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Abstract African development will remain intractable in a world where Africans are conceived as constituting disorganised data subject to the supposedly organising gaze of knowledgeable Others. African people are increasingly datafied dehumanised and denied self-knowledge, self-mastery, self-organisation and data sovereignty. Arguing for more attention to questions of data sovereignty, this paper notes that the Internet of Things and Big Data threaten the autonomy, privacy, data and national sovereignty of indigenous Africans. It is contended that decolonial scholars should unpack ethical implications of theorising indigenous people in terms of relational theories that assume absence of distinctions between humans and nonhumans. Deemed to be indistinct from nonhumans/animals, Africans would be inserted or implanted with remotely controlled intelligent tracking technological devices that mine data from their brains, bodies, homes, cities and so on. Key words: relationality, Big Data, Internet of Things, coloniality, research

HIV risk among teenagers is argued to be entangled with a plethora of other risks so that HIV-related risk may not be a paramount consideration. Teenage sexuality is a subject fraught with such consideration. This article is an ethnographic rendition of teenage sexuality in action in a South African township.

South Africa has the highest burden of HIV/AIDS in the world. Theories that account for this are wide-ranging. This article argues that anthropological theories advanced to speak to the widespread nature and particular patterning of HIV vulnerability revert to problematic notions that betray age-old prejudices that once characterised the discipline. I argue that these theories do not, in fact, go to the root cause debates that are more contemporary and thus credible in accounting for HIV/AIDS in South Africa. South Africa has some glaring properties that cannot be ignored when accounting for its HIV/AIDS epicentre status. This article is a critical appraisal of anthropological HIV/AIDS discourse in South Africa. I argue that, in fact, such discourse serves ubiquitous purposes that can be duly read when one considers the history of the discipline, practices in the discipline and the power dynamics that reside in and arise from scholarly interventions.

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