Since the era of decolonization, political parties have played a crucial role in shaping the national political landscape of independent Africa. They have served as vehicles for mobilization, governance, and opposition; provided platforms for the expression of diverse ideologies, aspirations, and interests; channeled patronage and resources; and attempted to hold governments accountable. Despite playing such a crucial role, however, the study of political parties in Africa has lagged significantly behind its counterparts in North America, Europe, and many parts of the Global South. In the immediate post-independence period of the 1960s, scholarly work largely assessed the continent’s nascent political parties through functionalist typologies, examining issues such as interest articulation, aggregation, and recruitment. Reflecting the rapid closing of democratic spaces, however, those who studied parties in the 1970s and 1980s came to assess them, where they still existed, as institutions of mobilization, development, and legitimation. Following the new democratic openings of the late 1980s and early 1990s, scholars scrambled to (re)assemble the concepts and analytic tools that had been evolving in the Global North since the early 1960s. Parties in the region have long been assumed to be weak, with many taking their ethnic nature and lack of organizational capacity as given. However, a newer literature has started to push back on some of these long-held assumptions and claims, questioning, for example, whether parties can really be weak if they possess the capacity to distribute gifts or coordinate government decisions with electoral considerations. Other works, similarly, have focused on the activities of opposition parties and the ways in which they have acted to stem the decline of democracy. Still others have complicated the relationship between parties and patronage. It is at this critical moment in the study of political parties in Africa that we offer this annotated bibliography—encompassing a range of classic and cutting-edge literature, and seeking to act as a guide to the state of the field today. It is important to note, however, that this bibliography is not intended to be exhaustive but rather to serve as a starting point for scholars and enthusiasts seeking a solid foundation in the study of African political parties. The selected resources are drawn from a diverse range of disciplines, including political science, African studies, sociology, and history, and cover a range of regions and electoral system types. Ultimately, this bibliography on political parties in Africa hopes to stimulate further research, analysis, and discourse on this crucial subject.

The business history of Africa has not been widely researched. As a subject area, it has seen engagement from different disciplines: business and economic history, African history, and imperial history. The general perception of Africa as a continent needing development may have contributed to a lack of interest in the role of business in African history. Nevertheless, from the 1970s onwards, the subject has had more engagement from scholars. Larger economies and regions with longer-standing intercontinental trade relationships have seen more research (e.g., South Africa, Nigeria). As both the private and higher education sectors are not consistently strongly developed across African countries, there are substantial differences in how much research has been conducted on a given country or industry. North African states are sometimes included in the historiography of the Middle East and only rarely included in the history of African business. As the subject area crosses disciplinary boundaries, research controversies and questions can be somewhat disconnected, and contributions to one field may not always be referenced by researchers from another. Research has also tended to differentiate between business actors, such as African and expatriate (with domestic ethnic minority trading diasporas such as the Lebanese in West Africa and the Indians in East Africa being included in this binary distinction or researched separately) and types of business, such as formal and informal enterprises, which usually require different methodological approaches as informal economic activities are more difficult to research archivally.

Multidisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences contributes to our collective understanding of citizenship in Africa. In this dynamic area of research scholars pose questions that are answered through normative and empirical research. Among scholars, there is not universal agreement on how to define citizenship. Some scholars conceptualize citizenship narrowly, defining it by the various laws that establish and recognize the status of citizens within the established borders of a state. Other scholars encourage expanded conceptualizations of citizenship to reflect the diverse, dynamic, and often unequal ways that citizenship is experienced. Other scholars stress that citizenship is also relational, based on interactions between people and between people and the state. This lack of conceptual clarity complicates but does not preclude comparative work in the study of citizenship in different countries or across populations that differ according to autochthony, ethnicity, class, race, gender and sexual orientation, or age. While the origins of citizenship in Africa are often attributed to the continent’s European colonial past, processes of inclusion, exclusion, and differentiation characterized the operation of social life in the African empires and acephalous societies that existed before European colonial empires were established on the continent. Over time, African actors from a variety of social locations have contested, constructed, and reconstructed notions of citizenship. These processes continue in the present. Many scholars interested in citizenship in Africa are attentive to dynamics of identity and belonging over time. Historical precedents do have clear consequences for contemporary citizenship. As a broad and inclusive state-based identity, citizenship provides the foundation for political participation. Yet, paradoxically, the political liberalization that began across Africa in the 1990s set the stage for exclusionary politics to deny “strangers” the right to participate in democratic politics in many African countries. The various forms of conflict that stemmed from these exclusionary measures inspired the conceptual and empirical research that animates much of the contemporary scholarship on citizenship in Africa.

This overview of literature on the agricultural history of sub-Saharan Africa focuses on works that contribute to our understanding of changes in farming systems, crops, and tools. The time period considered here is after the introduction of farming and before colonialism, thus roughly corresponding to 500 to 1900 ce. Agrarian change during this period remains very little studied in comparison with other continents. Many works on African history take their point of departure in a timeless description of precolonial agriculture. Agriculture is then often described on the basis of late 19th- and early-20th-century ethnographic observations, and it is common to assume that little had changed since the introduction of farming. The few works that carry the title “Agrarian history of” or “Agricultural history of” different regions in Africa are, in contrast to similar works covering countries and regions in, for example, Europe and Asia, mainly short papers or pamphlets that focus on either colonial development or sketch a program toward a precolonial agricultural history. The precolonial agricultural history of sub-Saharan Africa is a true interdisciplinary endeavor, and the ideal researcher would have to master Arabic and Portuguese texts, agronomy, palaeobotany, archaeology, linguistics, and oral history. It is to a large extent on the cutting edge between two or more of these specialties that interesting new results have emerged. Works that give a significant empirical contribution to the understanding of agriculture in the period and region under study are included in this article.

Gender is an important but variable social institution that prescribes and proscribes thinking, speaking, and action for people in their social roles as men and women (and also as other non-binary gender identities). Gender overlaps with the institutions of the economy, in the sense that gender mediates the distribution of capabilities, opportunities, and outcomes. In most societies of the world, gender limits or hampers the capabilities and opportunities of women, and adversely affects women’s outcomes relative to men. Scholarship on African societies has a long tradition of close attention to how gender and the economy overlap, and the differential consequences of that overlap for women relative to men. This attention started with early anthropological work during the colonial era, and accelerated in the 1970s as gender issues became a central concern of development policy and discourses. In recent decades, analysis of larger-scale survey data and administrative data has permitted better characterization of the varied importance of gender in African economies, and how other social institutions mediate the impact of gender on economic outcomes. Moreover, the ability of researchers and organizations to conduct randomized controlled trials has enabled researchers to establish more clearly how gender mediates individual and aggregate responses to changing incentives and expanded opportunities.

Traditional authorities (TAs) are leaders that draw legitimacy from tradition, custom, ancestry, and/or indigeneity. Examples of traditional sources of authority include linkages to historical kingdoms and membership in the first lineage to settle a community. However, TAs often also derive authority from their connections to the colonial and contemporary state. In many African countries, they have important roles in politics and local governance, including conflict resolution, management of land or other natural resources, and public goods provisions. In some countries, traditional leaders have official roles and state recognitions of their authority; elsewhere, they have informal influence. TAs’ proximity to local populations makes them effective intermediaries with the state. In addition, their succession to power is often hereditary; as such, they function as unelected local leaders. The terms chiefs, customary authorities, and traditional leaders may be used synonymously in the scholarship on traditional authority, but the specific terminology for different positions of authority varies by country.

The coup d’état has long been a key and defining feature of the post-independent African political landscape. The first successful military coup took place in Egypt in July 1952, followed by Sudan in 1958. But it was the 1966 overthrow of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, the doyen of Pan-Africanism and de facto leader of a united Africa, that marked a major turning point and heralded the coup phenomenon that took center stage for the next half-century. From the 1960s through to the twenty-first century, coups became a routine phenomenon across the continent. During the first three decades of independence, from 1960 to 1990, there were at least twenty-two successful coups d’état per decade. By the 2010s, thirty-three African states had experienced a coup, and only one-third of states had avoided a military takeover—and the attendant destabilizations. While early scholarship on the military in post-independence Africa tended to focus on its modernizing role, viewing the military as a tool for development, the surge in coups soon shifted focus to making sense of the praetorian behavior of officer corps, the causes of coups, and the consequences for civil-military relations. The coup idiom then became the vector and analytical aperture for studying the role of African militaries in the politics of the continent. The earliest work situated the coup in the broader context of colonial legacies and the institutional peculiarities that predisposed civilian governments to military overthrows. Later, some scholars underscored the structural foundations of coup behavior, while others pointed to the individual idiosyncrasies of officer corps. A stream of quantitative work in the 1980s and 1990s broke ground in providing more precise measurements and predictions of the coup phenomenon. As coup incidents peaked in the late 1990s and early 2000s, coinciding with large-scale civil wars and interstate conflicts, the main question had become not why coups happen but why they didn’t occur in the countries that avoided them or that previously experienced them but no longer did. Coups declined precipitously starting around the mid-2000s and throughout the 2010s, only for a resurgence to emerge at the end of the 2010s. The recent recrudescence in both attempted and successful coups, with a notable concentration in the Sahel and West African subregions, reignited scholarly and policy debates on the enduring centrality of the coup d’état in African political development.

Today Africa is home to about 30 percent of global mineral reserves and a significant share of the worldwide production of economically important minerals and metals. This continent is the first- or second-largest producer of platinum, diamonds, gold, phosphate, and cobalt, for example. African countries are also among the world’s top producers of copper, uranium, and oil. Minerals account for around 70 percent of total African export value (for some countries this percentage rises above 90) and about 28 percent of aggregate gross domestic product, as well as a similar share of total foreign direct investments (in 2020). The main mining regions have been situated in Southern and Central Africa (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Botswana), West Africa (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, Mali), East Africa (Tanzania), and North Africa (Morocco). The timing at which mining activities came to dominate the above-mentioned economies varies, and countries not mentioned here have mined metals and fuels as well, but mostly at a lower scale. The mining and smelting of very rich metal ores in Africa dates back to ancient times, and the encounter of gold in the coast of modern-day Ghana by 15th-century Portuguese colonizers resulted in this region becoming known as the “Gold Coast.” The late nineteenth century brought about the development of industrial mining with the discovery of rich gold and diamond deposits in South Africa. In due time, Western companies monopolized the large-scale, capital-intensive extraction of minerals. From the early twentieth century onward, explorations yielded substantial deposits of gold, diamonds, copper, tin, lead, iron, cobalt, phosphate, platinum, and other minerals in several African countries, which were exploited to meet the growing industrial demand for ores, metals, and diamonds in Europe. After the independence of most African colonies, the mining industry remained in the hands of foreign companies or was nationalized by the newly independent states in the 1960s to 1970s. In some cases, mineral production dwindled between the 1970s and 1990s due to the collapse of global mineral prices (noticeably copper), conflict, or white exodus. In certain regions, minerals that were previously extracted through industrial extraction continued to be mined, but at an informal artisanal level (e.g., in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), also involving women. After the early 2000s, Africa experienced a new mining boom, driven predominantly by Chinese demand. Mining has had important socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental consequences, including sectoral change, labor migration, urbanization, conflict, environmental degradation, and health problems. Moreover, a well-known body of academic research, the “resource curse” literature, has contended that the excessive reliance of developing countries on mineral production could result in poor political and economic performance.

The Sahel region of Africa extends, in an ecological sense, from Senegal and Mauritania in the west to Somalia in the east. In a political sense, the region is often more narrowly defined as comprising Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad; many accounts, including this article, include Senegal as well. All six of these countries became independent from France in 1960 and, except for Chad, experienced relatively limited armed conflict prior to the 1990s. In 1990 a rebellion in northern Mali touched off cycles of conflict that have continued through the time of writing. Another rebellion in northern Mali in 2012 became the tipping point for the central Sahel (Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger), as conflict spread from northern Mali into central Mali and then into Burkina Faso and Niger; meanwhile, Niger and Chad also experienced considerable spillover from Nigeria’s Boko Haram conflict, even as Chad continued to grapple with periodic armed rebellions. In the central Sahel, the primary purveyors of conflict since 2012 have been jihadists, ethnic militias, state security forces, external military forces, and, more recently, private security contractors such as the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group. The violence inflicted by each of these actors has tended to elicit reprisals from the other actors, feeding into a matrix of conflict whose causes include both structural factors and self-perpetuating violence. In terms of structural factors that drive conflict, these include the region’s poverty, underdevelopment, state weakness and corruption, demographic pressures, farmer-herder tensions, the politicization and securitization of ethnic and religious identities, and citizens’ lack of trust in judiciaries and politicians. Conflict has further exacerbated these factors, especially in terms of precipitating a collapse of faith in elected officials who are often seen—with some justification—as inept and aloof. In 2012, Mali experienced a military coup amid the northern rebellion of that year, and since 2020 the region has seen multiple coups: in Mali in 2020 and 2021, in Chad in 2021, in Burkina Faso in January 2022 and September 2022, and in Niger in 2023. The political upheavals in the region, combined with the Malian and Burkinabè military regimes’ hostility to France, have intensified geopolitical competition among France, Russia, and the United States for influence in the Sahel. As of 2023, the region’s trajectory remains largely grim, especially with intensifying violence and displacement in much of Mali and Burkina Faso and high levels of continued turmoil in parts of Niger. At the same time, Senegal, Mauritania, and, to a lesser extent, Chad retain a significant level of baseline political stability and internal security.

ABSTRACT Although studies on death and dirge abound, there are fewer studies examining how gendered constructions are enabled in dirge rendition. This article examines how dirge performers in the Mbube communities of northern Cross River State, south-eastern Nigeria extend the dirge beyond mourning to do gender work. Data for this study were collected through a six-month’s qualitative ethnographic fieldwork. With insights drawn from Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s (1987) concept of doing gender, the study accounts for how gendered identities are scripted in dirge rendition. The study illuminates how Mbube women take advantage of the uncensored and spontaneous nature of dirge, extend it beyond mourning to (un)do gender, to question patriarchal norms and to reconstruct the way women are perceived and constructed in the Mbube patriarchal space. This study contributes to growing body of research on gender(ing) by advancing understanding of how women performers employ dirge to subvert patriarchal hegemony.