By the end of the 1990s, molecular approaches predominated in biomedical science, but, for West African scientists, biology could not have ‘gone molecular’ at a worse time. Resource constraints led to knowledge expiry and many discovery dreams were terminated, exported or at least postponed. Pivotal transitions in methodologies, knowledge and resources temporally overlapped with an emergent imperative to address infectious disease in Africa. This prompted new initiatives from global health programmes in the North, which imported visions, disciplinary focus and equipment for new laboratory spaces. A handful of African researchers, however, have reimagined and reconstructed existing laboratories as a means to weave their own dreams. This article examines three such laboratories. It outlines how their equipment was accumulated, the ad hoc ways in which the laboratories are supplied and maintained, their extraordinary accomplishments and their key role as domestic nodes for research. The picture that emerges is one that extends beyond technological acquisition to an enactment of the scientists’ own dreams. Importantly, it is a record of outcomes from those who continued to dream while others stilled their imaginations or became canvases coloured by the dreams of other people.

This article examines the fiscal and administrative infrastructures underpinning global health research partnerships between the US and Uganda, and the power dynamics they entail. Science studies scholars and anthropologists have argued for the importance of studying so-called ‘boring things’ – standards, bureaucracies, routinization, codes and databases, for example – as a way to bring to the surface the assumptions and power relations that often lie embedded within them. This article focuses on fiscal administration as an understudied ethnographic object within the anthropology of global health. The first part of the article is a case study of the fiscal administration of a US–Uganda research partnership. The second part describes the institutionalization of some of the administrative norms and practices used by this partnership within the ‘global health enabling systems’ employed by US universities working in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa. I analyse a case study and ‘enabling systems’ to show how these administrative strategies create parallel infrastructures that avoid direct partnership with Ugandan public institutions and may facilitate the outsourcing of legal and financial risks inherent in international partnerships to Ugandan collaborators. In this way, these strategies act to disable rather than enable (or build) Ugandan research and institutional capacity, and have profound implications for African institutions as well as for the dream of ‘real partnership’ in global health.

People living in the neighbourhoods of Nampula city, northern Mozambique, often speak of a war that is being waged at night, during which sick infants and small children figure more and more frequently as the preferred prey of malevolent ancestors, witches and new malign spirits that come at night, and who abduct and enslave them in order to harm their families. The purpose of this article is to explore what this ‘war of the night’ reveals, to understand why it is that mothers are afraid their babies and children will be stolen from the compound and, finally, to analyse the ways in which families handle their fears and apprehensions about a child's sickness. I begin this analysis of the ‘war of the night’, and the accompanying anxieties surrounding infants and children, by examining it in relation to large-scale changes that have occurred both at the micro-level of the household and in the community more generally. Specifically, the article looks at the ways in which ongoing economic and social transformations are reconfiguring gender and generational relationships, which, in turn, generates more insecurity within the household and intensifies a sense of existential threat from external forces. The article then examines the cultural logic of rumours and beliefs involving children, as a consideration of local interpretations and experiences of infancy and childhood helps shed light on local concepts of (children's) vulnerability. With the aid of three case studies, the article charts how families manage children's diseases. It shows how the uncertainty surrounding an illness is not always ameliorated by divinations or by the healing provided by women working on behalf of ancestral power. Instead, women healers often crystallize and intensify mothers’ fears, also because their medical and ritual interventions are not always effective. The article concludes by examining the reasons why these women healers are increasingly struggling to manage the evil forces haunting infants and children and to make their medical interventions effective, and the effect of this on their local authority.

Pharmacy students at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar must research and write a thesis to graduate. Thésards who took topics in analytical chemistry and toxicology describe their thesis work as a temporary opportunity to perform ‘street-level’ public health research that they regard as ‘relevant’ to the quality of people's lives. Expecting futures in the private commercial sector, thésards regretfully leave the thesis behind. This article explores the parenthetical nature of this moment – its brief openings and more durable closures – as part of the history of ways of being a pharmacist in post-colonial Senegal. The thesis as an interlude in students’ biographies, curtailed by narrowed horizons of expectation, evokes other contractions: in the range of professional roles open to Senegalese pharmacists, and in the circuits of public health with which they might engage. For thésards, fieldwork, government work and commercial work entail spatial practices and imaginations; different ways of moving around the city and of tracing urban space that define pharmacists’ roles in terms of the modes through which they engage with broader collectivities. Mapping thésards’ parenthesis in Dakar is a means of capturing both their urban experience of work and the intertwining spatial, temporal and affective dimensions associated with this work. The past, probable and possible trajectories of pharmacy work are imprinted and imagined in the space of the city as field, market and polis. Pharmacists’ prospects and aspirations are caught up in broader shifts in how education, (un)employment and entrepreneurship animate relations of association and exchange in Senegal.

Contemporary societies in Central Africa are known for their mourning ethos: communities often engage in endless lamentation upon the death of their loved ones. Yet people experience the death of a family member differently, depending on the deceased's sexual identification. While the death of a person identifying as heterosexual is generally felt as unbearable, that of a person identifying as homosexual is experienced as bearable. Based on field research conducted in Cameroon, this article analyses the way in which contemporary Central African societies experience the death of persons identifying as homosexual. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's notion of homo sacer, the article argues that, as a result of the pervasiveness of anti-homosexual ideologies and procreationist doctrines promoting vitalis moralis or the ethics of life, childless persons identifying as homosexuals have become ‘homines sacri’ whose deaths arouse little grief from the community because their existence was perceived as ‘bare’ or useless even before their death.

In Burkina Faso, political turmoil, escalating insecurity and a looming pandemic challenge the population's trust in the state. This article contributes to the debates about state–citizen relationships in fragile countries by connecting local health-seeking practices with the global trends of datafication and a strong focus on the fight against malaria in this part of Africa. Drawing on long-term research engagement in Burkina Faso, I examine the health-seeking practices of rural citizens and look into diagnostic routines and reporting in two rural dispensaries. I show how the routinization of diagnostic procedures combined with a strong national and global political focus on the fight against malaria create what I term a ‘supply–demand nexus’ in which rural citizens selectively ask for the health services that they know the system can supply. I argue that the routinized diagnostic practices that mainly focus on malaria serve as a ‘technology of invisibility’ by not capturing other important diseases among the rural population. Finally, I ask whether the limited healthcare services in the current context of political insecurity, instability and a global pandemic spur a process of further fragilization of the social contract between rural citizens and the state.