Beyond the Frontiers of Activism and Social Change

Fela Anikulapo Kuti (1938–1997) distinguished himself as one of the foremost Nigerian musicians in the Afrobeat genre by identifying with the masses in Africa. He achieved a populist appeal by critiquing social ills and advocating for the es…

Akan Noun-Noun Compounds

This paper presents a discussion of Akan noun-noun compounds and a Construction Morphology account of their properties. Noun-noun compounds are the most studied type of compounds cross-linguistically, with studies revealing interesting issue…

Rwandans’ Attitudes Towards Swahili

This paper reports findings from a study examining Rwandans’ attitudes towards Swahili across different occupational groups. The study hypothesized that there would be a relationship between Rwandans’ occupations and their attitudes towards …

Auxiliaries and Analyticity in Northwestern Bantu

Northwestern Bantu (NWB) languages differ from Eastern/Southwestern Bantu languages in that their verb forms are more often analytic, with pre-stem inflectional material appearing in a complex that may be unbound from the main verb. This has…

BE Auxiliary Verb Constructions in Kihehe

Kihehe (G62) has a rich inventory of auxiliary constructions (> 120) grounded in different forms of be: copula -li and -ʋa ‘be’. This paper addresses those constructions in which the auxiliary is marked for one of three pasts – hodiernal,…

Dedicated Auxiliaries in Tswana (Bantu S31)

This article discusses the subclass of Tswana auxiliaries that cannot be analysed as resulting from the grammaticalization of regular forms of verbs also used predicatively in the present state of the language. It describes the general chara…

Auxiliary Stacking in Southern Bantu Languages

Auxiliary constructions in Southern Bantu exhibit a feature in which two or more auxiliaries appear alongside a single lexical verb. We term this construction ‘auxiliary stacking’. The goal of the paper is to outline the phenomenon of auxili…

Introduction to the Special Issue

Bantu languages are notoriously “verby” (Nurse 2008, 21), referring to the highly agglutinative nature of the inflected verb, whose complexities have sparked extensive research. Now that Bantu verbal morphology is much better understood, the…

From a Kingdom to a Commonwealth

This article examines the historical trajectory of Denkyira, a once-dominant Akan kingdom in Ghana. It challenges the prevailing narrative that the legacy of Denkyira ended with its defeat by Asante in 1701. Despite its significance as a pre…

Pitch Reset in Akan Subordinate Clauses

This study explores how lexical tone interacts with intonation in Akan, focusing on pitch reset as a prosodic cue in complex declaratives. Pitch reset – an upward shift in fundamental frequency (f0) following declination – has been documente…

The Mother of Awashi

In September 2020, a video circulating on social media plunged he country of Mozambique into a deep moral crisis. The video showed five young men, dressed in the uniform of the Mozambican army, cruelly whipping a naked woman along a road and…

Trapped in Coloniality

This article explores how the popular Icelandic Nordic Noir series, Trapped Season 2, provides a nuanced perspective on the deeply rooted concepts of Icelandic and Nordic exceptionalism and homonationalism in popular culture. It offers a com…

Warriors and Colonizers

This study critically examines (post)colonial ideologies within the Nollywood epic Jagun Jagun (2023), directed by Adebayo Tijjani and Tope Adebayo and produced by Femi Adebayo. Through a colonial reading, the film emerges as a narrative tha…

Silozi Phrasal Tonology

In Silozi, High tones are subject to a number of different processes including shift, doubling and deletion. After establishing these on the basis of isolation forms and two-word phrases, this paper examines a range of complex phrases which …

Negotiating Consent in African Studies

Informed consent has been increasingly equated with standardized models and legal jargon. At Scandinavian universities, researchers are expected to adhere to European standardized models and institutional forms, necessitating documentable (p…

Form, Formats, and Forms of Informed Consent

This article reflects on the unforeseen dynamics revealed as we presented written consent forms to be signed by our interlocutors during fieldwork in Djibouti and Namibia. Throughout the article we analyse how the consent form (in its legali…