Research Africa News: May 22nd, 2020
No-frills education Trust, slavery and the African School of Economics
MAY 23, 2020
AS LEONARD WANTCHEKON was having breakfast with his wife, Catherine Kossou, in 2007, she recalled how one friend could not trust anyone. Even as a child her friend would say: “That person is going to sell you,” or “He will make you disappear.”
The words struck a chord with Mr Wantchekon. Now a professor at Princeton University, he was born in Zagnanado in central Benin. Some of the music he listened to in his youth—such as that of Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou—had songs that warned against trusting those close to you.
Read the rest of the story here.
Africa Is Not Waiting to Be Saved From the Coronavirus If reporting doesn’t improve, the creativity and agency of swaths of humanity will be lost to history.
By Nanjala Nyabola, MAY 11, 2020
As Covid-19 races its way across Africa, there are two stories happening at once. The first is of governments using their armies and militarized police to beat, threaten, and shoot their way to public health. This is the story of the Kenyan police killing more people than the disease in the week after its first recorded case and of a pregnant woman dying on the street because the Ugandan police would not let her motorcycle taxi take her to a hospital after curfew. It is the story of governments closing their borders too late, diverting money to security instead of hospitals, and waiting for someone from somewhere else to save them.
Read the rest of the story here.
What African Nations Are Teaching the West About Fighting the Coronavirus
By Jina Moore May 15, 2020
In early March, Ingrid Gercama left her home in the Netherlands and flew to war-torn South Sudan. An applied-research anthropologist with a special interest in epidemics, she had spent time on the African continent during a public-health emergency before, remaining in Liberia, in 2014, during that country’s Ebola outbreak. When she landed at the frill-free airport in South Sudan’s capital of Juba, she was taken to a separate screening area, the shape and size of a shipping container, where her temperature was recorded by government health workers, along with her hotel address and her local telephone number. Gercama was asked a series of questions about her travel and health, she recalled, including whether she had recently come into contact with a bat. The screening area’s walls were covered with posters about covid-19 and its symptoms, and she was ushered into the country past a banner explaining the disease and offering a telephone number for a national coronavirus hotline, which she was to call if she developed a fever. She had to wash her hands once to get into the screening area, and again when she left.
Read the details in this link.
Three years on the go: A Reflection on the status of Civic Space in The Gambia after the removal of Jammeh
By Muhammed Lamin Saidykhan – Human Rights Defender and Movement Coordinator at Africans Rising, May 17, 2020
The Gambia has embraced a more open civic and political space for social justice organisations, movements and activists in the country compared to Yaya Jammeh’s time, although certain rights like those related to freedom of expression and rights to assembly remain limited because of lack of reforms, for instance, of the Public Order Act. The last three years under the transitional government have seen CSOs, and more specifically movements, coming together on a number of occasions to take actions aimed at holding the government accountable.
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 هو ممكن؟
إصدار السياسة:)
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.
Kwaito Bodies: Remastering Space and Subjectivity in Post-Apartheid South Africa
(رقصات كويتو: نقاشات في إعادة تشكيل المكان والذات في جنوب إفريقيا ما بعد الفصل العنصري)
Author: Xavier Livermon
In Kwaito Bodies Xavier Livermon examines the cultural politics of the youthful black body in South Africa through the performance, representation, and consumption of kwaito, a style of electronic dance music that emerged following the end of apartheid. Drawing on fieldwork in Johannesburg’s nightclubs and analyses of musical performances and recordings, Livermon applies a black queer and black feminist studies framework to kwaito. He shows how kwaito culture operates as an alternative politics that challenges the dominant constructions of gender and sexuality. Artists such as Lebo Mathosa and Mandoza rescripted notions of acceptable femininity and masculinity, while groups like Boom Shaka enunciated an Afrodiasporic politics. In these ways, kwaito culture recontextualizes practices and notions of freedom within the social constraints that the legacies of colonialism, apartheid, and economic inequality place on young South Africans. At the same time, kwaito speaks to the ways in which these legacies reverberate between cosmopolitan Johannesburg and the diaspora. In foregrounding this dynamic, Livermon demonstrates that kwaito culture operates as a site for understanding the triumphs, challenges, and politics of post-apartheid South Africa.
Publisher: Duke University Press, 2020.
Tippu Tip: Ivory, Slavery and Discovery in the Scramble for Africa
(نصيحة تيبو: العاج والرق والاستكشافات حين التدافع على أفريقيا)
Author: Stuart Laing
With this new life setting Tippu Tip, the Arab trader in ivory and slaves, in his wider context, Stuart Laing gives us the seamy underside of the Scramble for Eastern Africa. It was as much an Arab, Indian, and indeed African, scramble, based on the island market of ‘Stinkibar’, as European. White explorers, soldiers, and officials were the foam on the top of this multicultural tide..
Publisher: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, 2019.
Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park
(قوم سفاري: التاريخ الاجتماعي لمتنزه كروجر الوطني)
Author: Jacob S. T. Dlamini
Safari Nation opens new lines of inquiry in the study of national parks in Africa and the rest of the world. The Kruger National Park is South Africa’s most iconic nature reserve, renowned for its rich flora and fauna. According to author Jacob Dlamini, there is another side to the park, a social history neglected by scholars and popular writers alike in which blacks (meaning Africans, Coloureds, and Indians) occupy center stage. Safari Nation details the ways in which black people devoted energies to conservation and to the park over the course of the twentieth century—engagement that transcends the stock (black) figure of the laborer and the poacher..
Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2020.
Limpopo’s Legacy: Student Politics & Democracy in South Africa
(تراث ليمبوبو: مسائل في السياسة نحو الطلاب والديمقراطية في جنوب أفريقي)
Author: Anne K. Heffernan, Anne Heffernan.
In 2015 and 2016 waves of student protest swept South African campuses under the banner of FeesMustFall. This book brings an historical perspective to the recent risings by analysing regional influences on the ideologies that have underpinned South African student politics from the 1960s to the present. The author considers the history of student organization in the Northern Transvaal (today Limpopo Province) and the ways in which students and youth in this relatively isolated area in the north of South Africa have influenced political change on a national scale, over generations. Organized around the stories of several key political actors, the book introduces the reader to critical spaces of political mobilization in the region. Among the most prominent is the University of the North at Turfloop, which played an integral role in building the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) in the late 1960s and propagating Black Consciousness in the 1970s. It became an ideological battleground where Black Consciousness advocates and ANC-affiliates competed for influence in the 1980s. Turfloop has remained politically significant in the post-apartheid era: it was here in 2007 that Julius Malema stumped for Jacob Zuma’s ascension to the presidency during the ANC’s pivotal party conference that resulted in the ousting of Thabo Mbeki.
Publisher: James Currey, 2019.
A Brutal State of Affairs: The Rise and Fall of Rhodesia
(حوادث وحشية: صعود وهبوط روديسيا)
Author: Henrik Ellert and Dennis Malcolm Anderson
A Brutal State of Affairs analyses the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe and challenges Rhodesian mythology. The story of the BSAP, where white and black officers were forced into a situation not of their own making, is critically examined. The liberation war in Rhodesia might never have happened but for the ascendency of the Rhodesian Front, prevailing racist attitudes, and the rise of white nationalists who thought their cause just. Blinded by nationalist fervour and the reassuring words of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and army commanders, the Smith government disregarded the advice of its intelligence services to reach a settlement before it was too late. By 1979, the Rhodesians were staring into the abyss, and the war was drawing to a close. Salisbury was virtually encircled, and guerrilla numbers continued to grow. A Brutal State of Affairs examines the Rhodesian legacy, the remarkable parallels of history, and suggests that Smith’s Rhodesian template for rule has, in many instances, been assiduously applied by Mugabe and his successors.
Publisher: Weaver Press, Zimbabwe, 2020.
——– ———— ———–
Research Africa (research_africa-editor@duke.edu) welcomes submissions of books, events, funding opportunities, and more to be included in the next edition.
