African scholarship on epistemic decolonization and African self-determination has generated reflection and debate among African Studies scholars for several decades. The debate has gained new force in recent years and has resonated in African studies in new ways, prompted in part by political events and social activism around enduring racism. Grosz-Ngaté’s 2019 Presidential Lecture provides an opportunity to reflect further on these issues. It explores questions related to the production and decolonization of knowledge in conversations with colleagues in Mali and Senegal and draws out the implications of these discussions for African Studies Association members and for the Association at large.

Human experience is more visual and visualized than ever before. This has been obvious in Africa since the 1990s, when democratization, media liberalization, proliferation of small technology, and religious reform movements introduced new ways of meaning-making. Ibrahim’s ethnographic research shows how sharia implementation and cinema as cultural production in northern Nigeria are embedded within the implicit and explicit visual regime of influencing what and how people see, think, and perform. The strategic replacement of cinemas with religious or other “neutral” objects is a visual regime that shifts people’s vision or encounter from one means of cultural production to another.

Following the attacks in Timbuktu in 2012, the ICC’s Al Mahdi case became the first instance where one perpetrator was solely charged with the war crime of destruction of cultural heritage. The ICC prioritized the crimes against cultural heritage at the expense of other types of atrocities in Northern Mali for two reasons: expediency, and the convergence of interests between the Court, the Malian state, and the international community. This study finds that the international community, the state, and the local community do not have the same conceptions and approaches regarding cultural heritage, its protection, or its value.

A critique of multi-sectoral responses to the customary practice of ukuthwala (the isiXhosa term for abduction for purposes of marriage) in South Africa highlights attention to gendered tropes pertaining to marriage, custom, and sexual assault. Karimakwenda deconstructs how, in its inflexible framing of customary practice, the multi-sectoral campaign against violent forms of ukuthwala lacks historicization and silences women’s narratives. By obscuring historical and locally-embedded linkages between marriage practices and rape, the myopic campaign energizes collective anxieties around representations of violence within Black communities, and fuels misconceptions surrounding marital rape. This critique contributes to debates about gender, violence, and state power by offering a counter-narrative to simplified characterizations of sexual violence and custom.

Ga proverbial wisdom holds that “hate has no medicine,” but there is a sacred court in Accra where people can calm the animosity that emerges from social conflicts. A unique form of vernacular jurisprudence has emerged at the Nae We Shrine Tribunal, which manages the consequences of civil, criminal, and supernatural crimes without raising the ire of human rights activists. Using records from this shrine court, the authors of this article demonstrate how the Tribunal offers social and spiritual wellbeing in a manner that cannot be provided by the chiefly and state judicial systems.

In Kenya, the prophecies of the late Elijah Masinde, leader of the anti-colonial religious revival Dini ya Msambwa, remain contested. MacArthur explores the religious innovations, intellectual work, and moral debates for the first time through Masinde’s own words. During his 1948 deportation trial, while the prosecution sought to remake Masinde from prophetic madman into calculating criminal, Masinde used the courtroom to challenge the pathologization of rebellion and remake his own patriotic vision. MacArthur argues that Masinde’s trial reveals colonial justice and psychiatry as discursive arenas for contestations over resistance, social control, and moral authority in colonial and postcolonial Africa.

Formerly marginal areas are increasingly the focus of extractive mega-projects, which are framed as necessary for economic growth and a modern industrial economy. Yet there are concerns that such projects are unjustly displacing local populations, facilitated through the alliances of local elites with foreign investors. This article asks, who are the winners and losers from oil exploration in the Turkana region of Kenya? Using longitudinal ethnographic research on the dynamics of local government, oil exploration, and pastoralist livelihoods in Turkana, Mkutu and Mdee highlight how current processes may exacerbate inequality and marginalization, with the potential for increasingly violent consequences.

Why does collective resistance to democratic backsliding emerge in some contexts and not others? The experience of Malawi in 2011–2012 offers an opportunity to explore this question. In the face of attacks on democratic rights and institutions, large-scale popular and civil society mobilization challenged the government’s authoritarian tendencies. Drawing on collective action theories and comparing Malawi’s experience to that of Zambia, VonDoepp argues that Malawi’s resistance arose in an environment that was favorable to its emergence. Economic conditions had generated grievances against government, polarization remained modest, and civil society organizations benefitted from credibility and the presence of allies that facilitated activism.

The sports pages of the postcolonial press provide a vantage point for viewing the tensions surrounding nation-building in Nigeria. Following independence, coverage of the Green Eagles national football team reflected aspirations for a united Nigeria, but it was also an outlet for the deep political tensions plaguing Nigeria at this time. From 1960 to 1961, contentious games against Ghanaian rivals, disputes around the choice of a national coach, and clashes with referees in international matches all enabled sports journalists to become mouthpieces for both cohesion and discord. Schler and Dubinsky demonstrate that sports pages provide opportunities for viewing the links between postcolonial sports and politics.

This article examines the cultural ambiguity of Senegalese wrestling. Certain discourses around this sport have constructed it as a nostalgic embodiment of traditional, national, or African values. At the same time, other discourses emphasize the sport’s commercialization, its embeddedness in the economics of precarity, and even its inventedness as a tradition. The case of Senegalese wrestling illustrates how traditionality is summoned and put to question in a context of socioeconomic fragmentation. Repinecz offers readings of Aminata Sow Fall’s novel L’Appel des arènes (1982), Cheikh Ndiaye’s film adaptation of the same name (2005), and Boubacar Boris Diop’s novel Doomi Golo (2003 and 2009) to illustrate this analysis.

Anas Aremeyaw Anas has been called Africa’s “most notorious” journalist.1 He has produced documentaries extensively about human rights and corruption in Africa. As an undercover investigator, he is infamous for working in disguise. Operating under the mantra, “name, shame, and jail,” Anas describes himself as a “modern day crime fighter.” Anas has won numerous accolades, in Ghana and internationally, for work exploring illegal mining, sex work, infertility clinics, mental health care, cocoa plantations and child labor, corruption in the judiciary and international football. Anas sat down for an interview with Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann in 2018 to discuss his methods and interests.