There is no better way of helping new nations of Latin America, Africa and Asia in their present pursuit of freedom and better living conditions than by assisting them to develop their human resources through education” -- President Kennedy to the Board of Foreign Scholarships at the White House, February 27, 1961.

Among problems shared by most people of Africa are those resulting from an insufficiency of qualified technicians, teachers, doctors, engineers, agricultural experts, economists and public administrators. In many cases they must rely on foreign experts to perform essential services until Africans themselves are trained these modern skills. While conditions vary from country to country, most African nations are unable to fill their basic educational needs. Demand for educational opportunity has swept the continent and increasing numbers of young Africans are asking for the opportunity to study in this country.

The provision of the National Defense Education Act which may have application to African Studies are of the following three types;

1. (1) Graduate fellowships. Fellowships may be granted to students in new or newly expanded graduate programs approved by the Commissioner of Education. Institutions of higher education may apply to the Commissioner for approval of their programs, and may recommend applicants for fellowships. Fellowships are granted to individuals, but in addition a grant is made to the institution in recognition of its expenditures for training recipients of fellowships. Preference is given to applicants who are interested in teaching in institutions of higher education, normally in the field in which they study.

2. (2) Language and area centers. While the purpose of the Act is to support instruction in modern foreign languages, the importance of supporting course work in all phases of “area studies” is fully recognized. New or newly expanded language and area centers may be granted one half of the cost of their establishment and operation. That is, the Act provides for funds to match new expenditures by the applying institution. Such centers are restricted to needed languages for which adequate instruction is not already available in the United States. In addition, acceptable students of such needed languages, attending such a center or other qualified program, may receive stipends if they give reasonable assurance that they intend to be available for language teaching or relevant public service.

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.

This case note highlights fundamental errors of law committed by Mabuse J in MM v OM [2024] (3) SA 133 (GP). It demonstrates that the judge failed to appreciate that the phrase “pension interest” as defined in the Divorce Act refers to a benefit held by a retirement fund that only becomes due to be shared when the court dissolves a marriage where one of the spouses is a member of the retirement fund. Most importantly, it is shown that Mabuse J ignored the binding precedent of the Supreme Court of Appeal and failed to consider other judgments of the High Court, which clearly explain that where an exit event from the fund is anything but divorce, there can be no pension interest that the court can order to be shared. This note argues that the law was incorrectly applied in this case, and its approach, reasoning and conclusion must be rejected.

This article aims to expand the epistemological limits of the Indian Ocean by examining distinct examples that link the African and Indian worlds through objects, media and unconventional trajectories of exchange. While the histories of trade, migration and the circulation of objects between India and Africa, and along the western Indian Ocean rim, have been studied extensively, this article focuses on minor transnational circulations that compel us to reimagine African–Indian exchanges. In other words, I trace the transits of objects to emphasize non-linear mobilities, other networks, and rhizomatic imaginations of Africa and India that connect distant places and practices. First, I look at the arrival of African saints in western India during pre-modern times and their intertwined histories with precolonial empires and the Indian Ocean slave trade. Trade items and ritual objects associated with these saints connect them to terrains of exchange in the Misr (Egypt), Al-Habash (Ethiopia) and Nubia (Sudan and Nile Valley) regions, all important nodes that linked West Africa and the Indian Ocean through complex trans-Sahelian networks of traders, pilgrims and enslaved people. I then examine the circulation of trade goods, such as beads, textiles and umbrellas, that were produced in India for West African markets during the transatlantic slave trade, illustrating how colonial transcontinental networks used objects from the Indian Ocean to support their Atlantic enterprises through a complex system of commodity exchanges. The central objective is to demonstrate how lesser-known processes of circulation and transversal ontologies reveal the fraught and interconnected histories of the Africana Atlantic and Indian Ocean universe.

The Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, founded in British India in 1889, has many followers in Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and other West African countries, and has fostered cultural transformations that have rarely been discussed in scholarship on African–South Asian interactions. Through a history of media produced by and about the Ahmadiyya, this article shows how black and white photographs shaped a vibrant visual economy that constructed West African–South Asian interconnectedness in the midst of difference and discord. While Indian Ahmadiyya missionaries first deployed images as evidence for their controversial beliefs and to prove their success at conversion, the absorption of these personnel and their productions into emerging West African media infrastructures – educational publishing and journalism among them – created a wider visual repertoire that evoked complex emotional registers, including fear and mistrust as well as familiarity and fondness. West African and South Asian media makers interwove dreams, religious and journalistic communications, and digital archives of photographs to reveal religious, racial and gendered differences that played out in print and circulated well beyond any single audience. Visual and print media worked to diminish the Ahmadiyya’s foreignness and accommodate their differences as familiar, and thus played a critical role in cultivating cultural pluralism in new postcolonial West African nations.

Ewe and Guin-Mina people in Togo often use festival and ritual events as forums for cultural exchange and as opportunities to reinterpret and repurpose images and objects imported from India. Instead of focusing on large-scale commercial interactions, this article illustrates Afro-Indian cultural exchanges enacted microcosmically upon the canvas of West African bodies. I examine small-scale encounters between Ewe and Guin-Mina Vodun practitioners and South Asian merchants, paying close attention to ritual performances for Mami Wata – a pantheon of Pan-African water spirits often depicted as mermaids and venerated for their dominion over maritime trade. Specifically, I consider how ritual specialists devoted to Mami Wata index histories of trade with Indian merchants through performances that embody Hindu chromolithograph images of deities like Dattatreya and Shiva as depictions of local water spirits. Focusing on movements, gestures and transoceanic flows of currency, goods and objects present in Togolese Mami Wata veneration, this article teases out the threads of critical consumerism, gender fluidity and choreographic practices that accompany such ceremonies, especially during moments of transformative copresence with spirits. Exploring ways Ewe and Guin-Mina performers in Togo use stylized gestures and adornments to transform understandings of commercial relations with foreigners into sources of agency and transformation, I examine ritual choreographies in public festivals and private rituals as oceanic intersections: material representations of desires for social, transcultural and transnational mobility.

Mauritania is one of the African countries where the phenomenon of contemporary slavery is most prevalent today. The historical particularities inherent in this practice have been shaped by ethnocultural differences that still persist. The fight against this reality has been led by abolitionist initiatives that have emerged within civil society since the late 1970s. The most prominent organization in the fight against contemporary slavery in Mauritania is the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement, better known as IRA Mauritania. This article examines the history, action and socio-political impact of this organization through the unpublished testimonies of some of its protagonists – direct victims of this reality. The analysis of oral memory presented here, based on various historically silenced voices, raises new hypotheses about the historical crossroads currently faced by a country where the phenomenon of slavery is linked to other emerging issues such as migration crises, gender issues and the climate colonialism of the twenty-first century.