In this contribution to the special issue on Fakery in Africa, I examine the booming "fake essay" industry and draw on the role and perspectives increasingly occupied by of tens of thousands of young and highly-educated Kenyans. These so-called "Shadow Scholars" are part of a vast global online marketplace, an invisible knowledge production economy, where students and academics in the global North solicit and pay for their services in exchange for confidential and plagiarism-free essays, theses, dissertations, qualifications and publications. This article centres on descriptions of these writers as "shadows" as a means of complicating not only the most popular description of Africa in the global imagination - as existing in the shadow of an infinite number of different entities - but to challenge the notion of the shadow in relation to African knowledge production as being fake. It pays attention to the Kenyan writers' protestations that their knowledge, experiences and labour are all real and that analogies with shadows reduce them and the impact of their work to something that is non-existent and not alive. From their perspective the term shadow is pejorative because it further reduces the intellectual contribution of Africans, presenting them as derivative.

After the ban of over-the-counter sex enhancers in 2013 by the Medical Control Authority of Zimbabwe (MCAZ), the streets of the inner city area of Harare called The Avenues became a haven for illegal traders in sex enhancers. This article explores how products that are banned by the state acquire their own agencies. From the traders' perspectives, the point of departure to understanding efficacy is not the sex enhancers, but their clients' needs and their body systems. Thus, the authenticity of the products ceases to be a point of reference. The trade and consumption of sex enhancers amongst Zimbabweans is itself intricately intertwined with the broader political economy of the country. A deteriorating economy has engendered a crisis of masculinity which has contributed towards increased trade and consumption in sex enhancers. The article argues that drug efficacy is a complex phenomenon, whose conceptualisation and manifestations are fluid and not always pharmacological. The research documents six months in The Avenues as research "field", enriched by both online and traditional ethnographies. The analysis aims to understand perceptions of and dynamics around the efficacy of sex enhancers sold in Harare's urban streets.