Research Africa: May 28th, 2019
News and Issues
1. The Brilliant Women Making A Difference In Sudan’s Female-Led Revolution
By Amel Mukhtar, May 24, 2019
For 155 days so far — almost half a year — protests against the Sudanese regime have taken over life in the country. It took 113 of those days to finally depose its president of 30 years, Omar Al-Bashir, in a phenomenal first win for its citizens. However, his regime remains and, since April 6, hundreds of thousands of the population have formed a sit-in demanding their democracy. Despite the oppressive Public Order Law, a moral prohibition that can arbitrarily punish women for “indecent acts” such as wearing trousers or walking alone, and despite government orders for militia to target them in shocking ways, women powerfully form the vast majority of protests. They have refused to let energy lull, instead becoming the loudest voices carrying out the most rebellious actions.
Read the story in this link.
The Brilliant Women Making A Difference In Sudan’s Female-Led Revolution
www.vogue.co.uk
Vogue speaks to three Sudanese women vital to the paradigm shift
2. African Samurai: The Enduring Legacy of a Black Warrior in Feudal Japan
By Natalie Leung, May 20, 2019
When feudal Japan’s most powerful warlord Nobunaga Oda met Yasuke, a black slave-turned-retainer, in 1581, he believed the man was a god.Oda had never seen an African before. And like the locals in Japan’s then-capital of Kyoto, he was awed by Yasuke’s height, build and skin tone, according to Thomas Lockley, the author of “African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan.”
“When Yasuke got to Kyoto (with Jesuit missionaries), there was a massive riot. People wanted to see him and be in his presence,” says Lockley, who spent nine years researching and writing the book, which was published last month.
Read the story in this link.
3. The Boy Abducted to Guide Blind Beggars in Nigeria
By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, May 19, 2019
Samuel Abdulraheem has no recollection of the day he was abducted, aged seven, from his family home in the northern Nigerian city of Kano. Although he came from a large family – his father had 17 children by four wives – Samuel was on his own with a nanny that day. His family were told he had gone outside to ride his bicycle. They would not see him again for another six years.
“There is nothing we didn’t do to try to find him,” his older sister Firdausi Okezie recalls. Then aged 21, she was not made aware of his disappearance at first. Her brother had always enjoyed rushing to answer the phone and speak with her when she called home from university. But when other members of the household began answering it when she rang, she suspected something was wrong.
Read the story in this link.
The boy abducted to guide blind beggars
www.bbc.com
How a seven-year-old was stolen from his home in Nigeria and the chance encounter with his sister six years later.
4. A Legacy of Lunacy Haunts Kenya’s Old Railway.
By Jenni Marsh, May 21, 2019
In 1903, British colonial administrator Sir Charles Norton Edgecumbe Eliot made a bold statement: “It is not uncommon for a country to create a railway, but it is uncommon for a railway to create a country.” The country was Kenya. The railway became known as the Lunatic Express. Now 116 years later, another railway line has been built almost parallel to those same tracks in a bid to transform this part of Africa, but this time by a different world power: China. Will China’s $3.6B line be different? Kenya took on huge debt to buy a modern railway from Beijing that it hopes will boost its economy … despite the controversy it has attracted.
Read the story in this link.
5. Sekou Toure’s iconic 1963 speech on Africa’s endless possibilities as a united force
By Francis Akhalbey, May 24, 2019
May 25 of every year in Africa is Africa Day. The day is set aside by the African Union (AU) to commemorate the founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Throughout this week, which is also termed #AfricaWeek, Face2Face Africa will be sharing some iconic speeches by the founding fathers of the Organization of African Unity as a build up to Africa Day. Here’s the 1963 speech by the former president of Guinea and staunch pan-Africanist Ahmed Sekou Touré titled “The life of a man is counted in decades; the life of Africa is endless.”
Read the story in this link.
6. Being Black in Nazi Germany
By Damian Zane, May 22, 2019
Standing among her white classmates, who stare straight into the camera, she enigmatically glances to the side. Curiosity about the photograph – who the girl was and what she was doing in Germany – set the award-winning film-maker off on a path that led to Where Hands Touch, a new movie starring Amandla Stenberg and George MacKay. It is an imagined account of a mixed-race teenager’s clandestine relationship with a Hitler Youth member, but it is based on historical record.
Read the story in this link.
Being black in Nazi Germany
www.bbc.com
A new film explores the little-known story of Germany’s mixed-race population in the 1930s and 1940s.
NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
From African Peer Review Mechanisms To African Queer Review Mechanisms: Robert Gabriel Mugabe, Empire and the Decolonisation of African Orifices
( من آليات المحاسبة الندية إلى آليات الملاطفة الغرامية في أفريقيا: قراءات في أفكار روبرت غابرييل موغابي حول الإمبراطورية وإنهاء الاستعمار في الوسط الأفريقي)
Author/ (Editors): Artwell Nhemachena, Tapiwa Victor Warikandwa
This book juxtaposes economic liberalisation with the mounting liberalisation of African orifices. Reading land repossession and economic structural adjustment programmes together with what they call neoimperial structural adjustment of African orifices, the authors argue that there has been liberalisation of African orifices in a context where Africans are ironically prevented from repossessing their material resources. Juxtaposing recent bouts of Mugabephobia with discourses on homophobia, the book asks why empire prefers liberalising African orifices rather than attending to African demands for restitution, restoration and reparations. Noting that empire opposes African sovereignty, autonomy, and centralisation of power while paradoxically promoting transnational corporations’ centralisation of power over African economies, the book challenges contemporary discourses about shared sovereignty, distributed governance, heterarchy, heteronomy and onticology. Arguing that colonialists similarly denied Africans of their human essence, the volume problematises queer sexualities, homosexuality, ecosexuality, cybersexuality and humanoid robotic sexuality all of which complicate supposedly fundamental distinctions between human beings and animals and machines.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2019
Connecting South-South Communities The Narrative of South African-Malaysian Relations
( ربط مجتمعات الجنوب مجتمعات الجنوب: سرد العلاقات بين جنوب إفريقيا وماليزيا)
Author: Muhammed Haron
In addition to offering a comprehensive overview and fair insight over more than twenty five years into the relations between two South Middle Powers, namely South Africa and Malaysia, this book also discusses them within their respective regional structures and evaluates their diplomatic and commercial connections. It also explores issues that have generally been neglected by international relations experts; in this regard, it gives attention to cultural contacts that bring the critical role of non-state actors into the forefront of international affairs. Since the ideas espoused by South Africa and Malaysia’s political leaders are rooted in their specific national and broad regional philosophies, the study also unpacks the notions of the ’African ways’ vis-à-vis the ‘Asian ways’ in maintaining and sustaining state-to-state relations within the two regions. This book, which uses Critical Theory as an appropriate framework takes full recognition of various developments in international relations and adds to the fields of social sciences and the humanities.
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018
Fictioning Namibia as a Space of Desire: An Excursion into the Literary Space of Namibia During Colonialism, Apartheid and the Liberation Struggle
(تخيل ناميبيا كفضاء للهوى والرغبات)
Author: Renzo Baas
Modern-day Namibian history has largely been shaped by three major eras: German colonial rule, South African apartheid occupation, and the Liberation Struggle. It was, however, not only military conquest that laid the cornerstone for the colony, but also how the colony was imagined, the ‘dream’ of this colony. As a tool of discursive worldmaking, literature has played a major role in providing a framework in which to ‘dream’ Namibia: first from outside its borders and then from within. In Fictioning Namibia as a Space of Desire, Renzo Baas employs Henri Lefebvre’s city–countryside dialectic and reworks it in order to uncover how fictional texts played an integral part in the violent acquisition of a foreign territory. Through the production of myths around whiteness, German and South African authors designed a literary space in which control, destruction, and the dehumanisation of African peoples are understood as a natural order, one that is dictated by history and its linear continuation. These European texts are offset by Namibia’s first novel by an African, offering a counter-narrative to the colonial invention that was (German) South West Africa.
Publisher: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2019
KENDA MŨIYŨRU: Rũgano rwa Gĩkũyũ na Mũmbi
Author: Ngugi wa Thiong’oAuthor
One particular night, Ngugi suddenly woke up
He felt like the eyes of his heart had been opened
He had got a revelation
He went to his living room and took a pen.
He started writing this story about Gikuyu and Mumbi
And their perfect nine.
So this is not history, it is a revelation;
A revelation of love
A revelation of hope
A revelation of perseverance
A revelation of bravery
A revelation of knowledge
Publisher: East African Educational Publishers, Kenya, 2018
Experiments with Empire: Anthropology and Fiction in the French Atlantic
(اختبارات تجريبية مع الإمبراطورية: الأنثروبولوجيا والخيال في ظل الحكم الفرنسي للمحيط الأطلسي)
Author: Justin Izzo
In Experiments with Empire, Justin Izzo examines how twentieth-century writers, artists, and anthropologists from France, West Africa, and the Caribbean experimented with ethnography and fiction in order to explore new ways of understanding the colonial and postcolonial world. Focusing on novels, films, and ethnographies that combine fictive elements and anthropological methods, Izzo shows how empire gives ethnographic fictions the raw materials for thinking beyond empire’s political and epistemological boundaries. In works by French surrealist writer Michel Leiris, filmmaker Jean Rouch, Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ, and Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau, anthropology no longer functions on behalf of imperialism as a way to understand and administer colonized peoples; its relationship with imperialism gives writers and artists the opportunity for textual experimentation and political provocation. Anthropology, Izzo also contends, helps readers to better make sense of the complicated legacy of imperialism and to imagine new democratic futures
Publisher: Duke University Press, 2019
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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.
