What is the political significance of Southern Africa’s “hashtag movements”, socio-political campaigns using social media to disseminate information and to mobilise concerned and previously quiet segments of the public? 

What makes you middle class? Is it your income, occupation, or education? Your family background or maybe the house and neighbourhood you live in? It is probably all of these things. 

The South African political landscape experienced a shock from an unlikely source; the country’s local government elections on August 3, 2016 representing the last tier of government and often overlooked in favour of national and provincial polls. 

In January 2016, the Kenyan supermarket chain Uchumi has filed bankruptcy for its Ugandan subsidiaries, due to perpetual losses. And they are not alone: companies like Nestlé, Coca Cola or Barclays are slowly pulling out of Africa and recent reports – such as the Global Wealth Databook from Credit Suisse or from the Pew Research Center – suggest that the size of the African middle class may be much smaller than previously thought. So was the hype in recent years about “Africa rising” (Mahajan, 2009) and the African middle class just a bubble? In order to better comprehend the social and economic transformations taking place on the continent, it can prove helpful to look beyond the dazzling facade of economies such as Kenya or South Africa, and into those countries experiencing steady growth, but nevertheless far from including a well established middle class. Their middle classes are not shopping in big malls, driving cars and going on holidays. Rather, these groups are characterized by the improvement of their livelihoods compared to their parents’ generation, in terms of education, income and housing, but they still feel strongly vulnerable, and do not take their new benefits for granted. This has an important effect on their consumption patterns, and may not turn them into the promising new consumers, as they have sometimes been praised to be. 

In December 2013 the first Ebola cases surfaced in Guéckedou district, near the Liberian and Sierra Leon borders in the Forest Region of Guinea. The outbreak quickly spread from Forest Guinea to the rest of the country and, through the borders, to neighbouring countries. It took three months to identify the Ebola virus as the causative agent of the burgeoning epidemic, longer for the Guinean government to understand the importance of treating the outbreak as a national emergency, and even more time for everyone involved to appreciate the great social toll of Ebola.