Research Africa: January 28th, 2018
Events
– Senegal and France to host Global Partnership for Education Financing Conference
An earlier version of this press release had a date of February 8 for the GPE Financing Conference. The date has been changed to February 2, 2018.
New York City, September 20, 2017 – The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) is delighted that the governments of Senegal and France will co-host its financing conference, which will take place on February 2, 2018 in Dakar, Senegal. The announcement of the co-hosting was made by Presidents Macky Sall of Senegal and Emmanuel Macron of France at a high-level event on education financing held at the United Nations, which was attended by Secretary General António Guterres, several heads of state and leaders on global education.
https://www.globalpartnership.org/news-and-media/news/senegal-and-france-host-global-partnership-education-financing-conference?mc_cid=d0cb2d61af&mc_eid=fab0566d63
Senegal and France to host Global Partnership for Education Financing Conference
www.globalpartnership.org
The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) is delighted that the governments of Senegal and France will co-host its financing conference, which will take place on February 2, 2018 in Dakar, Senegal. This is the first time a donor and developing country co-host a GPE financing conference symbolizing the spirit of true partnership, which is the essence of GPE.
News and Issues
– The last U.S. slave ship was burned to hide its horrors. A storm may have unearthed it.
In the summer of 1860, half a century after the United States banned the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Capt. William Foster sneaked 110 African slaves into Mobile, Ala. — and knew that the floating evidence of the illegal deed could get him killed.
The trip was more part of an obscene bet than any sort of profit-making scheme, but the Clotilda, the ship that made the months-long journey, held the telltale signs that it was an illegal slaver: containers for water and food, and the lingering stench of urine and feces and vomit and blood.
If caught, Foster and his crew could be imprisoned or executed, so they found a remote section of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and torched the ship, igniting a mystery that would endure for a century and a half.
What happened to the Clotilda, the last ship to bring slaves to the United States?
Ben Raines, a reporter for the Birmingham News and a part-time nature guide, believes he has unearthed the answer — and the remains of the Clotilda, partly buried in 10 feet of river mud.
Read the story in this link:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/01/24/the-last-u-s-slave-ship-was-burned-to-hide-its-horrors-a-storm-may-have-unearthed-it/?utm_term=.02442d38ab45
– Mapped: British, Spanish and Dutch Shipping 1750-1800
I recently stumbled upon a fascinating dataset which contains digitised information from the log books of ships (mostly from Britain, France, Spain and The Netherlands) sailing between 1750 and 1850. The creation of this dataset was completed as part of the Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans1750-1850 (CLIWOC) project. The routes are plotted from the lat/long positions derived from the ships’ logs. I have played around with the original data a little to clean it up (I removed routes where there was a gap of over 1000km between known points, and only mapped to the year 1800). As you can see the British (above) and Spanish and Dutch (below) had very different trading priorities over this period. What fascinates me most about these maps is the thousands (if not millions) of man hours required to create them. Today we churn out digital spatial information all the time without thinking, but for each set of coordinates contained in these maps a ship and her crew had to sail there and someone had to work out a location without GPS or reliable charts.
Read the story in this link:
Mapped: British, Spanish and Dutch Shipping 1750-1800 …
spatial.ly
I recently stumbled upon a fascinating dataset which contains digitised information from the log books of ships (mostly from Britain, France, Spain and The …
– Hugh Masekela obituary: South African jazz pioneer who fought the evil of apartheid
Trumpeter and singer-songwriter who was a propulsive force in jazz in South Africa and a tireless campaigner against apartheid in exile, Hugh Masekela, who has died aged 78, was one of the world’s finest and most distinctive horn players, whose performing on trumpet and flugelhorn mixed jazz with South African styles and music from across the African continent and diaspora. Exiled from his country for 30 years, he was also a powerful singer and songwriter and an angry political voice, using his music and live performances to attack the apartheid regime that had banished him from his homeland.
Read the story in this link:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/jan/23/hugh-masekela-obituary?CMP=share_btn_fb
Hugh Masekela obituary
www.theguardian.com
Trumpeter and singer-songwriter who was a pioneer of jazz in South Africa and a campaigner against apartheid in exile
– What remains of democracy? Egypt, Italy and ‘the lesser evil’ after Giulio Regeni
Two years after the murder of Giulio Regeni, the truth finally seems at hand. Or at least we know where to look for it: in the murky academic environments of the University of Cambridge which cynically used the researcher, Giulio Regeni, to build a pro-Islamist conspiracy, perhaps even an anti-Italian conspiracy. The fact that Regeni was killed in Cairo and not in Cambridge might be thought to be relevant, but even on that front as well, there is good news: the Egyptian Prosecutor, spurred on by the Italian government, has forwarded important papers to Rome, thus proving – as Interior Minister Minniti avows – the will of Al-Sisi to cooperate in the quest for the truth, from which clearly Field Marshal Sisi has nothing to fear.
Read the story in this link:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/north-africa-west-asia/guido-rampoldi/what-remains-of-democracy-egypt-italy-and-lesser-evil-after-giulio-regeni
What remains of democracy? Egypt, Italy and ‘the lesser …
www.opendemocracy.net
A thesis circulating for some time seeks the secret of the 28-year-old’s death, not in the Al-Sisi regime, but for example in Cambridge. This is a dangerous distraction.
– INTERNATIONAL LITERACY ASSOCIATION’S 2018 WHAT’S HOT IN LITERACY REPORT SHOWS EDUCATORS PRIORITIZE ISSUES OF EQUITY, ACCESS AND QUALITY
Newark, Del. (Jan. 8, 2018) — A new report released today by the International Literacy Association (ILA) reveals wide gaps between what’s truly valuable to educators around the globe and what’s getting the most attention from the media, policymakers and others in the field. The ILA 2018 What’s Hot in Literacy Report provides a snapshot of what 2,097 literacy professionals from 91 countries and territories deem the most critical topics to advancing literacy worldwide. The survey asked respondents to rate 17 literacy-related topics in terms of what’s hot and what’s important. Topping the hot list for the second year in a row: Digital Literacy, a topic that dropped from No. 8 in 2017 to No. 13 in terms of importance.
Read the report in this RA link:
https://sites.duke.edu/researchafrica/files/2018/01/ila-2018-Report.pdf
NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
– The Lie Of The Land
[أكذوبة الأرض]
Author: Jasper Utley
Jasper Utley constructs a novel with a universal, African implications. The work is set in Namibia with Germans, Brits, Boars, and the Dutch (among others) battling for dominion over the land. A British agent, of duplicitous political heritage, is the anti-hero, protagonist. He is on an overt mission with covert overtures. Yet, he meets a native girl, Leah, and an unorthodox bind develops between the two. Each party learns to trust and depend upon each other. Trust develops into companionship and an improbable love. Through this relationship, the reader sees that the complexities of the relationship mirror the complexities of colonialism.
Tragedies and epiphanies are abound in this novel. Yet, the lesson is that the agent is always an extension of the agency of politics (and politics always prevails).
Publisher: University of Namibia Press
– Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique
[الطب في الوقت الحاضر: الرعاية الصحية في موزامبيق]
Author: Ramah McKay
In Mozambique, where more than half of the national health care budget comes from foreign donors, NGOs and global health research projects have facilitated a dramatic expansion of medical services. At once temporary and unfolding over decades, these projects also enact deeply divergent understandings of what care means and who does it. In Medicine in the Meantime, Ramah McKay follows two medical projects in Mozambique through the day-to-day lives of patients and health care providers, showing how transnational medical resources and infrastructures give rise to diverse possibilities for work and care amid constraint. Paying careful attention to the specific postcolonial and postsocialist context of Mozambique, McKay considers how the presence of NGOs and the governing logics of the global health economy have transformed the relations—between and within bodies, medical technologies, friends, kin, and organizations—that care requires and how such transformations pose new challenges for ethnographic analysis and critique.
Publisher: Duke University Press, 2018
– Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa [مظاهر الدين والإعلام والتهميش في أفريقيا الحديثة]
Author: Felicitas Becker, Joel Cabrita, and Marie Rodet (Editors)
Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa is one of the first volumes to put new media and old media into significant conversation with one another, and also offers a rare comparison between Christianity and Islam in Africa. The contributors find many previously unacknowledged correspondences among different media and between the two faiths. In the process they challenge the technological determinism—the notion that certain types of media generate particular forms of religious expression—that haunts many studies. In evaluating how media usage and religious commitment intersect in the social, cultural, and political landscapes of modern Africa, this collection will contribute to the development of new paradigms for media and religious studies.
Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2018
– Africa in the Colonial Ages of Empire: Slavery, Capitalism, Racism, Colonialism, Decolonization, Independence As Recolonization, and Beyond
[إفريقيا في عصر استعمار الامبراطوريات]
Author: Tatah Mentan
Africa in the Colonial Ages of Empire is written from the perspective that the scholarly lives of academics researching on Africa are changing, constantly in flux and increasingly bound to the demands of Western colonial imperialism. This existential situation has forced the continent to morph into a tool in the hands of Colonial Empire. According to Tatah Mentan, the effects of this existential situation of Africa compel serious academic scrutiny. At the same time, inquiry into the African predicament has been changing and evolving within and against the rhythms of this “new normal” of Colonial Empire-Old or New. The author insists that the long and bloody history of imperial conquest that began with the dawn of capitalism needs critical scholarly examination. As Marx wrote in Capital: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.
Publisher: Langaa Rpcig, Cameroon, 2017.
– Spiritual Citizenship:
Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifá in Trinidad
:المواطنة الروحية في تيرينيداد]
[من شعار توطيد سلطة السود إلى طقوسات أيفي العبادية
Author: N. Fadeke Castor
In Spiritual Citizenship N. Fadeke Castor employs the titular concept to illuminate how Ifá/Orisha practices informed by Yoruba cosmology shape local, national, and transnational belonging in African diasporic communities in Trinidad and beyond. Drawing on almost two decades of fieldwork in Trinidad, Castor outlines how the political activism and social upheaval of the 1970s set the stage for African diasporic religions to enter mainstream Trinidadian society. She establishes how the postcolonial performance of Ifá/Orisha practices in Trinidad fosters a sense of belonging that invigorates its practitioners to work toward freedom, equality, and social justice. Demonstrating how spirituality is inextricable from the political project of black liberation, Castor illustrates the ways in which Ifá/Orisha beliefs and practices offer Trinidadians the means to strengthen belonging throughout the diaspora, access past generations, heal historical wounds, and envision a decolonial future.
Publisher: Duke University Press, 2017
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