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Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, this book examines the emergence of mobility as an enduring and elusive collective value in contemporary Dakar, Senegal. It takes the concept of embouteillage (bottleneck)—a term used primarily to describe the city’s proliferating traffic jams, but also frustrated migration itineraries, tedious bureaucratic lags, overcrowded residential neighborhoods, overburdened infrastructures, the trickle of investment funds, and the scarcity of foreign visas—as both a concrete point of departure and as a theoretical lens for making sense of everyday life and policy in urban Africa and beyond. This book argues that it was in navigating through and engaging with bottlenecks of all sorts that residents grappled most urgently and intimately with the changing nature of citizenship and governance in the capital city. Moreover, the book asserts that the bottleneck, broadly construed, is not peculiar to Dakar but is instead the defining feature of citizen-state relations throughout the Global South. In this way, the book contributes to scholarly literatures on economic policy and practice after structural adjustment; citizenship and governance in a transnational era; urban space and infrastructure in the Global South; and migration and mobility.

Nigeria’s Nollywood is among the world’s largest film industries and is the most powerful expression of contemporary African culture. This book provides an overview of the industry and its history while focusing on Nollywood’s major themes and genres. Nollywood arose at the intersection of African popular culture and the decay of formal state institutions, including television broadcasting. Born at a moment of economic, political, social, spiritual, and moral crisis, its most characteristic themes address this situation from a popular perspective. Nollywood’s technological basis (piracy-prone video) and its economic basis in informal market trading have led to a staggeringly high rate of production. Films are produced quickly and on very low budgets and are therefore inevitably generic. Much of the meaning and cultural power of Nollywood lies in these collective generic forms. Nollywood’s genres are sometimes related to transnational film and television culture, but they are essentially original forms arising from specific values and tensions in Nigerian society and history. Nollywood is strongly linked to the Igbo and Yoruba cultures, but the horizon of its imagination is national; the processes of hybridity and homogenization that constitute this national imagination in turn have facilitated Nollywood’s remarkable diffusion throughout Africa and the African diaspora. The book is based on more than twenty years of interviewing and research. Its method holds the description of genres and the forces that shape them in creative tension with detailed readings of particular films and profiles of leading film auteurs.

This book unearths the little-known story of Johannesburg’s MuseumAfrica, a South African history museum that embodies one of the most dynamic and fraught stories of colonialism and postcolonialism, its life spanning the eras before, during, and after apartheid. In examining this story, it sheds new light not only on racism and its institutionalization in South Africa but also on the problems facing any museum that is charged with navigating colonial history from a postcolonial perspective. Drawing on thirty years of personal letters and public writings by museum founder John Gubbins, the book paints a picture of a uniquely progressive colonist, focusing on the philosophical notion of “three-dimensional thinking,” which aimed to transcend binaries and thus racism. Unfortunately, Gubbins died within weeks of the museum’s opening, and his hopes would go unrealized as the museum fell in line with emergent apartheid politics. Following the museum through this transformation and on to its 1994 reconfiguration as a post-apartheid institution, the book showcases it as a rich and problematic archive of both material culture and the ideas that surround that culture, arguing for its continued importance in the establishment of a unified South Africa.

How are we to explain the so-called "resurgence" of chiefs – or, more accurately, of indigenous sovereigns – in contemporary Africa, figures who were supposed to disappear with modernity, but are a rising, vocal force in many places across the continent today? What are we to make of the increasingly assertive politics of custom, also long said to be losing its aura under the impact of Universal History? What might both of these things have to do with transformations in the state, the workings of global political economy, and the changing social geography of the planet? These questions have pressed themselves forcibly, alike in Africa and way beyond, on scholars and social activists, on organic intellectuals and media commentators, in policy communities and digital publics. This volume addresses those questions by taking a wide view – it explores chiefship and the customary across Southern, Central, and West Africa – in order to account for this counter-intuitive chapter in the contemporary history of Africa, one that few mainstream social scientists would have anticipated.

During the worst years of apartheid, the most popular show on television in South Africa—among both Black and White South Africans—was The Cosby Show. Why did people living under a system built on the idea that Black people were inferior and threatening flock to a show that portrayed African Americans as comfortably mainstream? This book takes up this paradox, revealing the surprising impact of television on racial politics. The South African government maintained a ban on television until 1976, and according to this book, they were right to be wary of its potential power. The medium, it contends, created a shared space for communication in a deeply divided nation that seemed destined for civil war along racial lines. At a time when it was illegal to publish images of Nelson Mandela, Bill Cosby became the most recognizable Black man in the country, and, the book argues, his presence in the living rooms of white South Africans helped lay the groundwork for Mandela's release and ascension to power. Weaving together South Africa's political history and a social history of television, the book challenges conventional understandings of globalization, offering up insights into the relationship between politics and the media.