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In the 1980s, I had the good fortune of meeting a group of young French political scientists who had just founded Politique africaine, a journal that would become a source of inspiration for me. Their approach of politics “from below” helped me to move beyond dominant models in Western academia and to give the historicity of African societies a place of its own. It breathed new life into the study of politics by focusing on apparently marginal phenomena. Forty years later, these perspectives remain inspiring, as I illustrate via two questions from my recent work: Why did the moral panic about “homosexuality” take on such fierce forms in Cameroon? And what role can African forms of knowledge play in the global predicament surrounding new technologies that blur the boundary between real and fake?