Research Africa News: August 18th, 2020 

Research Africa News: August 18th, 2020 

 

 Genetic Study Reveals New Insights On Transatlantic Trade Of Enslaved People 

By Robin Young, August 17, 2020

 

Until recently, much of the information available about where enslaved people were captured before being brought to the Americas came from shipping logs and databases. These sources detailed ports of embarkation and numbers of people transported, and new data drawn from genetics corroborates much of what historians already knew.

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Why the African free trade area could be the game-changer for the continent’s economies  

August 2, 2020 4.34am EDT

Most economists see structural transformation as one of the main routes to Africa’s sustainable development. What it means is changing the share of agriculture, manufacturing and services in an economy. It is a central aim of the African Union’s Agenda 2063.

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The Nile and beyond: geopolitics of water  

19/07/2020

Water is life. We can survive several days without eating but not without drinking. Water is also the basic ingredient, essential to the production of all kind of food, whether vegetable or animal. This is why the issue of access to fresh water has always been central for humans, and has therefore always been a source of many conflicts. Inherently linked to climate change, economic development and population growth, however, these conflicts are today taking on an increasingly worrying dimension: access to water is becoming one of the main geopolitical issues of our century.

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Nile Be Dammed: Toxic Water Politics Threaten Democracy and Regional Stability  

By Michael Woldemariam August 10, 2020 

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) is now a fait accompli. Last month, Ethiopia began filling an enormous reservoir behind the $4.5 billion hydroelectric project, which promises to make the country an energy powerhouse. The megadam will bring cheap electricity to millions of households, power Ethiopia’s developing industrial sector, and enable the government to earn much-needed foreign exchange by exporting electricity to neighboring countries. The two countries that lie downstream from Ethiopia on the Nile River, Sudan and Egypt, could also benefit from the dam through access to power, improved flood control, and more efficient water storage that reduces the volume of Nile water lost to evaporation.

Read the rest of the rest of the story here.

 

“Indian racism towards Black people is almost worse than white peoples’ racism”

An Interview with Arundhati Roy, June 20, 2020

 

We ourselves live in a pretty sick society that seems incapable of feelings of sisterhood, brotherhood, solidarity An Email interview with Arundhati Roy

 

DC: How do we support the movement in the US and how does one show solidarity with people protesting in India? I’m assuming that you mean the massive protests that have erupted over the cold-blooded killing of George Floyd—the latest in a series of killings of African Americans by white American police. I would say that the best way of supporting that movement is to understand where it comes from, first of all.

Read the rest of the rest of the story here.

 

Afua Hirsch on exploring African culture beyond the western gaze 

By Afua Hirsch AUGUST 13 2020

In making my new television series African Renaissance, one question has always nagged me: what would the African continent look like if it had never been colonised?

 

Filming the work of the Ethiopian photographer Aïda Muluneh in Addis Ababa, the question lost its hypothetical quality. As a new arrival in the Ethiopian capital, I was struggling to adjust to the alphabet of Ethiopia’s Amharic, as well as to systems of date and time that shun global convention.

Read the rest of the rest of the story here.

 

NEW BOOKS          كتب جديدة

 

From Plough to Entrepreneurship: A History of African Entrepreneurs in Evaton 1905-1960s 

[من المحراث إلى ريادة الأعمال التجارية: نحو تاريخ ريادة الأعمال التجارية بين الأفارقة في إيفاتون 1905-1960] 

Author: Vusumuzi R. Kumalo

 

This book is motivated largely by the fact that Africans were deprived of economic and political autonomy by white government in South Africa. This marginalisation lies in the complex and interconnected processes of displacement and dispossession by which Africans were first dispossessed of their own land; then deprived of independent productive opportunities. The increasing scarcity of land as scarce commodity and African land ownership in Evaton, best explains the history of African local economic independence. For the local residents, land possession in Evaton provided a space where a moral economy that fostered racial pride and solidarity was forged. This richly sourced monograph develops the logical explanation that sticks together all forces that constrained Africans to give up labour to an industrial economy in Evaton. It provides the reader and student of racialised inequalities in South Africa with an understanding steeped in historical ethnography on how local Africans struggled for economic independence, and how whatever independence their struggles yielded, changed over time in Evaton.  

Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2020.

 

Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners  

[دون السطح: نحو تاريخ قاري لاستخدامات المواد الكيماوية الفاتحة للون] 

Author: Lynn M. Thomas

 

By 2024, global sales of skin lighteners are projected to reach more than $30 billion. Despite the planetary scale of its use, skin lightening remains a controversial cosmetic practice. This book focused principally on South Africa, the book quickly makes evident how closely connected skin lightening is to the history of the United States and other parts of the African continent. Over the course of the twentieth century, and particularly in the context of minority rule in South Africa, skin lighteners have raised thorny debates about race, respectability and self-regard. Thomas examines these questions but shows how class and gender intersect with race to complicate our understanding of who brightens, and why. A complex history of capitalism, medicine, media and technology informs Thomas’ intimate portrayal of these perilous cosmetics. Beneath the Surface is a deeply social history of a singularly fraught commodity.

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2020

 

Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Ahmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa  

[حركة التجديد الديني بين الخليفة والسلطان: قراءات في حياة احمد لوبو وتاريخ الفتاش وقيام الدولة الاسلامية في غرب افريقيا] 

Author: Mauro Nobili 

 

In two separate strands of historiography, scholars have tackled the genesis and literary construction of the chronicle on the one hand, and the history of the Caliphate on the other. The new book Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Ahmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020), brings both together. Mauro Nobili argues that the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh was a coherent and historically contingent product of the Caliphate. It was designed as a result of one Ḥamdallāhi scholar’s assessment of what it would take to legitimize claims to power and authority in the hotly contested political landscape of 19th-century Muslim West Africa.

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

 

Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa  

[الملكات ذوات السلطة  والتاجرات ذوات الملك في أفريقيا] 

Author: Nwando Achebe

 

Chronologically and by theme, Nwando Achebe pieces together the worlds and experiences of African females from African-derived sources, especially language. Achebe explores the meaning and significance of names, metaphors, symbolism, cosmology, chronicles, songs, folktales, proverbs, oral traditions, traditions of creation, and more. From centralized to small-scale egalitarian societies, patrilineal to matrilineal systems, North Africa to sub-Saharan lands, Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa offers an unparalleled history of the remarkable African women who occupied positions of power, authority, and influence..

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2020

 

Voices from the Kavango: A Study of the Contract Labour System in Namibia, 1925-1972  

[أصوات من كافانغو: دراسة نظام العمل التعاقدي في ناميبيا ، 1925-1972] 

Author: Kletus Likuwa

 

This book explores the contribution that the life histories and the voices of the contract labourers make to our understanding of the contract labour system in Namibia. In particular it asks: is it possible to view the migration of the Kavango labourers as a progressive step, or does the paradigm of exploitation and suppression remain the dominant one? The study highlights contract labourers engaging in a defeating activity and their disappointment with the little rewards which were non-lasting solutions to their problems. The realization of their entrapment under the contract system and the eventual frustrations led to the political mobilization for independence by SWAPO.
Publisher: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Namibia, 2020.

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