Research Africa News: October 17th, 2022

Research Africa News: October 17th, 2022

Charting Internet Speed in Africa
Not even the country with Africa’s top mobile internet speed is close to the global average, despite efforts to launch 5G networks. This is according to the 2022 Speedtest Global Index published this week by US-based internet speed analysis firm Ookla. South Africa, the continent’s internet speed leader—with an average mobile internet download speed of 68.9 megabits per second (mbps) is far below the global mean mobile download speed of 77.7 mbps.

South Africa is at position 46 globally, and in Africa it is followed by Togo, Mauritius, Morocco, and Botswana at download speeds.
Read the Speedtest Global Index here.

Kamala Ibrahim Ishag review – memory maps and rumours of djinns from mystical Sudanese painter
Adrian Searle, The Guardian, 7 Oct 2022.

In her painting Bait al-Mal, Kamala Ibrahim Ishag presents us with the neighbourhood in Khartoum where she grew up during the 1940s and 50s. This large, mostly dusky canvas presents us with clusters of figures in a kind of diagram of their connections and interrelatedness. Instead of streets and corners, we trace winding, branching webs of family and friendships and associations. We’ll never get to the end of them in these looping, bifurcating and fracturing lines..
Read the piece here.

Preserving the Coptic Language:
Many Egyptians are trying to revive the lingual link to their past

Lydia Wilson, Culture Editor, New Lines magazine

When Titi Maurice met her husband-to-be, she had a condition: To marry her, he had to learn to speak Coptic. One of only a handful of people in the world who spoke the language growing up, Maurice was determined that her children would have the same experience. Rafik, clearly besotted, did not hesitate. He had the basics of the written language from church, but Maurice taught him a living version — not the centuries-old liturgy and prayers repeated on Sundays but the everyday “Would you like a cup of tea?” or “It’s in the cupboard over there.”

Read the piece in this link.

The Future of Progress

Tackling two of the greatest challenges of our time — a broken food system and gender inequality — present enormous opportunities to improve the lives of millions of people in the world, including Africa.
The 2022 Goalkeepers Report explains how the world can accelerate solutions to these problems with human ingenuity, innovation, political will, and sustained funding.
You can access the Report here

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

The Trick Is To Keep Breathing: Covid 19 Stories From African and North American Writers.
[الغرض هو الحفاظ على الحياة: قصص جائحة كوفيد من خلال كتابات الأفارقة والأمريكيين الشماليين]
Author: Tendai Rinos Mwanaka (editor).

This Vol 3, features 2 essays, 5 stories and 64 poems from 32 poets, writers and academicians from North America and Africa, writers residing in these among other countries; The USA, Canada, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, The Gambia, Ghana, Malawi.., surrounding the grate, telling stories of resilience and triumph as they dealt with Covid 19 and its several mutations over the past 3 years. Humans are connection beings and one of the most fulfilling ways they do so is through sharing stories. It’s time we surround the fire, warming ourselves as we tell the stories of our humanness and resilience, stories of triumph, stories to release unrequited pain, anger and grief, stories of loss, stories that will act as continuing breath.
Publisher: Mwanaka Media and Publishing, Zimbabwe, 2022.

Chinese Medicine in East Africa: An Intimacy with Strangers
[الطب الصيني في شرق إفريقيا: علاقات حميمة مع الغرباء]
Author: Elisabeth Hsu.

Based on fieldwork conducted between 2001-2008 in urban East Africa, this book explores who the patients, practitioners and paraprofessionals doing Chinese medicine were in this early period of renewed China-Africa relations. Rather than taking recourse to the ‘placebo effect’, the author explains through the spatialities and materialities of the medical procedures provided why – apart from purchasing the Chinese antimalarial called Artemisinin – locals would try out their ‘alternatively modern’ formulas for treating a wide range of post-colonial disorders and seek their sexual enhancement medicines.
Publisher: Berghahn Books, 2022.

Holy Ghost: The Life And Death Of Free Jazz Pioneer
[وروح القدس: مآثر رائد موسيقى الجاز الحرة]
Author: Albert Ayler.

“Albert Ayler remains one of the great visionaries of American music. He arrived by way of jazz and the Sorrow Songs, entering public awareness through a movement inspired by calls for Black Liberation, and playing music that frequently found its deepest resonance with listeners whose tastes were more down-to-earth than bebop. Anyone who has gone to the crossroads with Robert Johnson or thrilled to the Wicked Pickett’s cross-grained scream can recognise and identify the vernacular voices inhabiting Ayler’s vision. Richard Koloda draws on archive material and fresh oral history to document aspects of an American family and the passage of an uncompromising artist who took no prisoners”.
Publisher: Jawbone Press, 2022.

Scream for Me, Africa!: Heavy Metal Identities in Post-Colonial Africa (Advances in Metal Music and Culture)
[تصرخ من أجل أفريقيا!: هويات المعادن الثقيلة في أفريقيا ما بعد الاستعمار]
Author: Edward Banchs.

Scream for Me Africa! examines the hard rock and metal scenes in five African countries: Botswana, Togo, South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana. Edward Banchs interviewed musicians, producers, and fans in each country to create vivid pictures of each of these rarely discussed scenes. The book considers how the subculture of heavy metal is viewed in postcolonial Africa and examines how musicians on the continent have stepped forward to make this genre their own. It looks at Africa’s blossoming scenes through various themes, including hybridity, othering, and political tensions.
Publisher: Intellect Ltd, 2022.

Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra
[المشاريع الأفروبولية: إعادة تعريف معاني السواد والجنس والثقافة من مدينة هيوستن إلى مدينة أكرا]
Author: Anima Adjepong.

This book examines the Afropolitan projects of Ghanaians living in two cosmopolitan cities: Houston, Texas, and Accra, Ghana. Anima Adjepong’s focus shifts between the cities, exploring contests around national and pan-African cultural politics, race, class, sexuality, and religion. Focusing particularly on queer sexuality, Adjepong offers unique insight into the contemporary sexual politics of the Afropolitan class. The book expands and complicates existing research by providing an in-depth transnational case study that not only addresses questions of cosmopolitanism, class, and racial identity but also considers how gender and sexuality inform the racialized identities of Africans in the United States and in Ghana. Bringing an understudied cohort of class-privileged Africans to the forefront, Adjepong offers a more fully realized understanding of the diversity of African lives.
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

Aniceti Kitereza: An Tanzanian Epic
[أنيسيتي كيترزا: ملحمة تنزانية]
Author: Shoonie Hartwig.

“Words that are spoken fly like the wind. Words that are written live forever.” Aniceti Kitereza spoke those words while telling Gerald (Jerry) and Charlotte (Shoonie) Hartwig the story of his novel. The year was 1969. They couldn’t have imagined that this conversation would inaugurate an eleven-year saga, one of determination and commitment revealed in a significant collection of letters and the extraordinary tale of a man and a book..
Publisher: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, Tanzania, 2022..

Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria
[الروحانية والذاتية الاستعمارية في إفريقيا: المخلوقات البشرية وغير البشرية في نيجيريا]
Author: Saheed Aderinto.

This book broadens the historiography of animal studies by putting a diverse array of species (dogs, horses, livestock, and wildlife) into a single analytical framework for understanding colonialism in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. From his study of animals with unequal political, economic, social, and intellectual capabilities, Aderinto establishes that the core dichotomies of human colonial subjecthood—indispensable yet disposable, good and bad, violent but peaceful, saintly and lawless—were also embedded in the identities of Nigeria’s animal inhabitants. If class, religion, ethnicity, location, and attitude toward imperialism determined the pattern of relations between human Nigerians and the colonial government, then species, habitat, material value, threat, and biological and psychological characteristics (among other traits) shaped imperial perspectives on animal Nigerians.
Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2022.
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