Research Africa News: February 21, 2020
Google PhD Fellowship Program Google
PhD Fellowships directly support graduate students as they pursue their PhD, as well as connect them to a Google Research Mentor. Nurturing and maintaining strong relations with the academic community is a top priority at Google. The Google PhD Fellowship Program was created to recognize outstanding graduate students doing exceptional and innovative research in areas relevant to computer science and related fields. Fellowships support promising PhD candidates of all backgrounds who seek to influence the future of technology. Google’s mission is to foster inclusive research communities and encourages people of diverse backgrounds to apply. We currently offer Fellowships in Africa, Australia and New Zealand, East Asia, Europe, India, the United States and Canada.
Read the details of the fellowship in this link
African Guest Researchers’ Scholarship Programme
An opportunity for postdoctoral researchers in Africa to pursue their own research projects, thereby indirectly strenghtening the academic milieux in African countries. The scholarship offers access to the Institute’s library and other resources that provide for a stimulating research environment.
Read the details of the scholarship in this link
Oil giant BP accused of racism in Mauritania after overlooking black students
By Amandla Thomas-Johnson, 18 February 2020
At least nine out of ten BP-sponsored scholarships went to Arab-Berber students in the majority black nation.
BP has been accused of contributing to “state racism” in Mauritania after awarding at least nine out of ten study abroad scholarships to students drawn from the country’s minority Arab-Berber group, with none appearing to go to the majority black population. The London-based oil giant, which has stepped up its investments in the West African country in recent years, also came under fire for the few women awarded the scholarship. However, it insists the students were chosen on merit.
Read the rest of the story in this ME link.
The Last Poets: the hip-hop forefathers who gave black America its voice
By Rebecca Bengal Fri 18 May 2018
It is half a century since the Last Poets stood in Harlem, uttered their first words in public, and created the blueprint for hip-hop. At an intimate open house session, they explain why their revolutionary words are still needed. You can trace the birth of hip-hop to the summer of 1973 when Kool Herc DJ’d the first extended breakbeat, much to the thrill of the dancers at a South Bronx block party. You can trace its conception, however, to five years earlier – 19 May 1968, 50 years ago this weekend – when the founding members of the Last Poets stood together in Mount Morris park – now Marcus Garvey park – in Harlem and uttered their first poems in public. They commemorated what would have been the 43rd birthday of Malcolm X, who had been slain three years earlier. Not two months had passed since the assassination of Martin Luther King. “Growing up, I was scheduled to be a nice little coloured guy. I was liked by everybody,” says the Last Poets’ Abiodun Oyewole. He was 18 and in college when he heard the news. “But when they killed Dr King, all bets were off.”
Read the details in this link.
The Georgetown Student Who Became Justice Minister of Sudan He was preparing for life as an academic. A new government in his homeland had bigger plans for him.
By Rebecca Hamilton FEBRUARY 5, 2020
Late last summer, Nasredeen Abdulbari, 41, was in the Georgetown University Library, editing the fifth chapter of his dissertation on constitutional law and human rights, when he received a text message from a Sudanese civil society leader asking him to call urgently. Seismic changes were underway in Abdulbari’s home country of Sudan, where protesters had succeeded in ousting President Omar Hassan al-Bashir after 30 years of dictatorship. Abdulbari closed his laptop and stepped outside to make the call. “Civil society is nominating you to be the minister of justice,” the man on the other end of the line told him.
Read the details in this link.
NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
Financing Africa
[تدبير الموارد المالية في أفريقيا]
Author: Attiya Waris
Financing Africa’s development requires ingenuity, discipline, and an understanding of fiscal systems – the entirety of government revenues and expenditures, including taxation and debt. This book makes fascinating what might seem at first glance complex. It describes diverse approaches that have been adjusted to local circumstances across the continent and reflects on the push to unite and harmonise toward African union. Africa is rich, yet resources are lost through loopholes in fiscal systems. Financial resources come from the people, are not unlimited, and do not come easily or without cost. Africans must therefore cherish these resources and use them in nation-building and national and regional development. Efficient, effective, transparent and accountable fiscal systems that are fair and just will go a long way toward financing Africa’s development. Using examples from all of Africa’s 54 countries, the book makes fiscal matters real and understandable for people, no matter their field. It demonstrates the importance of fiscal law and policy for development and the impact it has on individuals, communities, nations, regional groupings, and the continent.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2019.
Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger
[فادا: نقاشات حول الملل وهوية الانتماء في النيجر]
Author: Adeline Masquelier
Niger most often comes into the public eye as an example of deprivation and insecurity. Urban centers have become concentrated areas of unemployment filled with young men trying, against all odds, to find jobs and fill their time with meaningful occupations. At the heart of Adeline Masquelier’s groundbreaking book is the fada—a space where men gather to escape boredom by talking, playing cards, listening to music, and drinking tea. As a place in which new forms of sociability and belonging are forged outside the unattainable arena of work, the fada has become an integral part of Niger’s urban landscape. By considering the fada as a site of experimentation, Masquelier offers a nuanced depiction of how young men in urban Niger engage in the quest for recognition and reinvent their own masculinity in the absence of conventional avenues to self-realization. In an era when fledgling and advanced economies alike are struggling to support meaningful forms of employment, this book offers a timely glimpse into how to create spaces of stability, respect, and creativity in the face of diminished opportunities and precarity
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2019
Religion and Development in Southern and Central Africa: Vol. 2
[الدين والتنمية في جنوب ووسط أفريقيا: المجلد 2]
Author (Editor): James N. Amanze, Maake Masango, Chitando Ezra, Lilian Siwila
This book is a result of a joint conference, which was held from 18th-22nd July 2017 under the theme Religion, Citizenship and Development – Southern African Perspectives.” The theme of the conference was adopted in order to underline the importance and significance of religion in the socio-economic development of people in the world generally and in Southern and Central Africa in particular. The papers in the book are divided into two volumes. Volume one consists of papers which directly discuss religion and development in one form or another. The second volume contains papers that discuss religion and other pertinent issues related to development. The papers are grouped into sub-themes for ease of reference. These include Citizenship and Development, Migration and Development, Disability and Development, Pentecostal Churches and Development and Religion and Society. All in all, despite a divergence of sub-themes in volume two, all point to issues to do with the role of religion in development in Southern and Central Africa today..
Publisher: Mzuni Press, Malawi, 2019.
Histories of Dirt Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos
[تاريخ الأوساخ: وسائل الإعلام والحياة الحضرية في مدينة لاغوس في عهد الاستعمار وما بعده]
Author: Stephanie Newell
In Histories of Dirt Stephanie Newell traces the ways in which urban spaces and urban dwellers come to be regarded as dirty, as exemplified in colonial and postcolonial Lagos. Newell conceives dirt as an interpretive category that facilitates moral, sanitary, economic, and aesthetic evaluations of other cultures under the rubric of uncleanliness. She examines a number of texts ranging from newspaper articles by elite Lagosians to colonial travel writing, public health films, and urban planning to show how understandings of dirt came to structure colonial governance.
Publisher: Duke University Press, 2019.
Caravans of Gold: Fragments in Time Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa
[قوافل من الذهب: الفن والثقافة والمقايضات عبر إفريقيا جنوب الصحراء في القرون الوسطى]
Author: Kathleen Bickford Berzock
Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time draws on the latest archaeological discoveries and art historical research to construct a compelling look at medieval trans-Saharan exchange and its legacy. Contributors from diverse disciplines present case studies that form a rich portrayal of a distant time. Topics include descriptions of key medieval cities around the Sahara; networks of exchange that contributed to the circulation of gold, copper, and ivory and their associated art forms; and medieval glass bead production in West Africa’s forest region. The volume also reflects on Morocco’s Gnawa material culture, associated with descendants of West African slaves, and movements of people across the Sahara today. Featuring a wealth of color images, this fascinating book demonstrates how the rootedness of place, culture, and tradition is closely tied to the circulation of people, objects, and ideas. These “fragments in time” offer irrefutable evidence of the key role that Africa played in medieval history and promote a new understanding of the past and the present. Published in association with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University.
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2019.
Things Left Unsaid
[المسكوت عنه]
Author: Rosabelle Boswell
In South Africa issues of identity remain a pressing concern and preoccupation. For some, the experience of feeling that one does not belong in South Africa, especially among Africans and African descendants, appears to be intensifying. In this first collection of poems, Rosabelle Boswell speaks of the many places in which ordinary Africans born outside of South Africa try to achieve belonging. They do so in the family context, the backyard, language, the meeting, familiar landscapes and dreams. The poems also foreground the tumult of emotions that rise from the experience of exclusion and the results of pressure when one must conform. There is panic and dislocation, desperation, fear and sense of marginality when one’s work and achievements are reduced to whether one is born in South Africa or not. According to the poet, in such a context, one can only achieve true freedom from the tyranny of belonging by psychologically walking away from the expectations of those in power and putting oneself in a ‘clearing’ where flexibility, openness and newness reside. The forest of expectations remains, but we can achieve temporary respite from it by walking away now and again. The collection spans two years of writing identity in a different form, poetry.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 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.
