We are pleased to share that the Research Africa team has a new member: Madison Cullinan has joined as an editor. Please note that future emails may come from her email address, madison.cullinan@duke.edu.
Additionally, please note that the following books are available to be reviewed. Write to us at research_africa-editor@duke.edu if you wish to participate in a review of one of the following books:
– The National Council For Higher Education And The Growth Of The University Sub-Sector In Uganda
– Being and Becoming Gender, Culture and Shifting Identity in Sub-Saharan Africa
– Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine
– Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics After Apartheid
– Native Estates: Records of Mobility Across Colonial Boundaries
Events & Issues
– The Battle for Existence Among Sudan’s Journalists
Mohammed Amin
Friday 17 November 2017
KHARTOUM – In a country already renowned for its lack of press freedom, the Sudanese journalist community is decrying a draft law set to curtail their work even further. On Wednesday, two journalists were detained for a few hours after staging a protest outside the Sudanese Press and Publication Council, a government body staffed with politicians and members of the pro-government journalists’ union. Journalists say the new law, if it is passed, will put the nail in the coffin for any remaining press freedom in the country, increasing the government’s powers to suspend newspapers, confiscate issues and even close down offices. At the protest on Wednesday, journalists chanted that it had now reached a question of “to be or not to be” when it comes to press freedom in the country, and shouted “free journalism or no freedom”. But security forces were quick to respond, detaining prominent journalist Shamail Alnur, intimidating protesters, and preventing them from turning the protest into a permanent sit-in. No reason was given for Alnur’s detention.
Read more on the story in this link:
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/battle-existence-among-sudans-journalists-2126396151
– How Africa can negotiate an effective continental free trade area agreement
November 14, 2017 7.26am EST
African countries are forging ahead to complete negotiations for a continental free trade area between 55 countries by early next year. The idea, adopted by the African Union in 2012, is to create a single market which includes the free movement of goods, services and people. The integrated African market covers 1.2 billion people and a combined GDP of over USD$3.5 trillion.
Read more on the story in this link:
https://theconversation.com/how-africa-can-negotiate-an-effective-continental-free-trade-area-agreement-87366
– Meet Ami, Mali’s biggest female rapper
By Alex Potter, November 14, 2017
There aren’t many female rappers in Mali. The West African country is known for the bedouin ballads of Tinariwen, the enduring voice of Khaira Arby, and the new-rock beats of Songhoy Blues. But Mali is not so famous for its rap scene—and even less so for its female rappers. Ami is an exception.
Read more on the story in this link:
Meet Ami, Mali’s biggest female rapper
– Conversation avec Boubacar Boris Diop ( Partie I )
Publié le 7 novembre 2017 par Sherine Soliman, membre du PIR
L’écrivain et intellectuel sénégalais Boubacar Boris Diop est sans nul doute l’une des voix les plus courageuses et les plus incontournables du continent africain aujourd’hui. Auteur de nombreux romans – en français et en wolof – qui interrogent et donnent à voir les drames africains (le génocide des Tutsi du Rwanda, l’ingérence des puissances occidentales dans les affaires des autres, la trahison des politiques et intellectuels du continent, etc.), son œuvre littéraire n’a cessé de fleurir à l’ombre féconde d’une conscience critique résolument anticoloniale et même décoloniale, comme l’indique son engagement en faveur d’une littérature en langues africaines. En 2000, il reçoit le Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire pour l’ensemble de son œuvre. Il a également signé des essais politiques édifiants traitant du racisme (« Négrophobie » avec Odile Tobner et François-Xavier Verschave), de différentes problématiques – politiques ou culturelles – africaines (« l’Afrique au-delà du miroir ») ou encore des interventions néocoloniales françaises en Afrique (« La Gloire des imposteurs » avec la militante Aminata Dramane Traoré). Il est également passé par le journalisme, et continue d’enseigner en université jusqu’à présent. Il accepte aujourd’hui d’échanger avec nous et de nous faire partager ses vues sur la tragédie des migrants, les guerres impériales, la prégnance du racisme et ses effets – y compris dans le monde arabe –, la Françafrique ou encore l’évolution de la littérature africaine.
Read more on the story in this link:
– Egypt’s female performance groups on the rise
Youssra el-Sharkawy October 27, 2017
Female Islamic bands are emerging as a new fixture at women’s celebrations around Egypt. Fully or partially veiled, and wearing sparkling but unrevealing clothes, they perform at weddings, where men and women are segregated, and at henna parties, where women come together before a wedding or to celebrate a birth.
The bands purposely do not violate Sharia in their performances. The douf (tambour) is often the only musical instrument they use, although there are exceptions, and the groups only appear at women-only events. Their repertoire tends to consist of Egyptian rustic wedding songs.
Read more on the story in this link:
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/10/conservative-bands-sing-dance-at-all-women-events.html#ixzz4yjfOpbaX
-NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
– Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement
Author: Alexander Thurston
Boko Haram is one of the world’s deadliest jihadist groups. It has killed more than twenty thousand people and displaced more than two million in a campaign of terror that began in Nigeria but has since spread to Chad, Niger, and Cameroon as well. This is the first book to tell the full story of this West African affiliate of the Islamic State, from its beginnings in the early 2000s to its most infamous violence, including the 2014 kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls.
Read more in this link:
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11094.html
-Theory of Philosophical Consciencism: Practice Foundations of Nkrumaism in Social Systemicity
[نظرية الوعي الفلسفي: الأسس الممارسية لنظرية أنكروما في النظام الاجتماعي]
Author: Kofi Kissi Dompere
The main premise of the monograph is that there exists a set of sufficient conditions in support of the necessary conditions for internal transformation of socio-natural varieties. The theory is useful in understanding developmental processes and multi-polar-power zero-sum games for global dominance. The necessary conditions constitute the natural necessity that constrains cognitive freedom. The sufficient conditions constitute cognitive freedom that must overcome the necessity in socio-natural systems dynamics. Had this conceptual system been familiar to African leaders, the African transformation from colonialism to complete emancipation, rather than neocolonialism, would have been increasingly successful. This holds for those seeking triumph over injustices, oppression, imperialism and social change in all systems. In the Theory of Philosophical Consciencism, Professor Dompere establishes how Nkrumah used the theory of categorical conversion housing the necessary conditions of transformation to design strategies for creating the sufficient conditions for socio-political transformations.
Publisher: Adonis & Abbey Publishers, Nigeria, 2017
– Literary Location and Dislocation of Myth in the Post/Colonial Anglophone World
[أدب الأسطورة في آداب شعوب ما بعد الاستعمار الانجليزي]
Author: (Editor:) André Dodeman, University of Grenoble–Alpes, and Élodie Raimbault, University of Grenoble–Alpes
The English-speaking world today is so diverse that readers need a gateway to its many postcolonial narratives and art forms. This collection of essays examines this diversity and what brings so many different cultures together. Whether Indian, Canadian, Australasian or Zimbabwean, the stories discussed focus on how artists render experiences of separation, belonging, and loss. The histories and transformations postcolonial countries have gone through have given rise to a wide range of myths that retrace their birth, evolution, and decline. Myths have enabled ethnic communities to live together; the first section of this collection dwells on stories, which can be both inclusive and exclusive, under the aegis of ‘nation’.
Publisher: Brill Publishers, 2017
– The President’s Keepers: Those keeping Zuma in power and out of prison
[حراس الرئيس: الذين يحافظون على سلطة الرئيس زوما ويبعدوه عن السجن]
Author: Edition by Jacques Pauw
There was an outcry on South African social media on Saturday 4 November when a PDF version of investigative journalist Jacques Pauw’s book The President’s Keepers began being circulated online and via WhatsApp. A number of prominent media, academic and other South African personalities took to social media to criticise the sharing of this file as “theft”, “stealing”, “immoral” and “pirating”. At best, none of those assertions reflect the nuanced complexities around copyright and the public good. At worst, they merely illustrate misinformed armchair moralising. By Sean Muller. Investigative journalist Jacques Pauw exposes the darkest secret at the heart of Jacob Zuma’s compromised government: a cancerous cabal that eliminates the president’s enemies and purges the law-enforcement agencies of good men and women. As Zuma fights for his political life following the 2017 Gupta emails leak, this cabal – the president’s keepers – ensures that after years of ruinous rule, he remains in power and out of prison
Publisher: Tafelberg, 2017
– African Studies in the Academy: The Cornucopia of Theory, Praxis and Transformation in Africa?
[وضع الدراسات الأفريقية في العالم الأكاديمي: جدليات النظرية والتطبيق والتغير في أفريقيا؟]
Author: (Editors) Munyaradzi Mawere, Tapuwa Raymond Mubaya
For a long time, African Studies as a discipline has been spearheaded by academics and institutions in the Global North. This puts African Studies on the continent at a crossroads of making choices on whether such a discipline can be legitimately accepted as an epistemological discipline seeking objectivity and truth about Africa and the African peoples or a discipline meant to perpetuate the North’s hegemonic socio-economic, political and epistemic control over Africa. The related question that immediately arises is: Who should produce what and which space should African Studies occupy in the academy both of the North and of the South?
Confronted by such a question, one wonders whether the existence of African Studies centres in the academies of the global, north opens opportunities for critical thinking on Africa, or if it opens possibilities for the emergence of the same discipline in Africa as a fertile space for trans-disciplinary debate. While approaches critical for the development of African Studies are pervasive in African universities through fields such as cultural studies, social anthropology, history, sociology, indigenous knowledge studies and African philosophy, the discipline of African Studies though critical to Africa is rarely practiced as such in the African academy and its future on the continent remains bleak. African Studies in the Academy is a testimony that if honestly and objectively practiced, the crossroads position of African Studies as a discipline makes it a fertile ground for generating and testing new approaches critical for researching and understanding Africa. It also challenges Africa to seriously consider assuming its legitimate position to champion African Studies from within. These issues are at the heart of the present volume.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2017
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