Within amateur musical circles in Benin, one is told that if a male blows too hard into a brass instrument his testicles might swell up, fall off, or even run away. Concerned parents warn their children against ‘blowing’ brass instruments, telling stories of inguinal hernias and infertility, and many maintain that male brass players must take preventative measures. Accompanying this unease about blowing out is a complementary concern with breathing in, and the possible inhalation of micro-organisms or poison through the mouth. Engaging with this anxiety of blowing, this article takes seriously my interlocutors’ concern with the consequences of playing brass instruments on their bodies. My main argument is that understandings of the precarious nature of breath are at the core of musicians’ experiences of anxiety. My exploration of the relation between breath, anxiety and the body supports a common phenomenology of breathing across cultures, and serves to advance breath as an important site of meaning making.

This article revisits the modern political history of Niger during the 1960s to the 1980s through an analysis of relations between student activists and government authorities. It explores how a student organization, the Union des Scolaires Nigériens (USN), managed to bypass multiple layers of political control to become a well-structured political movement, capable of seriously challenging the legitimacy of the authorities. Specifically, the article examines interactions between the USN and different bodies of political power, including the Diori and Kountché governments, in the larger context of regional solidarities and the Cold War. It analyses key moments of this struggle by showing how two generations of student leaders (those of the 1960s to early 1970s and the late 1970 to early 1980s) nourished the creation of specific windows of political action, which found various outlets for expression depending on the form of state power as well as the form and methods of activist work.

The first period of agrarian reforms with clear state control over the land (African socialisms) took place between 1945 and 1980, but then a second period started in which market agrarian reforms have prevailed. This work synthesizes agrarian structural reform policies (property systems and land tenure) between 1980 and 2016 in African countries, especially those that had or have bureaucratic bourgeoisie governments (one-party and/or African socialist). The two periods are complementary, rather then being opposed to each other, as state agrarian reforms smoothed the path to market agrarian reforms. Although there is not yet sufficient empirical research on the results of the agrarian reforms implemented during this period, our hypothesis is that they are helping to: increase the unequal structure of property; develop tenure systems and non-capitalist contractual labour relations in new ways, both non-associative (the grabbing of vast tracts of land) and associative (renewed control of customary lands by traditional authorities); and force peasant expropriation and the subsequent increase in the number of landless non-proletarianized peasants. Therefore, the problem of poor agrarian structures in Africa is still unresolved.

This article discusses youth cultural production in contemporary Africa, analysing the videos of Douala, which are often called ‘films that don't seem Cameroonian’. Most contemporary African videos dramatize everyday life, telling didactic stories that are very close to ordinary people's experiences. As such, they have been interpreted as forms of African popular art. Films that don't seem Cameroonian, however, break with this dominant trend. Directors and actors openly quote international hits and are more interested in transcending the local context than in dramatizing (and moralizing) it. Inserting this production into Douala society, this article deals with the youths’ desire to escape their everyday situations and connect with the global arena. It also considers the failures of this ambition, as their poor finances and infrastructural challenges bind them to a much more restricted horizon of possibilities. Video filmmaking in Cameroon is both a source of empowerment and prestige and a sign of marginality and powerlessness. The article concludes with an account of the cultural work at the core of videos that are syncretic and urban, but only partially ascribable to other experiences of African popular art.

The movement of school teachers to primary and secondary schools around South Africa and its Bantustans in the early and mid-1970s was an intentional part of the project of propagating Black Consciousness to school learners during this period. The movement of these educators played a key role in their ability to spread Black Consciousness philosophy, and in the political forms and methods they chose in teaching it. These were shaped by their own political conscientization and training in ethnically segregated colleges, but also in large part by the social realities of the areas to which they moved. Their efforts not only laid the foundation for Black Consciousness organization in communities across South Africa, they also influenced student and youth mechanisms for political action beyond the scope of Black Consciousness politics. This article explores three case studies of teachers who studied at the University of the North (Turfloop) and their trajectories after leaving university. All of these teachers moved to Turfloop as students, and then away from it thereafter. The article argues that this pattern of movement, which was a direct result of apartheid restrictions on where black South Africans could live, study and work, shaped the knowledge they transmitted in their classrooms, and thus influenced the political consciousness of a new generation.

Congolese commerçantes, or transnational women traders, travel abroad to cities such as Guangzhou in search of affordable products to import to Kinshasa. Without any support from local banks, women must search for the means to finance their trips and navigate a complex bureaucracy governed by unpredictable customs tariffs. Just as men rely on their social networks to ensure the success of their business activities, women traders must also forge relationships with people in positions of power. However, a woman's social network, linked to her business activities, invites assumptions about her sexual morality. Men working within the country's unstable economic landscape are celebrated for their ingenuity and ability to ‘work the system’, while a woman's sexual morality is perceived as being affected by, and bound up in, Kinshasa's corrupt business matrices. Transnational commerçantes are thus not only an important part of the economic milieu, largely governed by patron–client relationships; but are also representative of changing gender dynamics in Kinshasa. Based on multi-site fieldwork in Kinshasa and Guangzhou, this article explores the moral anxieties associated with women's transnational trade, anxieties that relate to broader issues about the politics of social networks within local bureaucratic infrastructures.