with kin, upon whom they relied for social security. By contrast, the (re)telling of standard jokes is a fairly recent practice. Unlike in joking between kin, the original composers of the jokes are anonymous and the butt of the jokes are fictitious third persons. This insulates listeners from direct embarrassment and the teller from retaliation. These jokes were told between male peers, and commented on the diminished status of men in contemporary times. By telling standard jokes, men provoked ‘laugher out of place’, in a bid to re-establish sociality in moments of distress and extend mutuality beyond the domains of kinship networks.

The notion of ‘concrete Sape’ constitutes the central heuristic tool of this study. Inspired by the Congolese elegant art of dressing (La Sape) – a form of ostentatious elegance in contexts of precarity – it refers here to strategies of urban display and the simulation of state order through spectacular constructions in contexts marked by war or post-crisis. Much like the body of the sapeur, which masks social fragility under the guise of appearance, the concrete-clad city showcases an image of an urban modernity that hides inequalities, political instability and the structural weaknesses of the state. This metaphor enables a joint analysis of the logics of simulacra, extraversion, violence and legitimation at play in the political economy of concrete. This study is rooted in a comparative ethnography of the post-crisis real-estate boom observed in Kinshasa and Brazzaville since the 2010s. It combines direct observations, a photographic corpus of public and private buildings, participation in real-estate fairs, and over thirty semi-structured interviews and informal conversations. By bridging urban studies and the socio-anthropology of politics, it sheds light on the mechanisms of simulacra, violence and political legitimation embedded in the economy of concrete and construction in Central Africa, both within and beyond post-conflict contexts.