News and Issues
The Danger of a Better Behaved Boko Haram
By Idayat Hussan, August 21, 2018
Boko Haram, the Nigerian jihadist group infamous for its bombings and abductions, is undergoing something of a makeover. A key faction that has the backing of so-called Islamic State has renounced its old blood-soaked ways and is trying instead to win hearts and minds in a new strategic twist to a nine-year insurgency that has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions.
Read the story in this link:
http://www.irinnews.org/opinion/2018/08/21/opinion-nigeria-militancy-peace-boko-haram
How Les Filles de Illighadad is Revolutionizing Traditional Tuareg Music
By Cynthia Schemer (Translation by Ahmoudou Madassane and Christopher Kirkley), February 17, 2017
The Tuareg society, a nomadic people living throughout the Sahara, are known for their tende—a style of music and the mortar drum played—and their traditional folk guitar playing. Tuareg guitar has gained notoriety locally in the Sahara and internationally due in part to Tinariwen, a band from Mali that won a Grammy Award for Best World Music Album for their 2011 release, Tassili.
Read the story in this link:
How Les Filles de Illighadad is Revolutionizing Traditional Tuareg Music
How a Senegalese princess sold into slavery in the 1700s became a wealthy plantation owner in Florida
By Elizabeth Ofosuah Johnson, September 26, 2018
In many African traditional cultures, it is believed that an African never strays too far from home. If he or she does, it is assumed the African will surely find his or her way back either in the world of the living or the dead. This notion is the reason why the rites of passage are taken very seriously in African traditional settings and why during the slave trade, many traditional ceremonies were performed to bid farewell to the captured Africans, giving them strength until they make it back home again.
Princess Anta Madjiguene Ndiaye was captured in her Senegalese kingdom and sold into slavery, and it took more than two centuries for her people to relocate her and welcome her spirit back home through grand celebrations in 2018.
Read the story in this link:https://face2faceafrica.com/article/how-a-senegalese-princess-sold-into-slavery-in-the-1700s-became-a-wealthy-plantation-owner-in-florida
The Book That Shook France’s African Colonial Empire
By Charu Sudan Kasturi, September, 13th, 2018
The first book by a Black author to win France’s most prestigious literary prize also forced the country to confront its brutal colonial record. After over six rounds of voting, the Académie Goncourt in Paris still couldn’t decide the best French novel of 1921. Then, on December 14th, a deciding vote cast by the organization’s president broke the deadlock and shook the Francophone world: The Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary award, had gone to René Maran. Maran was a French Guyanese colonial administrator in Ubangui-Shari (what is today the Central African Republic). He was the first Black author to be win the then-18-year-old award. But as civil rights and anti-colonial movements were stirring, it was the content of Maran’s novel that truly set off tremors on both sides of the Atlantic.
Read the story in this link:
https://www.ozy.com/flashback/the-book-that-shook-frances-african-colonial-empire/88593
Things Fall Apart turns 60
By Idowu Omoyele: October, 5th 2018
Sixty years ago, 27-year-old Chinua Achebe initiated a publishing sensation when London-based William Heinemann printed 2000 hardback copies of his debut novel, Things Fall Apart. Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, born in eastern Nigeria, was a member of the first set of students admitted to the University College in Ibadan when it was founded in 1948. Although he was supposed to study medicine on scholarship, he graduated with a BA degree in English, history and religious studies in 1953. Achebe began working at the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) in Lagos in 1954 and travelled out of Nigeria for the first time in 1956, when he flew to England on a scholarship to attend a course in radio production at the BBC Staff Training School.
Read the story in this link:
https://mg.co.za/article/2018-10-05-00-things-fall-apart-turns-60#.W7gSLGvTsXc.facebook
Why Infanticide Is A Problem In Senegal
By Allyn Gaestel, October 3, 2018
We had to pass two strictly-manned, massive gates to access the inner courtyard of the prison in Thies, the third largest city in Senegal. The women’s ward was off to the right, behind another wall and another smaller gate. It was like a small house, a cramped concrete structure without cells or bars. On the ground, mattresses were pressed against each other, blanketing the concrete floor. Women sat languidly on them or clustered in the courtyard outside.
Read the story in this link:
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/10/03/631892291/why-infanticide-is-a-problem-in-senegal
NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
Dani Nabudere’s Afrikology: A Quest for African Holism
[كتاب داني نابوداري عن الأفريكولوجيا: نحو سعي حثيث لفهم الشمولية الأفريقية]
Author: Sanya Osha
This publication is comprised of a diverse set of works on various aspects of African culture, politics, and philosophy. Toward the end of his life, Dani Nabudere formulated a theoretical construct that he termed “Afrikology.” Unlike most other Afrocentrists, who have stopped with the task of proving the primacy of the Egyptian past and its numerous cultural and scientific achievements, Nabudere strenuously attempts to connect that illustrious heritage with the African present. This, remarkably, is what makes his project worthy of careful attention. His corpus is multidisciplinary, although a major preoccupation with Africa is discernible in virtually all his works. His writings deal with critiques of imperialism, African political systems, processes of globalization and Africa’s location within them, and the ideological and existential imperatives of Afrocentric discourse.
Publisher: CODESRIA, Senegal, 2018
Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light
[باريس فيما بعد الاستعمار: أوهام التآلف في مدينة الانوار]
Author: Laila Amine
This book shows that space and place are anything but stable. Amine focuses on the literal margins of Paris, and on the literary and artistic works that are produced in or about those margins. Rather than reproduce the well-worn trope of the banlieue, the outskirts of Paris, as a tragic space whose inhabitants are unable to integrate so-called French values, Amine carefully examines the work of writers and artists who have engaged with the space and have produced pointed critiques of structural inequality and the legacy of colonialism that calls into question traditional French narratives of cultural and religious alterity.
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
Transitional Justice in Africa Aspects of the Dismantling of Systems of Authoritarian Study of Truth Commissions Experiences: Achievements And Challenges
[العدالة الانتقالية في أفريقيا مظاهر تفكيك الأنظمة السلطوية دراسة في تجارب لجان الحقيقة : مكتسبات وتحديات]
Author: Edited by Democratic Arab Center
The aim of this edited volume is to create an encyclopedia-style book on African transitional justice models. Through studying transitional justice experiences in Africa and measuring the extent to which grievances were experienced during conflicts, readers can better understand how conflicts and civil wars have been reduced without the boldest transitional justice mechanisms in Africa. This volume brings together academic experiences and various specialized researchers who are knowledgeable about international changes. Further, it examines ways to improve academic knowledge on research regarding African transitional justice.
Publisher: Democratic Arab Center, Germany, 2018
The Corner’s Wife Poems in Translation
[قرينة الزاوية: قصائد في الترجمة]
Author: Joan Hambidge
Joan Hambidge has published over 25 collections of poetry. Her work uses poetry to dissect, examine, and recompose the material of her own life and work to explore ideas and issues central to our understanding of language and meaning. The poems selected for translation in this compilation offer insights into her views across distinct phenomenon: city life, love, family, time, and eternity. The Coroner’s Wife offers English readers the unique opportunity to experience a prolific and renowned Afrikaan poet in her/his own language. Translations have been sensively rendered by well-known poets, Charl JF Cilliers, Johann de Lange, Jo Nel and Douglas Reid Skinner.
Publisher: Dryad Press, South Africa, 2018
Julius Nyerere
[جوليوس نيريري]
Author: Paul Bjerk
Based on multinational archival research and interviews with Nyerere’s family and colleagues, Paul Bjerk provides an incisive and accessible biography of African leader Julius Nyerere. Recognizing Nyerere’s commitment to participatory government and social equality while also confronting his authoritarian turns and policy failures, Bjerk offers a portrait of principled leadership under the difficult circumstances of postcolonial Africa.
Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2017
Of Bushmen and Work: Models, Modelling and Illusions
[من طبائع الادغال والعمل: تأملات في النماذج والتماذج والأوهام]
Author: Dafe Otobo
This book contains the 9th Inaugural Lecture Series of the University of Lagos, Nigeria delivered by Dafe Otobo on July 4th, 2018. According to Professor Otobo, “this is a small part in the on-going attempt at placing state policies, organizational, managerial and workers practices in Nigeria, if not Africa and elsewhere, into truer perspective.” In discussing topics such as trade unionism and developments in Nigeria, the lecture is a thought-provoking and thorough critique of prominent theories on labor and employment relations.
Publisher: Malthouse Press, Nigeria, 2018
Decolonising Colonial Education: Doing Away with Relics and Toxicity Embedded in the Racist Dominant Grand Narrative.
[تحريرالتعليم من ربق الاستعمار: كيف نتحرر من الآثار السامة المنبطحة في الأكذوبة الكبرى التي خلفها الاستعمار]
Author: Nkwazi Nkuzi Mhango
This book, Decolonising Education Chastises, invites academics to seriously commence academic and intellectual manumission by challenging the toxic Western dominant Grand Narrative that embeds, espouses and superimposes itself on others. It compels African scholars in particular to unite and address the legacies of colonialism by confronting the hegemonic dominance, along with the lies and myths that have caused many conflicts in world history. Such a toxic system founded on problematic experiments and theories has tended to license unsubstantiated views and stereotypes of others as intellectually impotent, moribund and of inferior humanity. The book invites academics and intellectuals to commit to a healthy dialogue among the world’s competing traditions of knowledge production in order to construct an inclusive narrative informed by a recognition of a common shared humanity.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2018
Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal
[مواطنة من القمامة: البنى التحتية والحيوية لقطاع العاملين في داكار ، السنغال]
Author: Rosalind Fredericks
Over the last twenty-five years, garbage infrastructure in Dakar, Senegal has taken center stage in the struggles over government, the value of labor, and the dignity of the working poor. Through strikes and public dumping, Dakar’s streets have been periodically inundated with household garbage as the city’s trash collectors and ordinary residents protest urban austerity. Often drawing on discourses of Islamic piety, garbage activists have provided a powerful language to critique a neoliberal mode of governing-through-disposability and assert rights to fair labor. In Garbage Citizenship, Rosalind Fredericks traces Dakar’s volatile trash politics to recalibrate how we understand urban infrastructure by emphasizing its material, social, and affective elements. She shows how labor is a key component of infrastructural systems and how Dakar’s residents use infrastructures as a vital tool for forging collective identities and mobilizing political action. Fleshing out the materiality of trash and degraded labor, Fredericks illuminates the myriad ways waste can be a potent tool of urban control and rebellion.
Publisher: Duke University Press, 2018
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Research Africa (research_africa-editor@duke.edu) welcomes submissions of books, events, funding opportunities, and more to be included in the next edition.
