Sociality and Digitality: An Exploration of New Forms Digital Social Connection Belonging in Africa

The articles presented in this Special Issue seek to answer one of the defining questions of our time: what does it mean to be social, to belong, and to seek recognition in an age of pervasive digital connectivity? This question acquires particular urgency and texture when asked from the vantage point of Africa. Across the continent, digital and mobile technologies have proliferated at a remarkable speed, reshaping how people communicate, organise, socialise, mourn, laugh, protest, and imagine futures. Yet the terms on which this transformation is theorised-and by whom-remain contested. This Special Issue is an attempt to shift that conversation, to insist that Africa is not merely a site where global digital trends play out, but a place where digitality itself is being remade. African countries and citizens face a rapidly changing digital environment and a rapidly changing socio-political environment in which the structures, hierarchies, and exclusions inherited from colonial and apartheid histories persist, even as formal political independence has been achieved. Against this layered, contested terrain, what do digital affordances make possible? And how are mobile and social media being used not merely to communicate, but to constitute new forms of selfhood, community, and political association?