Research Africa News: May 5th, 2020
Can Trump resolve the Egypt-Ethiopia Nile dam dispute?
By Mehari Taddele Maru 24 Apr 2020
In early February, officials from Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan announced in a joint statement that they had cleared the way for the filling and operation of a disputed mega-dam being built by the Ethiopian government on the Nile River. The statement, which came on the back of months of US-led negotiations, caused many to believe the three northeast African countries may finally reach a deal on the multi-billion-dollar project.
Read the rest of the story here.
In Old Cairo, a Subdued Ramadan Looms as Virus Shutters the City
By Declan Walsh, 20 April 2020
The holiest month in the Islamic calendar promises this year to be the strangest ever for the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims. In Cairo, known as the city of a thousand minarets, the coronavirus has cast a long shadow.
Read the details in this link.
How Angolan Elites Built a Private Banking Network to Move Their Riches Into the European Union
By Khadija Sharife and Mark Anderson 13 April 2020
A group of Angolan government officials and senior bank executives funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars out of the country with little oversight, creating their own private banking network through which they sent the money to Portugal and elsewhere in the European Union, an OCCRP investigation has found. The network sent at least $324 million through its banks, with most of the funds originating in Angola. In addition, $257 million was found to be held by European companies closely affiliated with these officials.
Read the details in this link.
The pandemic can be a catalyst for decolonisation in Africa
By David Mwambari 15 Apr 2020
The Western “brand” is suffering from what many see as a “slow and haphazard” response by Western governments to the COVID-19 outbreak. As the epicentre of the pandemic moved from China to Europe and now to the US, the weakness of Western neoliberal and neo-colonial systems has come to the fore.
Read the details in this link.
NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
The Integrated East African Financial System: Is It Feasible? The Policy Version
(النظام المالي المتكامل لشرق أفريقيا: هل يمكن تنفيذه؟ مراجعة سياسة)
Author: Mugerwa Paul
As the EAC regional bloc is soon celebrating 20 years since its inception, is it any closer to being fully integrated? Is the regional financial integration still feasible? How can it work for every member State and every East African? How can other RECs learn from the EAC experience? What should be further considered to optimise the business sense in the entire financial integration drive? In an analysis of more than 70 financial and other institutions the author addresses the levels of financial inclusion, financial system development, and regional integration to assess the feasibility of a financially integrated EAC and provides benchmarks which inform policy. The author explores not only conventional finance and banking but also introduces one area that is usually not captured in most writings and books in this areas i.e. Islamic Finance. While Islamic Finance is slowly becoming a mainstream area of finance, there has been limited research, works and writing in the area.
Publisher: Asante Capital Hub, Uganda, 2020.
Music, Health, and Power: Singing the Unsayable in The Gambia
(الموسيقى والصحة والسلطة: التغني بالمحظور في غامبيا)
Author: Bonnie B. McConnell
Music, Health, and Power offers an original, on-the-ground analysis of the role that music plays in promoting healthy communities. The book brings the reader inside the world of kanyeleng fertility societies and HIV/AIDS support groups, where women use music to leverage stigma and marginality into new forms of power. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over a period of 13 years (2006–2019), the author articulates a strengths-based framework for research on music and health that pushes beyond deficit narratives to emphasize the creativity and resilience of Gambian performers in responding to health disparities. Examples from Ebola prevention programs, the former President’s AIDS “cure,” and a legendary underwear theft demonstrate the high stakes of women’s performances as they are caught up in broader contestations over political and medical authority. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of ethnomusicology, medical anthropology, and African studies. The accompanying audio examples provide access to the women’s performances discussed in the text.
Publisher: Routledge, 2020.
Boxing Is No Cakewalk! Azumah ‘Ring Professor’ Nelson in the Social History of Ghanaian Boxing
(الملاكمة ليست نزهة! دور أزوما نيلسون (أستاذ الحلبة) في التاريخ الاجتماعي للملاكمة الغانية)
Author: De-Valera NYM Botchway
Boxing is no cakewalk! Azumah ‘Ring Professor’ Nelson in the Social History of Ghanaian Boxing explores the social history of boxing in Ghana and its interesting nexus with the biography of Azumah Nelson, unquestionably Ghana’s most celebrated boxer. The book posits that sports constitute more than mere games that people play. They are endowed with enormous political, cultural, economic and social power that can influence people’s lives in various ways. Boxing is no cakewalk! interrogates the social meaning and impact of boxing within the colonial and postcolonial milieux of popular culture in Ghana. Consequently, it reconsiders the prevailing conception of boxing as adversative to ‘enlightened’ human culture by arguing that it is a positive formulator of individual and national identities. The historicising of sports and the lives of sportspersons in Ghana provides an eloquent backdrop for an understanding of the past social dynamics and their effect in the present. The book’s analytical narrative offers an intellectual contribution to the promising areas of social and cultural history in Ghana’s historiography and the scholarly discourse on identity formation and social empowerment through the popular culture of sports.
Publisher: NISC (Pty) Ltd, South Africa, 2020.
Understanding the Higher Education Market in Africa
(فهم سوق التعليم العالي في أفريقيا)
Author (Editor): Emmanuel Mogaji, Felix Maringe and Robert Ebo Hinson
This book offers theoretical and practical insights into the marketing of higher education in Africa. It explores the key players, challenges and policies affecting higher education across the continent; their marketing strategies and the students’ selection process. While acknowledging the vast size of the continent, this book aims to provide an understanding of the dynamics of higher education in Africa. This book recognises the private and government involvement in higher education provision and students and staff as stakeholders in the marketisation process. Strategic efforts are directed by universities to attract prospective students. This book further addresses issues such as the responses of higher education sectors to the notion of markets and marketing; consumerism and competition in higher education in Africa; conceptions of the commodification of higher education in Africa; and the dominance of Western epistemologies and their influence in transforming higher education sectors. Students as consumers in increasingly marketised higher education sectors in Africa are also discussed. Though primarily for marketing students and academic researchers, the book’s feature of blended theoretical and practical knowledge means that it will also be of interest to marketing practitioners and university managers.
Publisher: Routledge, 2020.
Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896
(الأفارقة المحررون وإلغاء تجارة الرقيق ، 1807-1896)
Author: /(Editors): Richard Anderson and Henry B. Lovejoy
In 1807, Britain and the United States passed legislation limiting and ultimately prohibiting the transoceanic slave trade. As world powers negotiated anti-slave-trade treaties thereafter, British, Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian, French, and US authorities seized ships suspected of illegal slave trading, raided slave barracoons, and detained newly landed slaves. The judicial processes in a network of the world’s first international courts of humanitarian justice not only resulted in the “liberation” of nearly two hundred thousand people but also generated an extensive archive of documents. Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896 makes use of these records to illuminate the fates of former slaves, many of whom were released from bondage only to be conscripted into extended periods of indentured servitude. Essays in this collection explore a range of topics related to those often referred to as “Liberated Africans”-a designation that, the authors show, should be met with skepticism. Contributors share an emphasis on the human consequences for Africans of the abolitionist legislation. The collection is deeply comparative, looking at conditions in British colonies such as Sierra Leone, the Gambia, and the Cape Colony as well as slave-plantation economies such as Brazil, Cuba, and Mauritius.
Publisher: University of Rochester Press, 2020.
Tacky’s Revolt The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
(ثورة تاكي: قصة عن التجارة الأطلسية للرقيق)
Author: Vincent Brown
In the second half of the eighteenth century, as European imperial conflicts extended the domain of capitalist agriculture, warring African factions fed their captives to the transatlantic slave trade while masters struggled continuously to keep their restive slaves under the yoke. In this contentious atmosphere, a movement of enslaved West Africans in Jamaica (then called Coromantees) organized to throw off that yoke by violence. Their uprising—which became known as Tacky’s Revolt—featured a style of fighting increasingly familiar today: scattered militias opposing great powers, with fighters hard to distinguish from noncombatants. It was also part of a more extended borderless conflict that spread from Africa to the Americas and across the island. Even after it was put down, the insurgency rumbled throughout the British Empire at a time when slavery seemed the dependable bedrock of its dominion. That certitude would never be the same, nor would the views of black lives, which came to inspire both more fear and more sympathy than before. Tracing the roots, routes, and reverberations of this event across disparate parts of the Atlantic world, Vincent Brown offers us a superb geopolitical thriller. The book expands our understanding of the relationship between European, African, and American history, as it speaks to our understanding of wars of terror today.
Publisher: Harvard University Press 2020.
To Be Or Not To Be: Sudan at Crossroads A Pan-African Perspective
(تكون أو لا تكون: السودان في مفترق الطرق، وجهة نظر أفريقي قاري)
Author: M. Jalāl Hāshim
To Be or Not to Be is an analysis of linguistic, cultural, political, economic and social factors, which explain the intricate root causes of conflicts which have ravished Sudan. It stands in stark contrast to the dominant simplification and distortions which have come to typify presentations of the region. Central to the book is an unapologetic explanation of Arabization; which often is portrayed as individual choices of religious loyalty, but, in fact, masks an intentional power-system which viciously corrupts Afrikan identities. By highlighting the detrimental complexities of manipulation, geopolitics, identity confusion and cultural imperialism, Hashim has not only written an authoritative book about Sudan, but also presented a comprehensive case study that all of Afrika must learn from. Rarely are we presented with such a vigourous inside-view to an area of Afrika which once was held in the highest civilizational esteem, but has been reduced to an ideological field of Arab-led terror, massacres and disintegration.
Publisher: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, Tanzania, 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.
