Research Africa News: February 9th, 2020
Who was Omar ibn Said? New research reconsiders Muslim slave’s writings
By Yonat Shimron, February 7, 2020 (Religion News Services)
(RNS) — He was a slave from Senegal who wrote in Arabic. Or was he an Arab prince? He was a scholar who memorized vast passages of the Quran and mastered numerous Islamic texts. Or were his writings unintelligible? He was a devout Muslim. Or did he convert to Christianity? These are just some of the conflicting narratives about Omar ibn Said (or more correctly Sayyid), a black Muslim scholar captured in Senegal in 1807 and transported by boat to Charleston, South Carolina. He eventually fled to North Carolina and lived out his days as a house slave to James Owen and Owen’s brother, onetime North Carolina Governor John Owen.
Read the rest of the story in RNS link.
Buried in Sand For A Millennium: Africa’s Gus Roman City
By Messynessy, Jan. 15, 2020
Got your archeologist’s cap on? Today we invite you to touch down in Algeria and explore Timgad, a lost Roman city on the edge of the Sahara desert that remained hidden beneath the sand for nearly a thousand years. Positively obscure compared to the international notoriety of Pompeii, this ancient city is nonetheless one of the best surviving examples of Roman town planning anywhere in the historical Empire. No one believed the first 18th century European explorer who claimed to have found a Roman city poking out of the sand in the North African desert, and the full extent of the 50-hectare site wouldn’t be realised and excavated in its entirety until the 1950s. Rome is still well worth the visit, but it’s in Algeria that some of the most impressive Roman remains in the whole world are to be found…Read the details in this link here.
African Union: Implementation of #Agenda2063
The First Continental Report on the implementation of #Agenda2063 has been launched!
The report is an assessment of 31 African Union Member States & 6 Regional Economic Communities towards achieving Africa’s blueprint and master plan for sustainable development and economic growth.
The report is available here
Africa has 1.2 billion people and only six labs that can test for coronavirus. How quickly can they ramp up?
DAKAR, Senegal — After Africa’s first suspected case of the Wuhan coronavirus emerged last month in the Ivory Coast, doctors sent a sample from the coughing college student to the closest equipped lab — 4,500 miles north, in Paris.
Officials said the wait for the results, which came back negative, highlighted the need to rapidly expand testing capacity on the continent, where health authorities are scrambling to prepare for a potential outbreak.
Read the rest of the story here
NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Perspectives of Youth Language Practices in Africa: Codes and Identity Writings
[المنظو اللغوي والاجتماعي للممارسات اللغوية بين الشباب في أفريقيا: حالة دراسية
للرموزوالهوية الانتمائية في الكتابة]
Author (Editor): Gratien G. Atindogbé, Augustin Emmanuel Ebongue
With the demographic explosion of young people in major African cities, we are witnessing the emergence of youth languages and new speech forms. In search of well-being, these young people, plagued by poverty, social injustice, unemployment and idleness, invent linguistic codes that allow them to find themselves. The linguistic and sociolinguistic description of these youth languages is the object of this volume. The contributions inform on the statutes and functions of the youth languages of Africa, their forms and structures, their representations, and envisage perspectives and prospective didactics. Avec l’explosion démographique des jeunes dans les grandes villes africaines, on assiste, à une émergence de langues et de parlers jeunes. En quête de bien-être, ces jeunes, en proie à la pauvreté, aux injustices sociales, au chômage et à l’oisiveté, inventent des codes linguistiques leur permettant de se retrouver. C’est la description linguistique et sociolinguistique de ces parlers, qui fait l’objet de ce collectif. Les contributions informent à cet effet sur les statuts et fonctions des parlers et langues jeunes d’Afrique, leurs formes et structures, les représentations entretenues à leur égard, et envisage des perspectives et prospectives didactiques.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2019.
Democratic Engineering in Rwanda and Burundi
[هندسة الديمقراطية في رواندا وبوروندي]
Author: Jean-Marie Kagabo
In Democratic Engineering in Rwanda and Burundi the author argues that a democratic model which is suitable for single-cultural societies may not be applicable in multicultural societies; he illustrates that the liberal and socialist theories have not addressed the issue of national minorities which threatens peace and stability in most African countries. The author investigates the form of democratic engineering that would harmonise ethnic relations and guard against ethnic discrimination and violence. He explores the consociational and integrative theories to identify a suitable democratic system that would stabilise Rwanda and Burundi. He analyses the pros and the cons of the present options adopted by Rwanda and Burundi to address the question of ethnicity and also assesses the potential of a number of other solutions.
Publisher: Fountain Publishers, Uganda, 2018.
Wanted Dead and Alive the Case for South Africa’s Cattle
[مطلوب حيا أم ميتا: دراسة حالة المواشي في جنوب أفريقيا]
Author: Gregory Mthembu-Salter
Given what we know about climate change, should we still be raising and eating cattle? And how do we weigh the cultural and economic value of cattle against their environmental impact? This engaging book brings history, science, economics and popular culture together in a timely discussion about whether current practices can be justified in a period of rapid climate change. Journalist Gregory Mthembu-Salter first encountered South Africa’s love of cattle during his own lobola negotiations. The book traces his personal journey through kraals, rangelands and feedlots across South Africa to find out more about the national hunger for cattle. He takes a broad sweep – drawing on such diverse sources as politicians involved in land reform, history, braai-side interviews with cattle farmers and abattoir owners, conversations with his mother-in-law, and analysis of cutting-edge science.
Publisher: Cover2Cover Books, South Africa,2019.
Letter from America Memoir of an Adopted Child
[رسالة من أمريكا: مذكرة طفل متبنى]
Author: Gil Ndi-Shang
Inspired by Alistair Cooke’s masterpiece “Letter from America” (1934-2004) that depicted the transformation of British culture in the United States of America, Ndi-Shang’s text redefines ‘America’, focusing on the melting pot engendered by African, indigenous, European and Asian cultures in Latin America through the case of Peru, the erstwhile epicentre of Spanish empire in Latin America. It is a reflection on the triangular relationship between Africa, Europe and America against the backdrop of slavery and (neo-)colonialism which continue to define intimate experiences, daily interactions, personal trajectories and human relations in a ‘globalized world’. Ndi-Shang probes into the legacies of racial inequalities but also the possibilities of a new ethic of encounter amongst human beings/cultures. The text is based on an intricate interweaving of the humorous with the tragic, the personal with the global, the historical with the current and the real with the creative.
Publisher: Spears Media Press, Cameroon, 2019
Black Feminism Reimagined After Intersectionality
[الحركة النسوية بين السود: اعادة تصور نظرية تداخل الهويات]
Author: Jennifer C. Nash
In Black Feminism Reimagined Jennifer C. Nash reframes black feminism’s engagement with intersectionality, often celebrated as its primary intellectual and political contribution to feminist theory. Charting the institutional history and contemporary uses of intersectionality in the academy, Nash outlines how women’s studies has both elevated intersectionality to the discipline’s primary program-building initiative and cast intersectionality as a threat to feminism’s coherence. As intersectionality has become a central feminist preoccupation, Nash argues that black feminism has been marked by a single affect—defensiveness—manifested by efforts to police intersectionality’s usages and circulations. Nash contends that only by letting go of this deeply alluring protectionist stance, the desire to make property of knowledge, can black feminists reimagine intellectual production in ways that unleash black feminist theory’s visionary world-making possibilities..
Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2019
Locating Politics in Ethiopia’s Irreecha Ritual
[تحديد ماهية السياسة في طقوس مجموعات إريشا الإثيوبية]
Author: Serawit Bekele Debele
In Locating Politics in Ethiopia’s Irreecha Ritual Serawit Bekele Debele gives an account of politics and political processes in contemporary Ethiopia as manifested in the annual ritual performance. Mobilizing various sources such as archives, oral accounts, conversations, videos, newspapers, and personal observations, Debele critically analyses political processes and how they are experienced, made sense of and articulated across generational, educational, religious, gender and ethnic differences as well as political persuasions. Moreover, she engages Irreecha in relation to the hugely contested meaning making processes attached to the Thanksgiving ritual which has now become an integral part of Oromo national identity.
Publisher: Brill Publications, 2019.
Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia
[قصص عن الأمل المرارة: حالة دراسة مشيدي الطرق الصينيين في إثيوبيا]
Author: Miriam Driessen
China’s new globalism plays out as much in the lives of ordinary workers who shoulder the task of implementing infrastructure projects in the world as in the upper echelons of power. Through unprecedented ethnographic research among Chinese road builders in Ethiopia, Miriam Driessen finds that the hope of sharing China’s success with developing countries soon turns into bitterness, as Chinese workers perceive a lack of support and appreciation from Ethiopian laborers and state entities. The bitterness is compounded by their position at the margins of Chinese society, suspended as they are between China and Africa and between a poor rural background and a precarious urban future. Workers’ aspirations and predicaments reflect back on a Chinese society in flux as well as China’s shifting place in the world. Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia sheds light on situations of contact in which disparate cultures meet and wrestle with each other in highly asymmetric relations of power. Revealing the intricate and intimate dimensions of these encounters, Driessen conceptualizes how structures of domination and subordination are reshaped on the ground. The book skillfully interrogates micro-level experiences and teases out how China’s involvement in Africa is both similar to and different from historical forms of imperialism.
Publisher: Hong Kong 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.
