The work of fate and fortune in Africa

This special issue explores notions of fate and fortune as they inflect and are inflected by work as a practice and as a way of being in contemporary Africa. In so doing, it aims to shed new light on the cultural and moral terms in which economic realities are apprehended, organized and transformed across the continent at a time in which modes of value creation and accumulation are rapidly changing. Five case studies from Western and Southern Africa feature in this collection, covering a range of situations and activities in which fate and fortune are variously invoked in the making of livelihoods, the appropriation and distribution of valuables and/or the endorsement of specific economic predicaments. Rather than to philosophical or cosmological systems, attention is given to the work, in a broad sense, that notions of luck and fortune sanction, require or neglect in order to achieve certain economic objectives. Briefly outlined, the articles in this collection inquire into: the intergenerational changes in the ethic of work and magic regulating the distribution of fortune in Ewe agricultural communities in Togo (Gardini); the role of destiny in the making of open-ended livelihood trajectories among Soninke men in the Gambia and beyond (Gaibazzi); the ‘chain' of social, physical and spiritual activities generated by the highly contingent search for diamond luck in Sierra Leone (D'Angelo); the efforts and outlays implied by holding an ‘active faith' in order to restore good fortune and elicit divine providence in a Pentecostal movement in South Africa (van Wyk); and luck and indeterminacy as foundations of the entrepreneurial strategy and ethos of two young multi-media businessmen in Namibia (Fumanti). From agriculture to migration, from diamond mining to petty trade and popular TV shows, this issue investigates in other words the articulation between local notions of fate and fortune and a wide range of activities in contemporary African economic life.