Scientific Director & Chief Editor
Komla M. Avono (Ph.D.)
ISSN 2710-4699 Online
Special issues
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Africa’s Identity: Crises, Sovereignties, Legacies, and Horizons
More than six decades after independence, Africa continues to negotiate the complex intersections of historical legacies, political sovereignty, cultural identity, and aspirations for self-determination. Recent geopolitical transformations, particularly in the Sahel, alongside renewed debates on Pan-Africanism, governance, and regional integration, have intensified scholarly inquiries into the continent’s evolving identity and its position within the global order. Rather than approaching African identity as a fixed cultural or historical construct, this special issue of Uirtus examines it as a dynamic, contested, and continually reconstructed reality shaped by political struggles, institutional transformations, collective memories, and transnational encounters.
Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from political science, history, literary studies, and socio-environmental research, the contributions critically investigate postcolonial leadership and development, Afro-Asian solidarity and Pan-African imaginaries, the geopolitical implications of ECOWAS sanctions and the emergence of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), the enduring influence of colonial institutions on urban environmental governance, and the negotiation of intercultural and diasporic identities. Collectively, these studies illuminate the tensions between inherited structures and emerging forms of African agency, emphasizing the continent’s capacity to reinterpret its past, critically engage its present, and envision alternative futures.
Through this special issue, Uirtus seeks to advance rigorous, interdisciplinary scholarship that positions Africa not merely as an object of geopolitical analysis, but as an active producer of knowledge, political thought, cultural meaning, and transformative possibilities.
Leadership, Governance, and Development in Frank Ogodo Ogbeche’s Harvest of Corruption and Ola Rotimi’s Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again
Abstract
Good leadership is a cornerstone of development. It contributes to development through good governance. However, it is clear from these selected plays under study that leadership impedes development. Leaders hinder national development through their bad leadership and ruling. They do not care about national interest. Their leadership reflects postcolonial leadership. Frank Ogodo Ogbeche and Ola Rotimi in their respective plays: Harvest of Corruption and Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again have dramatized this postcolonial leadership and its imagined consequences for development. Laying emphasis on Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial theoretical framework, the purpose of this article is to show how literary presentation of postcolonial leadership and governance impedes national development in the selected plays. This study shows that autocracy and unaccountability affect development in Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again. In Harvest of Corruption, embezzlement of public funds and corruption hamper national development. This study shows that democracy, the participation of women in politics and accountability are necessary for effective national development.
Keywords: Leadership, governance, postcolonial drama, political satire, corruption, development, Nigeria
Black Power before Black Power: Richard Wright, Africa, and the Bandung Imagination
Abstract
This article reads Wright’s Black Power (1954) and The Color Curtain (1956) side by side, and finds his impressions of the Gold Coast and Bandung leads him to write a powerful disaffirmative history of anticolonial power. While Wright sees the issue of self-governance for Africans as part of a larger challenge of Afro-Asian peoples to empire, his association of empire-combating peoples is opposed and conditioned by their Americanization and affinity to modernity. This comparative analysis of travel scenes, political commentary and representations of development draws the contrast between solidarity as a practice of negotiation and solidarity as an inevitable outcome of shared racial injury. African involvement in Asian networks and on responses to Wright is matters of scholarship here, correcting the inclination to read Wright as the final authority on the conference. The emergent “Bandung imagination” refers to a shared sovereign space, all the while maintaining the differences of the participants. Wright’s accomplishment is to pose enduring questions for diasporic belonging, representation and material self-determination that his categories are not finally determined to answer.
Keywords: Black Power, Richard Wright, The Color Curtain, Pan-Africanism, Afro-Asian solidarity, Black internationalism, Bandung
ECOWAS Sanctions and Regional Realignment in the Sahel: Counterproductive Effects, Sovereigntism, and the Consolidation of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES)
Abstract
This article analyzes the institutional breaking point in West Africa through the prism of the failure of the economic and financial sanctions imposed by ECOWAS on the military transitions in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Conceived as an instrument of absolute coercion (« the thunder ») to restore constitutional order, these comprehensive measures produced a paradoxical boomerang effect. Drawing on theories of sanctions effectiveness and the political sociology of crises, this study demonstrates that the severity of the embargo acted as a catalyst for siege nationalism. Rather than weakening the ruling regimes, external pressure legitimized their sovereignist discourse, consolidated popular support, and accelerated their endogenous cooperation. This dynamic led to the creation of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) and the announcement of their withdrawal from ECOWAS in January 2024. The analysis highlights the « mirage » of a punitive diplomacy unsuited to the informal and resilient economies of the Sahel. Ultimately, the article argues that the failure of this coercive strategy marks a major geopolitical reconfiguration in West Africa, characterized by a lasting institutional dualism and the implosion of the traditional regional normative model.
Keywords: ECOWAS, Alliance of Sahel States, international sanctions, coups d’état, sovereigntism; regional integration, Sahel
Institutional Trajectories of Sanitation in Bamako, 1906-2024: Colonial Legacies, Institutional Bricolage of Economic Interest Groups, and Reconfigurations of Public Action
Abstract
This article analyzes the socio-environmental trajectory of sanitation in Bamako (1906–2024). The context is defined by the critical transition from pre-colonial circularity to the contemporary urban waste crisis. The methodology is qualitative, synthesizing colonial archives, regulatory texts, and life narratives gathered through fieldwork interviews with practitioners and users. This empirical approach is structured around three theoretical frameworks: historical institutionalism, urban political ecology (UPE), and the anthropology of informal institutions. The findings demonstrate that the pre-colonial institution, governed by the moral economy of gender (danbe) and the valuation of organic flows, was disrupted by the colonial rupture (1906–1910). This period established a coercive hygienist biopolitics and a segregated infrastructural dualism exclusively for the benefit of the colonial minority. The post-colonial state inherited this framework, becoming trapped in path dependency. In the 1990s, Structural Adjustment Programs and local managerial failure triggered the state’s withdrawal, fostering a “privatization from below” via Economic Interest Groups (GIEs). By commodifying cleanliness through subscription-based services, this hybrid model (market-oriented and community-based) has transformed the colonial divide into an economic class segregation, excluding insolvent low-income neighborhoods. The article concludes on the necessity of an endogenous environmental sovereignty to overcome this neoliberal lock-in.
Keywords: Sanitation, Bamako, Path dependency, Economic Interest Groups (GIE), Environmental justice
Intercultural Self-positioning and Narrative Identity Construction in Ijoma Mangold’s Das deutsche Krokodil
Abstract
This paper examines the intercultural construction of identity in Ijoma Mangold’s contemporary autobiographical work Das deutsche Krokodil. This study analyses how the author shapes his identity between the German and African contexts. The narrative structure is guided by three key markers: dual heritage from Germany and Nigeria; skin colour as a cultural, social and symbolic marker; and writing style as an instrument of narrative sovereignty. The approach draws on the concepts of hybridity and the ‘third space’, diasporic identity and multilingualism. These theoretical frameworks demonstrate that identity is not a fixed legacy, but a dynamic process constructed through interaction with family, society and language. The analysis shows that Ijoma Mangold rejects imposed categorisations and, through his writing, demands freedom of identity. Reading the work makes it clear just how relevant post-migrant autobiographical literature is as a space for reflection on cultural hybridity and the challenges of integration in today’s societies. Autobiographies reveal not only the construction or redefinition of identity, this genre also offers all hybrid individuals the opportunity to record their experiences in writing. With regard to world literature, this study highlights three key contributions: the enrichment of research in the field of literature and society; the provision of educational tools and the promotion of cultural innovation as a vehicle for coexistence.
Keywords: Hybridity, interculturality, identity, autobiography, world literature