Since the commodity boom of the early 2000s, the visibility of ‘artisanal’ or ‘small-scale’ mining has grown in media coverage and development policies focused on Africa. This article argues that the regulatory category of ‘artisanal’ mining in Africa originated during the colonial period as ‘customary mining’. I build this case through a regional case study of mining policies in the colonial federation of French West Africa, where a single decree accorded African subjects ‘customary rights’ to seasonally mine gold and rock salt in restricted areas. By contrast, colonial citizens, mostly Europeans, accessed stable mining titles. Customary mining rights never codified actual African mining ‘customs’, as colonial officials argued. Rather, this law marked the boundary between the technological status of French subjects and citizens. Core elements of this colonial legal framework have been incorporated into postcolonial policies governing the rights of citizens to mineral resources in Africa.

This article explores the relationship between Angolan guerrilla broadcasts and their effects on the Portuguese counterinsurgency project in their war to hold on to their African colonies. The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA's Angola Combatente) and National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA's Voz de Angola Livre) broadcasts allowed these movements to maintain a sonic presence in the Angolan territory from exile and to engage in a war of the airwaves with the Portuguese colonial state with whom they were fighting a ground war. First and foremost, it analyzes the effects of these rebel broadcasts on listeners, be they state or non-state actors. A reading of the archives of the state secret police and military exposes the nervousness and weakness of the colonial state even as it was winning the war.

Catholic school alumni played a crucial role in shaping Senegal and Benin in the first decades after independence.1 Though they came from a variety of religious and socioeconomic backgrounds, they nevertheless strongly identified with their Catholic schooling experience. Indeed, these West African alumni composed a distinct social group that had been inculcated in the habits and values of ‘Catholic civism’, an ideology based around public service, self-discipline, moral restraint, honesty, and community. While many studies of educated youth emphasize their political activism, Catholic school youth engaged in the subtler process of shaping their new countries by transforming colonial-era institutions from within. Beyond politics, students who graduated in the early independence era used Catholic civism as both a social marker and an implicit social critique.

Mirative expressions, which mark surprising information (DeLancey 1997), are often expressed through linguistic forms that are also used to encode other, seemingly unrelated, meanings – e.g. evidential markers that mark lack of direct evidence (Turkish: Slobin & Aksu 1982, Peterson 2010; Cheyenne: Rett & Murray 2013; Cuzco Quechua: Faller 2002; Ostyak: Nikolaeva 1999; among others). In this paper, we show that the English particle like features a parallel polysemy between a mirative use and its better-known hedging use, which expresses weakened commitment to the strict denotation of a linguistic expression. After presenting several diagnostics that point to a genuine empirical difference between the hedging and mirative functions of like, we propose that both uses widen the size of a contextually restricted set, admitting elements that were previously excluded. More specifically, hedging like expands the set of ‘similar enough’ interpretations that we can apply to a linguistic expression in a context, including interpretations that we would normally consider to be too different from the context at hand. Mirative like, on the other hand, expands the set of worlds that we are willing to consider as candidates for the actual world in the conversation, resulting in the inclusion of worlds that interlocutors have previously ruled out due to perceived outlandishness. We therefore suggest that the two uses are best treated as sharing a common semantic kernel, deriving hedging and mirativity as effects of the particular type of object to which like applies.

From 1951, apartheid officials sought to implement soil rehabilitation programs in Nongoma, the home district of Zulu Paramount Chief Cyprian Bhekuzulu. This article argues that these programs brought to the surface fundamental questions about political authority in South Africa's hinterland during the first years of apartheid. These questions arose from ambiguities within native policy immediately after the passage of the 1951 Bantu Authorities Act: while the power of chiefs during the colonial and segregationist era in Zululand had been tied to their control of native reserve land, in Nongoma, these development interventions threatened that prerogative at the very moment apartheid policy sought to strengthen ‘tribal’ governance. In response, the Zulu royal family in Nongoma called on treaties with the British from the conquest era, colonial law, and the very language of apartheid to reassert chiefly control over land, and more importantly, to negotiate this new apartheid political order.

This article investigates both the claims made for, and the dangers or opportunities posed by, the development of (allegedly), aspiring or “would-be” autonomous vehicles and other artificially superintelligent machines. It also examines the dilemmas posed by the fact that these individuals might develop ideas above their station. These ideas may also limit or challenge the legitimacy of the proposed management and safety strategies that might be devised to limit the ways in which they might function or malfunction.