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How the best intentions of African socialism became the useful tools of capitalism.

In the mid-twentieth century, skilled labor was seen as the key to national development. For newly independent African countries, this posed a formidable challenge: to build thriving economies, they needed to rapidly educate workers. As it turns out, that wasn’t their only obstacle.

Ambition and Adjustment reveals how responses to this human capital problem from the political left and right converged in unlikely ways to block Africa’s postcolonial progress. Focusing on nation-building projects in Zambia and Tanzania, Priya Lal recounts how the first generations of Africa’s professional class faced pressures on all sides—from foreign planners prioritizing economic growth and from local socialists decrying higher education and professionalization as wasteful and elitist. When African development stalled, international institutions like the World Bank took up parts of both approaches, justifying structural adjustment programs that defunded African universities and hospitals in the name of social equity. Indeed, Lal shows that neoliberal austerity in the 1990s was packaged in Africa’s socialist narratives from the 1960s.

By unearthing this forgotten history, Ambition and Adjustment upends traditional accounts of postcolonial development, exposing how socialism and capitalism both conflicted and overlapped to shape Africa’s trajectory since independence.

An in-depth examination and critique of girls’ empowerment campaigns in Uganda.

In Kampala, Uganda’s capital and largest city, to “detooth” is to take a man’s money with promises of sex and intimacy.  In this highly engaging book, anthropologist Erin V. Moore uses detoothing as a metaphor to capture the ways that many in Uganda, where unemployment rates are staggering, get access to resources from prosperous international NGOs. 

Based on over a decade of ethnographic research in Uganda, Canada, Ethiopia, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, the United States, and at the United Nations, Development Detoothed focuses on the world’s largest campaign to “empower” adolescent girls in the global south, which aimed to reach hundreds of millions of girls. Moore follows the campaign’s money and messages around the world, through what she calls the “development supply chain,” from NGO headquarters to staff training workshops, UN offices, government agencies, and community-based organizations.

From this uniquely multisited perspective, she explains how billions of aid dollars earmarked for girls ended up in the hands of men who ran these organizations. Rather than merely document ironic outcomes, however, Moore shows how people inventively navigated the development industry’s many injustices, arguing that as young Ugandan women pull development’s “teeth” they effectively challenge broader ideas about power, money, and masculinity.