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Soil property and class maps for the continent of Africa were so far only available at very generalised scales, with many countries not mapped at all. Thanks to an increasing quantity and availability of soil samples collected at field point locations by various government and/or NGO funded projects, it is now possible to produce detailed pan-African maps of soil nutrients, including micro-nutrients at fine spatial resolutions. In this paper we describe production of a 30 m resolution Soil Information System of the African continent using, to date, the most comprehensive compilation of soil samples ( N ≈ 150 , 000 ) and Earth Observation data. We produced predictions for soil pH, organic carbon (C) and total nitrogen (N), total carbon, effective Cation Exchange Capacity (eCEC), extractable—phosphorus (P), potassium (K), calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), sulfur (S), sodium (Na), iron (Fe), zinc (Zn)—silt, clay and sand, stone content, bulk density and depth to bedrock, at three depths (0, 20 and 50 cm) and using 2-scale 3D Ensemble Machine Learning framework implemented in the mlr (Machine Learning in R) package. As covariate layers we used 250 m resolution (MODIS, PROBA-V and SM2RAIN products), and 30 m resolution (Sentinel-2, Landsat and DTM derivatives) images. Our fivefold spatial Cross-Validation results showed varying accuracy levels ranging from the best performing soil pH (CCC = 0.900) to more poorly predictable extractable phosphorus (CCC = 0.654) and sulphur (CCC = 0.708) and depth to bedrock. Sentinel-2 bands SWIR (B11, B12), NIR (B09, B8A), Landsat SWIR bands, and vertical depth derived from 30 m resolution DTM, were the overall most important 30 m resolution covariates. Climatic data images—SM2RAIN, bioclimatic variables and MODIS Land Surface Temperature—however, remained as the overall most important variables for predicting soil chemical variables at continental scale. This publicly available 30-m Soil Information System of Africa aims at supporting numerous applications, including soil and fertilizer policies and investments, agronomic advice to close yield gaps, environmental programs, or targeting of nutrition interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that human beings are bound to each other inextricably is at the heart of this lecture about African agency. It draws on the African philosophy Ubuntu, with its roots in human incompleteness, sociability and inclusivity. Ubuntu’s precepts and workings are severely tested in these times of rapid change, accelerated nimblefootedness, and multiple responsibilities. Africans negotiate their social existence between urban and rural life, continental and transcontinental realities, and all the market forces that influence relationships and loyalties. Between ideal and reality, dreams and schemes, how is Ubuntu actualised, misappropriated, and endangered? This talk unearths the intrigues and contradictions that go with inclusivity in Africa. Basing my argument on the ideals of trust, conviviality and support embodied in the concept of Ubuntu, I seek to demonstrate how the pursuit of personal success and even self-aggrandisement challenges these ideals, thus leading to discord in social relationships. Even as it is increasingly seriously tested by opportunism, Ubuntuism, sometimes a reality and sometimes an ideal, brings hope and redemption, and offers a feasible framework for participatory and inclusive emancipatory social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I liken information and communication technologies (ICTs) or digital technologies to what we in West and Central Africa have the habit of referring to as Juju. I invite as scholars of the digital humanities to see in the region's belief in incompleteness and the compositeness of being human, as well as in the capacity to be present everywhere at the same time an indication that we have much to learn from the past on how best to understand and harness current purportedly innovative advances in ICTs. The idea of digital technologies making it possible for humans and things to be present even in their absence and absent even in their presence is not that dissimilar to the belief in what is often labelled and dismissed as witchcraft and magic that lends itself to a world of infinite possibilities – a world of presence in simultaneous multiplicities and eternal powers to redefine reality. The article argues in favour of incompleteness as a normal way of being. It challenges students of humanity to envisage a relationship between humans and digital technologies that is founded less on dichotomies and binary oppositions, nor on zero-sum games of conquest and superiority. If humans are present in things and things in humans, thanks to the interconnections, the flexibility and fluidity of being that come with recognition of and provision for incompleteness, it is important to see things and humans not only as intricately entangled, but also as open-ended composites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory essay lays out the main themes of a special issue of Journal of Contemporary African Studies which brings together six empirically grounded papers by African social scientists of different disciplinary backgrounds. These works touch on various aspects of the social impact of religious innovation and competition in present day African Christianity. They represent the first fruits on the social science side of an interdisciplinary initiative that made 23 research grants for theologians and social scientists to study Christianity and social change in contemporary Africa. These articles focus on a variety of dynamics in contemporary African religion (mostly Christianity), including gender, health and healing, social media, entrepreneurship, and inter-religious borrowing and accommodation. The editors conclude that the research and learning reflected in this volume will enhance understanding of religion’s vital entanglement in contemporary African society. The articles reveal problematic ethical and psychological dynamics in some of these new movements, particularly among some of the neo-Pentecostal groups. Yet the authors are determined to go beyond perspectives that are overly fixated with African problems and victimisation. They are keen to explore opportunities for understanding African agency and African wellsprings of hope. The editors conclude that scholars of religion and religiosity in Africa need to invest new conceptual and methodological energy in researching what it means to be actively religious in Africa today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing contemporary nutrition problems often requires application of knowledge from multiple disciplines. The scaling up nutrition (SUN) movement harnesses multiple sectors for effective global and in-country planning and implementation. Although the role of knowledge networks (academia and research institutions) is recognised, the how of engaging knowledge networks in the current SUN architecture is only now becoming apparent. For relevant sectors to play their roles effectively, observed capacity gaps, particularly in developing country settings, need to be addressed. The present paper presents the work being undertaken by the Ghana SUN Academic Platform (AP), a local knowledge network, towards strengthening nutrition capacity in Ghana. The AP presently provides technical support, evidence and capacity towards scaling up effective nutrition interventions in Ghana and beyond. The data presented draws heavily on the observations and collective experiences of the authors in practice, complemented by a review of relevant literature. The ultimate goal of the AP is to build capacity of professionals from nutrition and cognate sectors (including planning, agriculture, health, economics, research and academia). This is an essential ingredient for effective and durable SUN efforts. The paper recognises that both disciplinary and interdisciplinary capacity is required for effective SUN efforts in Africa, and offers an approach that utilises cross-sector/inter-professional, peer-learning and experiential learning initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If my experience of anthropology in and on Africa is anything to go by, there has been too much of engaged or public anthropology and too little of anthropology as an intellectual pursuit animated by rigorous contemplation and practice on and around a set of shared curiosities. Distinguishing between academic anthropology and engaged or public anthropology requires a priori reflection on the scientific status of anthropology. This paper argues that anthropology's scientific potential has yet to be fully realised. Without a rigorous commitment to science, theory building, and an acknowledgement of associated epistemologies, as well as little patience for knowledge production as a collaborative endeavour, much anthropology today is little different from an evangelical and ideological commitment to saving souls, saving situations, winning converts and ‘giving back’. The paper challenges anthropologists to commit to the essential task of producing critical knowledge of critical value, and to re-embrace and fulfil anthropology's core mission and ambition as an evidence-based field science. The need for anthropology as a rigorous and collaborative field science, liberated from ‘western’ and ‘male’ dominance, calls for a negotiated, inclusive and accountable ethics, evidence-based thick description, an understanding of interconnections and interdependencies, and critical and comparative theory building as a permanent engagement and as a dynamic and constructive debate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws on rich ethnographies and ethnographic fiction depicting mobile Africans and their relationships to the places and people they encounter to argue that mobility is more appropriately studied as an emotional, relational and social phenomenon as reflected in the complexities, contradictions and messiness of the everyday realities of encounters informed by physical and social mobility. The current dominant approach to studying and relating to mobile Africans is problematic. Nationals, citizens and locals in communities targeted by African mobility are instinctively expected to close ranks and fight off the influx of barbarians who do not quite belong and must be ‘exorcised’ so that ‘insiders’ do not lose out to this particular breed of ‘strangers’, ‘outsiders’ or ‘demons’, perceived to bode little but inconvenience and savagery. If and when allowed in, emphasis is on the needs, priorities and convenience of their reluctant hosts, who tend to go for the wealthy, the highly professionally skilled, the culturally bleached and Hottentot Venuses of the academy, even at the risk of accusations of capital flight and brain drain. The article demonstrates how to marry ethnography and fiction to study African mobility not only as a ‘collection of logical bones and flesh’ but also as ‘emotional beings’. It calls for conceptual flexibility and ethnographic empirical substantiation, and challenges social scientists to look beyond academic sources for ethnographies and accounts of how a deep, flexible and nuanced understanding of mobility and interconnections in Africa play out in different communities, states and regions of a world permanently on the move. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author reflects on Africa as a continent of crises and of unfulfilled expectations of modernity and as a continent of opportunity. He describes the impact of the proliferation of communication technologies in the growth of Africa's popular culture industry. He also explores how African youth can help create a distinct African democracy that is configured to satisfy their reality.

The article offers the author's insights on the social and epistemological implications of knowledge production in Africa. The author states that Africa is still the dupe of a springy colonial and colonizing epistemology that takes the form of science as hegemony and ideology. He also mentions that South African anthropologists believe that the knowledge they inhabit in the country must be held to knowledge of whites or black who failed to dwell to the stereotypical comforts of being white.

This paper draws on the experiences of Fulani of the Western Grassfields of Cameroon and on Cyprian Ekwensi's novel Burning Grass to argue that most so-called simple African societies are cosmopolitan in composition and outlook. This reality is often muted by state and scholarly obsession with sameness and difference. The paper discusses how two competing elite associations condone and contest such obsession in a context of complex postcolonial politics of rights and entitlements, wherein juridico-political citizenship is often challenged at local and regional levels by claims of autochthony. Both elite associations find justification and legitimation in state politics and policies. There are no permanent winners or losers in the Cameroonian state, which simultaneously accommodates and alienates contested claims and practices of being Mbororo-Fulani. In this game of indigeneity and citizenship umpired by the state, ordinary Mbororo-Fulani quickly understand how to accommodate the political elite and especially how to play one political elite against the other in the interest of change and continuity or of mere survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and other critical voices to argue that education in Africa is victim of a resilient colonial and colonizing epistemology, which takes the form of science as ideology and hegemony. Postcolonial African elite justify the resilience of this epistemology and the education it inspires with rhetoric on the need to be competitive internationally. The outcome is often a devaluation of African creativity, agency and value systems, and an internalized sense of inadequacy. Education has become a compulsion for Africans to ‘lighten their darkness’ both physically and metaphorically in the interest of and for the gratification of colonizing and hegemonic others. The paper calls for paying more attention to popular systems of knowledge, in which reality is larger than logic. It calls for listening to ordinary men and women who, like p’Bitek’s Lawino, are challenging the prescriptive gaze and grip of emasculated elite. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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This paper draws on a recently published study on xenophobia in Southern Africa to discuss the hierarchies and inequalities that underpin citizenship. Paradoxically, national citizenship and its emphasis on large-scale, assimilationist and bounded belonging are facing their greatest challenge from their inherent contradictions and closures, and from an upsurge in rights claims and the politics of recognition and representation by small-scale communities claiming autochthony at a historical juncture where the rhetoric highlights flexible mobility, postmodern flux and discontinuity. In Africa as elsewhere, accelerated mobility and increased uncertainty are generating mounting tensions fuelled by autonomy-seeking difference. Such ever decreasing circles of inclusion demonstrate that no amount of questioning by immigrants immersed in the reality of flexible mobility seems adequate to de-essentialize the growing global fixation with an “authentic” place called home. Thus trapped in cosmopolitan spaces in a context where states and their hierarchy of “privileged” citizens believe in the coercive illusion of fixed and bounded locations, immigrants, diasporas, ethnic minorities and others who straddle borders are bound to feel like travellers in permanent transit. This calls for scholarship, politics and policies informed by historical immigration patterns and their benefits for recipient communities. The paper argues in favour of greater scholarly and political attention on the success stories of forging new relationships of understanding between citizens and subjects that are suggestive of new, more flexible, negotiated, cosmopolitan and popular forms of citizenship, with the emphasis on inclusion, conviviality and the celebration of difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on the African publishing industry initiative to determine ‘Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century’, to discuss writing, scholarship and publishing in and on Africa. It highlights the challenge of promoting commitment to African humanity and creativity without producing a simplistic reductionism or the inflation of belonging in Africa. It also argues for the need to problematize what is published and read on Africa, and to determine how sympathetic to Africa culturally, morally and scientifically authors and publications are. The article concludes with suggestions on how to reverse the process of writing and publishing Africa and Africans into the ‘heart of darkness’ dreamt up by Joseph Conrad and perfected by social science at the service of ambitions of dominance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looks at the paradoxes of globalization as a process of flows and closures, empowerment and enslavement, hope and disappointment in Africa. Arguments that the neo-liberal rhetoric and euphoria regarding globalization must be countered with the reality of exclusion for all but an elite few; Sociality and conviviality of cultural communities; Strategies to resist the effects of Africans' exclusion by the global structures of inequality.

Argues that Africans especially in Botswana are far from giving up chieftaincy or from making completely modern institutions of it. Origin of chieftaincy in Africa; Theories on chieftaincy; Chieftaincy and democracy as dynamic realities in Botswana.

This article argues that education in Africa, from colonial times to the postcolony, has been the victim of various forms of violence, the most devastating of which is the violence of cultural and political conversion: externally and internally driven initiatives and processes intended to domesticate, harness, transform, alter, remodel, adapt, or reconstruct Africa and Africans through schools and universifies to suit new ways of being, seeing, doing, and thinking. As a result of such violence, educational systems have privileged mimicry and transformed epistemologies informed by partial theories to metanarratives of arrogance, superiority, and intolerance of creative differences. Even when clear alternatives are imagined to the current irrelevance in education, economic difficulties render their realization extremely difficult. Repressive states have perpetuated and capitalized upon this predicament by manipulating desperate academics into compliance and complicity with mediocrity. This article examines some epistemological consequences of such alienation and irrelevance and looks at their implications for theorizing Africa. It calls for a global conversation of universities and scholars in which Africa participates on its own terms, with the interests and concerns of ordinary Africans as its guiding principle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines articles on social and health aspects in Africa. Impact of modernity on African scholars; Rejection of social experiences valued by African people; Decline of the Zambian Copperbelt.

Globalization is seen as a process of accelerated flows of capital, consumer goods, people, and products of culture and knowledge. The article highlights the popular disenchantment in Africa against globalization. It has been argued that due to the emergence of the information superhighway, the way wealth is created has been changed remarkably. However, it has been pointed out that the rush to create new information and communication technologies is to a large extent driven by the irresistible drive to accumulate and to maintain economic, political and cultural privileges and advantage. While some view it as rapidly forwarding the globalization process, others sympathetic to the predicament of those financially and psychologically incapable of achieving these sophisticated technologies, see their development as fostering media and cultural imperialism. It has been felt that contemporary African studies ought to go towards understanding the creative agency of ordinary Africans in the face of repeated contradictions and frustrations with global capitalism and its seesaw of flows and closures, assimilation and exclusion, seduction and rejection.

Focuses on what constitutes African cultures. Analysis of the African novel; Discussion on the recognition of cultural pluralism; Role of social sciences in cultural promotion.

Asserts that Cameroonians remain united despite the instability in Africa, due to ethnic or regional ambition to preserve their differences under the delusion of maximizing opportunities. Ability of Cameroon to be unaffected by political and economic instability in the region; Politics of regional or ethnic balance.

Over the years, appreciable advancements have been made in the treatment and control of cancer incidence and progression globally. However, the conventional treatment method is often accompanied with serious and sometimes devastating side effects, besides the treatment cost, which is usually so high that it remains unaffordable to many cancer sufferers in developing countries. Some of such sufferers are left with alternative or traditional medicine involving the use of medicinal plants as the only option for meeting their health-care needs. The present review was conducted to evaluate the available published literature reporting on plant species used for the treatment of cancer over the past twenty years (1998 – 2018) in Africa. A total of 212 articles containing information on medicinal plants used for cancer treatment in Africa were retrieved from scientific databases such as Google scholar, PubMed, and Web of science. A total of 207 plant species from 70 different plant families were recorded in this review. Forty-eight percent (48%) of the documented plant species were reported with cytotoxic activity against different cancer cell lines in vitro and in vivo. The dominant plant families documented for use in cancer treatment included Asteraceae and Fabaceae. Plant species such as Artemisia afra Jacq., Artemisia armeniaca Lam., Bidens pilosa L. , Solanecio mannii (Hook.f.) C. Jeffrey, and Solanecio nandensis (S. Moore) C. Jeffrey were reported for the treatment of different cancer types such as skin, breast, and colorectal cancer in southern Africa. Most of the studies were on breast, skin, colorectal, cervical, leukemia, and prostate cancer with less attention to other forms of cancer. While these cancer types might recieve more attention in the preliminary phase, there is a need for further in-depth studies on the promising medicinal plants against other forms of cancer. Some of the identified 'potent' medicinal plant species from in vitro screening need to be evaluated in vivo as part of the drug design pipeline. The mechanism(s) of action, other pharmacological activities including cytotoxicity against non-targeted cells and potential in cancer therapy development of the identified 'potent' extracts and isolated plant compounds are other areas that require more research attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]