Research Africa News: July 19th, 2021

Research Africa News: July 19th, 2021

KK and the USA
By Andy DeRoche

The less well-known, and complicated, story of Kenneth Kaunda’s central role in relations between Zambia and the United States.

When Kenneth David Kaunda died in Lusaka, Zambia on June 17, 2021, it marked the passing of the last of the great African nationalists who led the fight against racism and colonialism. Kaunda, known by all as “KK,” first emerged on the international stage in the 1950s as an organizer for the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress (NRANC). He rode around the vast northern province on his bicycle with his guitar in tow, giving speeches and singing freedom songs in scores of villages and thereby inspiring the locals to found NRANC branches. After serving time in prison for his activism, he emerged to take charge of the splinter United National Independence Party (UNIP) in 1960.
Read the rest of the article here.

Haiti Has Been Abandoned—by the Media, the US, and the World Human rights activist
Antoinette Duclaire’s murder is the latest for a country in chaos—where an obsession with elections obscures a complete absence of democracy or accountability.
By Amy Wilentz, JULY 6, 2021

The last time I was in Haiti, in December 2019, there had been several kidnappings before I arrived—and there would be many, many more after I left—but my two-week visit was blessedly free of kidnappings, murder, etc. Back then you could imagine you were semi-safe driving at night—if you had a car full of male friends driving behind you, and another one in front of you.
Read the rest of the article here.

A Libyan Revenant
Betrayed to his factional rivals by Saudi Arabia and left for dead, a Libyan militia commander got his chance at revenge.
BY Frederic Wehrey, July 14, 2021.

Early in the afternoon of June 25, 2017, Saudi authorities at the immigration counter at the King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah pulled aside for questioning two young Libyan men who were flying back to Libya after performing the umrah pilgrimage. At first, one of the men, who ran a religious tourism company, thought that the questioning would be related to an overstayed visa on a previous visit and therefore nothing to be overly alarmed about. In fact, the Saudis had stopped them because Egypt, Saudi Arabia’s ally, had placed the Libyans on a terrorism list months before, for their alleged links to the Muslim Brotherhood and their alleged earlier involvement in kidnapping Egyptian diplomats in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.
Read the article here.

Racism and the equality delusion The real critical race theory
Tommy J. Curry |16th July 2021

We tend to think that racism will one day be overcome. But this belief in incremental progress isn’t shared by many black scholars. The much maligned and misunderstood founder of Critical Race Theory, Derrick Bell, pronounced racism a permanent feature of American society. His argument that the very foundations of liberal democracy in the United States make equality between white and black people impossible might be hard to accept, but it remains valid, writes Tommy Curry.
Read the research article here.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Curriculum Reform: Initial Primary School Curriculum and Assessment Reform Experiences in Malawi
[إصلاح المناهج الدراسية: مناهج المدارس الابتدائية الأولية وتجارب إصلاح التقييم التعليمي في مالاوي]
Author: Wezzie Chiziwa

Countries worldwide are engaged in education reforms in trying to respond to certain issues ranging from socioeconomic to political and technological changes. Many countries around the world thus engage in various education reforms to deal with such challenges. Current curricular thoughts contend that the previous education did not prepare the learners with adequate knowledge and skills to deal with the everyday challenges and to enhance lifelong learning. In order to address the shortfalls of the previous curriculum, there has been a paradigm shift in the way education systems operate. Worldwide, countries are embracing the learner centred approach to the teaching and learning process as opposed to the traditional teacher centred approach. Another popular reform is Outcome Based Education (OBE). Malawi embraced OBE in its education system beginning with primary school followed by secondary school in 2001 and 2015 respectively.
Publisher:Livingstonia Press, Malawi, 2021.

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War
[بالتحديد : الآداب الأفريقية ودراسات ما بعد الاستعمار والحرب الباردة ]
Author: Monica Popescu

In At Penpoint Monica Popescu traces the development of African literature during the second half of the twentieth century to address the intertwined effects of the Cold War and decolonization on literary history. Popescu draws on archival materials from the Soviet-sponsored Afro-Asian Writers Association and the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom alongside considerations of canonical literary works by Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ousmane Sembène, Pepetela, Nadine Gordimer, and others. She outlines how the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union played out in the aesthetic and political debates among African writers and intellectuals. These writers decolonized aesthetic canons even as superpowers attempted to shape African cultural production in ways that would advance their ideological and geopolitical goals. Placing African literature at the crossroads of postcolonial theory and studies of the Cold War, Popescu provides a new reassessment of African literature, aesthetics, and knowledge production.
Publisher: Duke University Press, 2020.

My Night in Captivity: A Memoir
[ليلة في الأسر: مذكرة حياة]
Author: Christian Cardinal Wiyghan Tumi

In this gripping, lucid and succinct account, Cardinal Tumi, the retired Archbishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Douala, Cameroon, invites readers into the dreary night of his captivity by “Amba Boys” – so-called liberation fighters seeking the restoration of the erstwhile British Southern Cameroons. Tumi recounts the circumstances, actors and intrigues leading up to his capture along with Fon Sehm Mbinglo I, the paramount traditional ruler of the Nso people. Find out how the Cardinal regained his freedom and his proposals on how to resolve the five-year conflict that has decimated the South West and North West Regions of Cameroon..
Publisher: Spears Media Press, Cameroon, 2021.

Creating Spaces of Hope: Young Artists and the New Imagination in Egypt
[ خلق فضاءات للأمل: الفنانون الشباب ومتطلبات الخيال الخلاق في مصر]
Author: Caroline Seymour-Jorn

It is now just over a decade since protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square started Egypt’s chapter in the events of the Arab Spring. Much has been made in western criticism of art and culture’s role in the revolution, but the everyday cultural production of studio artists, graffiti artists, musicians, and writers since has attracted less attention. How have artists responded personally and artistically to the political transformation ? What has social role of art been in these periods of transition and uncertainty? What are the aesthetic shifts and stylistic transformations present in the contemporary Egyptian art world?
Publisher: American University in Cairo Press, 2021.

Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture: Archiving Postcolonial Minorities.
[ بقايا التفتق الفرنسي الجزائري: قراءات في أرشفة أقليات ما بعد الاستعمار]
Author: Mona El Khoury

At the end of French colonization in Algeria, four categories of people held French citizenship or had strong ties with France: European settlers, Jews, mixed-race individuals, and Harkis. The end of the War of Independence exiled most of them from Algeria, traumatized them in various ways, and transferred many to metropolitan France. Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture: Archiving Postcolonial Minorities examines the legacies of these transnational identities through narratives that dissent from official histories, both in France and Algeria. This literature takes particular stories of exile and loss and constructs a memory around a Mosaic father figure embodying the native land, Algeria. Mona El Khoury argues that these filiation narratives create a postcolonial archive: a discursive foundation that makes historical minorities visible,while disrupting French and Algerian hegemonies. El Khoury questions the power of literature to repair history while contending that these literary strategies seek to do justice to the dead Algerian father, even as they valorize enduring minority identifications.
Publisher: Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2020.

Abdellah Taïa’s Queer Migrations: Non-Places, Affect, Temporalities.
[هجرات عبد الله طايع المغربي وأنشتطه المثلية: تأملات في اللامكانية ، التأثيرية ، الوقائعية]
Author (Editors): Denis M. Provencher and Siham Bouamer

In this first edited collection in English on Abdellah Taïa, Denis M. Provencher and Siham Bouamer frame the distinctiveness of the Moroccan author’s migration by considering current scholarship in French and Francophone studies, post-colonial studies, affect theory, queer theory, and language and sexuality. In contrast to critics that consider Taïa to immigrate and integrate successfully to France as a writer and intellectual, Provencher and Bouamer argue that the author’s writing is replete with elements of constant migration, “comings and goings,” cruel optimism, flexible accumulation of language over borders, transnational filiations, and new forms of belonging and memory making across time and space. At the same time, his constantly evolving identity emerges in many non-places, defined as liminal and border narrative spaces where unexpected and transgressive new forms of belonging emerge without completely shedding shame, mourning, or melancholy.
Publisher: Lexington Books, 2021.

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