In the spring of 2017, Somali(lander) social media played host to a heated debate about government corruption, socio-economic justice and the future of Somaliland’s democratic project. The debate took place entirely in verse and became known as Miimley (‘in/with m’), as all its poems alliterate in miin (‘m’). In an immediate sense, Miimley went viral as it became a forum for airing several simmering socio-political and economic frustrations and for discussing Somaliland’s democratic trajectory. Yet its popularity also rested on its poetic form: Miimley is a contemporary iteration of a poetry silsilad (chain), a long-established political-literary practice. This article and its accompanying poems introduce readers to Miimley and the current dynamics of Somali poetic debate. After contextualizing Miimley in a political and literary sense, I detail the biographies and contributions of six poets: Xasan Daahir Ismaaciil ‘Weedhsame’, Cabdullaahi Xasan Ganey, Daaha Cabdi Gaas, Deeqa Nuux Yoonis, Layla Cali Faarax ‘Layla Sagal’ and Ibraahin Xasan ‘Sangal’. In so doing, this work offers an insight into the political perspectives of a generation of social media-savvy poets who came of age after the collapse of the central Somali state, while also reflecting on the enduring yet evolving role of poetry in Somali political life.

This article examines the contradictory terms of ‘inclusion’ in market-led development through an ethnographic study of the Atlantis Special Economic Zone (SEZ) on the periphery of Cape Town, South Africa. Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork and over seventy interviews with zone officials, elected community representatives and residents, it traces how unemployed people are mobilized as ‘representatives’ in the SEZ’s community participation programme, which is meant to evidence the zone’s social licence to operate while providing little remuneration. Officials frame participation as shared value and market inclusion; participants experience it as unpaid labour and reputational risk; and residents often interpret it as an unfair channel to insider advantage. In a peripheral setting marked by chronic unemployment and long-delayed investment, these competing framings show how programmes promising inclusion demand new forms of labour – moral, affective and material work through which people seek recognition, belonging and livelihoods – yet often incur social and economic losses. Building on Africa-focused debates about market inclusion as adverse incorporation, and on the anthropology of volunteering, the article argues that contemporary inclusionary projects depend on the unwaged efforts of the poor and reproduce new forms of precarity – even as they sustain the fiction of the ‘inclusivity’ of markets on the continent.

This article explores the increasing use of competitions to distribute scarce jobs among educated young people in urban Africa. Based on research on the entrepreneurship competition Mashrouy in Sudan and the government-run Concours in Mali, we explore how university graduates continued to join competitions despite considering ‘winning a proper job’ highly unlikely. Interweaving debates on neoliberalism in Africa with classical anthropological work on competitions as social forms, we remain critical of the ‘contestification’ of access to work, while showing how the graduates acted upon the structural oddities of competitions. We explore distinct modalities of attending and partaking in competitions as meaningful forms of participation that went beyond mere striving for success. The graduates’ narrowing of their efforts to formal registration and ‘good-enough’ engagement (to attend) is tied to their general scepticism around the selection procedures and prizes of these competitions. By contrast, partaking refers to practices of joining and valuing these competitions in other ways, as spaces to strengthen friendships and connections, and as spaces of work. By documenting the youths’ distinct practices of ‘competing’, we show how they were not just victims of misguided tools of governance, but used these events to reaffirm their value, exploring collective moral, expressive and futuristic potentials.

This article argues that Iyere, a community that participated in south-western Nigeria’s pursuit of colonial modernity, was hindered in its pursuit of progress by the Owo Native Authority Council, the powerful colonial authority that administered it. That hindrance fostered local feelings of marginalization among the people of Iyere. The community was among the peripheral communities reorganized and controlled by the traditional leadership of the Owo kingdom under the British system of indirect rule. But by 1967, it was no longer under the control of the Owo kingdom. The article examines the reasons for this change, focusing on the Iyere Improvement Society’s role in community development during decolonization and the factors behind Iyere’s political shift towards kingdom status. The case study of Iyere illustrates how local Western-educated African elites exploited the memory of colonial discontent in the periphery to continue pursuing modernity and progress after colonial rule ended.