The last two decades have witnessed a surge in studies of youth culture and social practice. In Africa, as elsewhere, this body of youth-centred research and writing has devoted considerable attention to specific groups within a given country's young population, while largely neglecting others seen to lack either culturally innovative or politically subversive traits. Youths in large cities and young combatants involved in insurgency or counter-insurgency have shared centre stage in studies of youthful Africa. This article argues for broadening the research agenda of African youth studies, calling for increased attention to the interpretive work performed by provincial youths as they try to understand and hopefully alter the future prospects of their communities in the new century. It shows how ideas about the meanings of globalisation and ‘the millennium’, intertwined with experiences of a recent refugee ‘crisis’, are shaping Guinean youths' socio-political reflections and yearnings. In doing so, it stresses just how complicated and cosmopolitan ‘provincial’ life, particularly for young people, has become in Guinea's forest region, as well as the variety and sophistication of the historical ‘materials’ and interpretive schemes through which these youths depict and judge possible local futures.

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This article on the Republic of Mali's involvement in the 2003 Smithsonian Folklife Festival examines conflicting conceptions of the nation-state as a framework for understanding the purpose of the festival. Its descriptions of the stage performances and commentary of members of Tartit—the sole music ensemble representing the Tuareg communities of Mali's northern Saharan region—enable analysis of a complex set of artistic, political, and economic dynamics unfolding within and beyond both Mali and the time and space of the festival. It demonstrates how the group's efforts highlighted the power of distinctly national pressures to impinge upon marginal artists' thoughts and actions.

Recent research on twentieth-century Africa has been marked by a surge of interest in autobiographical narrative. While this development is generally praiseworthy, the knowledge it has produced has been uneven, in temporal as well as spatial terms. This article channels the current interest in personal experience and narrative to a place and time where resonances of the ‘common’ voice have been rather weak: the Republic of Guinea, across the final decades of the twentieth century. Foregrounding the autobiographical reflections of a local teacher in the country's southeastern forest region, it forges new perspectives on political subjectivity in Guinea's understudied provinces.

This article on the Republic of Mali’s involvement in the 2003 Smithsonian Folklife Festival examines conflicting conceptions of the nation-state as a framework for understanding the purpose of the festival. Its descriptions of the stage performances and commentary of members of Tartit-the sole music ensemble representing the Tuareg communities of Mali’s northern Saharan region-enable analysis of a complex set of artistic, political, and economic dynamics unfolding within and beyond both Mali and the time and space of the festival. It demonstrates how the group’s efforts highlighted the power of distinctly national pressures to impinge upon marginal artists’ thoughts and actions.