I examine the struggle surrounding the relocations of Bushmen from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana. Despite a recent court decision allowing the Bushmen to return, the ‘war of words’ continues and the Bushmen's circumstances remain inconclusive. I analyse and compare the actions of transnational and local NGOs and the Botswana state in addressing the ‘Bushman Question’ and consider the impacts of the various strategies and images deployed. The clash between essentialized views of pristine hunter-gatherers and images of Bushmen as modern citizens in the making has contributed to the problematic outcome thus far.

This article deals with issues of territoriality, public space, the microphysics of power and street gang life in the current urban context of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this city, a growing number of street children invade the public places. They team up in gangs and scour the streets in search of a location to settle (for a while). Along with their appropriation of public space, these gangs encounter several actors such as the city authorities, shop owners, tenants or rival street gangs. Before any settlement, deals have to be closed since every inch of the city is negotiable. All participants get involved in these negotiations, for no one is considered marginal, certainly not the street youth who are inextricably bound up with Congolese society. This contribution considers this dynamic field of negotiations through a focus on space and analyses it from a Foucauldian angle. It explores how gang members develop particular ways to control their territories and exercise power in them. Additionally, it examines how street youths manage to construct a home in the streets and make sense of their urban environment in the process.

Using ethnographic material alongside newspaper and NGO reports, this article explores popular responses to ZANU PF's devastating Operation Murambatsvina, commonly dubbed Zimbabwe's tsunami, which targeted informal markets and ‘illegal’ housing across Zimbabwe between May and August of 2005, making an estimated 700,000 people homeless and indirectly affecting a quarter of Zimbabwe's population. The article argues that central to experiences of these dramatic events ‘on the ground’ (particularly in Harare's high- and low-density suburbs of Chitungwiza and Hatfield, where most of the ethnographic material was collected) was a profound tension between the resonances evoked by official appeals to a reassertion of ‘order’ and formal planning procedures, and the spectacle of ZANU PF's public demonstration of its ability to deploy state ‘force’ ruthlessly, and indeed ‘arbitrarily’; that is, as, when and how it chose. Although the brutal execution of the programme was widely condemned by observers and victims alike, less reported has been the way in which official justifications for the operation were sometimes recognizable and salient to people living in urban areas across Zimbabwe, resonating with memories of past clearances, or with longstanding and divergent aspirations for respectability, urban ‘order’, and a functioning, bureaucratic state. It is argued that in the ambiguity and uncertainty generated by this tension the political advantages of the operation for the ruling party become most apparent. Relating the plethora of rumours circulating at the time (about the ‘hidden agendas’ behind the operation) to Mbembe's work on post-colonial conviviality, the article argues that like Mbembe's satirical cartoons these rumours did not so much undermine or subvert the authority of ZANU PF as reinforce its omnipotent presence. However, unlike the pessimism of Mbembe's vision of all encompassing power, it is argued that if the rumours that circulated about Operation Murambatsvina are an example of the constant re-making of ‘stateness’ on the margins, then the uncertain ambiguity of such rumours can not only reinforce the omnipotent presence of the ‘state power’, but also illustrate the omnipresence of its fundamental insecurity.

In recent years, it has become common for academic writers to use ‘the occult’ as an analytical category to which are assigned various types of mystical belief and activity that are quite widespread in Africa, including those often described as ‘magic’ and ‘witchcraft’. It is notable that all these concepts generally go undefined. The present article argues that much of the current academic vocabulary used to describe and analyse the invisible world that many Africans believe to exist is tainted by an intellectual history associated with colonialism. Instead, we propose that much African thought and action related to the invisible world should be considered in terms of religion, with the latter being defined contextually as a belief in the existence of an invisible world, distinct but not separate from the visible one, that is home to spiritual beings with effective powers over the material world.

Muslim radicalism in Tanzania has tended to be perceived as a political problem, and as part of a trans-regional wave of Islamist movements. The present article instead seeks to demonstrate the connections between current debates among Tanzanian Muslims and long-standing ritual and social concerns, by highlighting debates on funerary practice. While these debates focus on the correct ritual process of burial (with reformists decrying elements of traditional practice as inappropriate innovation), their underlying concern is with the ability of the living to safeguard the well-being of the deceased. This concern, in turn, can be connected both to long-term social change and to the interaction between Muslim and indigenous religious notions. As propitiation of God supplants that of ancestors, the fate of the dead is increasingly construed as depending on the supplication of the living. Ultimately this religious debate is as concerned with society as with doctrine or ritual, and the opposing sides share some common ground. They do not, however, construe this as ‘Africanizing’ Islam, but as part of a necessary intellectual debate.

The World Health Organization has recognized ‘traditional medicine’ as a de facto and economical substitute for biomedicine in the developing world. Accordingly, the Zambian government aims to integrate ‘traditional healers’, locally known as ng'anga, with their biomedical counterparts in a national health care system. Hence, on the one hand, ng'anga elaborate their practice into ‘herbalism’, which could meet scientific standards and fit into the scope of biomedicine. On the other hand, they continue to deal with affliction by positing the existence of occult agents, such as witchcraft and spirits, at the risk of being criticized for exploiting indigenous beliefs. As a result, many ng'anga associate themselves with Christianity, the national religion of Zambia, which serves as an official domain of the occult where they take refuge from biomedical rationalization. However, conventional churches, the government and health authorities do not approve of the link between Christianity and traditional medicine; hence ng'anga as traditional healers are marginalized in modern, Christian Zambia. Being thus dissociated from the national religion, ng'anga are officially confined to the periphery of national health care, where they submit to the primacy of biomedicine and the workings of state power.