Achille Mbembe's ground-breaking essay 'Provisional notes on the postcolony' (1992a) (hereafter 'Provisional notes') 1 is the most cited article published by the journal Africa. Three decades later, the article continues to influence the ways in which scholars account for the contradictions of socio-economic and political formations not only in Africa but in other postcolonial societies. In this part issue, we reconsider some of the vistas opened up by the essay in the analysis of different socio-political formations in Central, Southern and West Africa.Rarely does a single essay attain such significant influence as to immediately command the attention and critical response of colleagues and peers, enough to redirect debates and scholarship in a discipline or subfield. And yet, this is what Achille Mbembe achieved with his article. Remarkably, according to the entry in the contributors' biographies in that issue of the journal, this was one of Mbembe's earliest scholarly publications in English. Mbembe had already published very important books and essays on Cameroon's history in leading French outlets, between the mid-1980s and 1991mid-1980s and (see Mbembe 1985a1985b;1996). Furthermore, he had also been working for a few years as an academic at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania in the USA after his doctorate in history from the leading French university, the Sorbonne, in 1988. Yet, it was primarily 'Provisional notes' 2 that first introduced Mbembe to the