This special issue attempts to further a line of critical inquiry in African politics, administration and development discourse, which we refer to here as the ‘posts’. In our terminology, the ‘posts’ constitute a body of narratives, which critique the heterogeneous assortment of orthodoxies in the mainstream African development discourse. The ‘posts’, although part of the mainstream thinking, interrogate themes within that discourse for their disingenuous intellectual and policy approaches to African problems (see Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999 for a general discussion of the subject). The ‘posts’ charge that mainstream discourses, far from being beacons of enlightenment about Africa, often reflect a broad intellectual inertia, manifested in failed policies to address poverty-alleviation, the region’s main development challenge.