Research Africa News: December 29, 2022

Research Africa Reviews Welcomes New Board Members

Research Africa network would like to welcome new members to the editorial board. They include Professor Alinah Segobye, North West University, South Africa & Botswana, Professor Ifeyinwa Okolo, Federal University Lokoja, Nigeria, and Professor Hamdy Hassan, Cairo University & Zayd University. We are looking forward to collaborating with them in making RAR a more relevant and useful platform to the community.

We would also like to thank a couple of outgoing members: both Professor Badr. A. Badr and Professor Yunus Dombe have been with us from the founding of RA network, and we are grateful for their service and dedication to global scholarship.

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The US Academy and the Provincialization of Fanon

By Muriam Haleh Davis, November 9, 2022.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1959, the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon sent off an outline of L’An V de la révolution algérienne, a sweeping analysis of the French occupation of Algeria, to his publisher and received a probing reply: “Are you sure that everything will still be valid in six months’ time? Is the text still timely? I cannot hide from you my personal doubts about this.” The Algerian Revolution had broken out on November 1 five years prior, but François Maspero could not have known that Fanon would pass away in 1961, missing the chance to witness an independent Algeria by just three months. Nor could Maspero have suspected the immense interest that Fanon’s work would elicit 60 years later in the United States, a country that Fanon described as a “monster where the flaws, sickness, and inhumanity of Europe have reached frightening proportions.”

Read the rest in this link.

The Thinker is out! Special Issue on ‘The African Idea of Africa’.

Guest edited by Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Bongani Ngqulunga.

This special issue is part of the collaborative research project initiated by the Chair in Epistemologies of the Global South with Emphasis on Africa, based at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, and the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS), based at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. The collaborative project is entitled “The Changing African Idea of Africa and the Future of African Studies.” At the University of Bayreuth, the research project is also part of The African Multiple Cluster of Excellence supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grant number EX 20521-390713894). The overarching agenda of The African Multiple Cluster of Excellence is that of reconfiguring African Studies, and at the centre of this is the imperative of doing African Studies with Africans while also privileging African voices and intellectual/academic productions.

Read the rest in this link.

Elon Musk Is Destroying the Myths of Silicon Valley in Front of Our Very Eyes

By Luke Savage, November 27, 2022.

The myth of Silicon Valley touts the grit and flair of its tech bro champions. But the chaos of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover has revealed that there’s no genius or elaborate game of multidimensional chess behind the curtain: just garden-variety capitalists.

Read the rest of the piece here.

James Baldwin’s Advice on Writing

By Maria Popova.

“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” BY MARIA James Baldwin’s Advice on Writing.

In 1989, Paris Review founding editor and trailblazing interviewer George Plimpton edited a wonderful collection titled The Writer’s Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from the 20th Century’s Preeminent Writers (public library). Among them was novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987), whom Plimpton had interviewed on two separate occasions in early 1984, half a century after Baldwin read his way out of Harlem and into the pantheon of literary greatness.

Read the rest of the piece here.

Description PhD Studentship on Slavery, Colonialism and the University of Liverpool

The Centre for the Study of International Slavery (CSIS) and the School of Histories, Languages, and Cultures invite applications from suitably qualified candidates for a fully-funded PhD Studentship starting in January 2023 (dates negotiable) in collaboration with the University of Liverpool’s Libraries, Museums and Galleries (LMG). The studentship is tenable for three years full time [subject to satisfactory progress], though part-time options will be considered. Both Home/EU and international applicants may apply but international applicants will be required to pay the difference between home and international fees.

Read the rest in this link.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Sustained Terrorism on Africa: A Study of Slave-ism, Colonialism, Neocolonialism, and Globalism

[الإرهاب المستدام في أفريقيا: لمحة تاريخية عبر العبودية والاستعمار ثم الاستعمار الجديد الى العولمة ]

Author: Tatah Mentan.

Human beings indeed need not justify terrorism of any kind, regardless of whether one is Muslim, Christian or Jew, because it is the axis of evil and devastation of mankind. Terrorism on Africa has been a ubiquitous presence against which the democratic values of African civilization are ranged-a demon to be exorcised at all costs, even at the cost of civil liberties. However, the deliberate use of the term terrorism in recent decades was carefully selected, mainly, against a certain religion (Islam). The idea was then globally politicized by the Western world. Leaving that scholarly view in its own right, this study disagrees with the opinion raising terrorism as the devil’s just-born child of evil, when in reality Africans had been terrorized for centuries as slaves and human chattel, colonies, neo-colonies and captives of globalism.

Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon.

Rage and Carnage in the Name of God: Religious Violence in Nigeria

[ الغضب والعنف باسم الله: الهوس الديني في نيجيريا]

Author: Abiodun Alao.

In Rage and Carnage in the Name of God, Abiodun Alao examines the emergence of a culture of religious violence in postindependence Nigeria, where Christianity, Islam, and traditional religions have all been associated with violence. He investigates the root causes and historical evolution of Nigeria’s religious violence, locating it in the forced coming together of disparate ethnic groups under colonial rule, which planted the seeds of discord that religion, elites, and domestic politics exploit. Alao discusses the histories of Christianity, Islam, and traditional religions in the territory that became Nigeria, the effects of colonization on the role of religion, the development of Islamic radicalization and its relation to Christian violence, the activities of Boko Haram, and how religious violence intermixes with politics and governance. In so doing, he uses religious violence as a way to more fully understand intergroup relations in contemporary Nigeria..

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2022.

Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda: There is Confusion

[المسيحية والسياسة فيما بعد الحرب في أوغندا: ظاهرة الارتباك]

Author: Henni Alava et. al.

Alava’s work sheds critical light on the complex and unstable relationship between Christianity and politics, and peace and war. Drawing on long-running ethnographic fieldwork in Uganda’s largest religious communities, Henni Alava maps the tensions and ironies found in the Catholic and Anglican Churches in the wake of war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda. The book describes how churches’ responses to the war have been enabled by their embeddedness in local communities. Yet it is also in the churches’ embeddedness in structures of historical violence that religious faith nurtures peace liable to compound conflict.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

Decolonizing 1968: Transnational Student Activism in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar

[إنحلال الاستعمار عام 1968: النشاط الطلابي عبر مدن تونس وباريس وداكار]

Author: Burleigh Hendrickson.

explores how activists in 1968 transformed university campuses across Europe and North Africa into sites of contestation where students, administrators, and state officials collided over definitions of modernity and nationhood after empire. Burleigh Hendrickson details protesters’ versions of events to counterbalance more visible narratives that emerged from state-controlled media centers and ultimately describes how the very education systems put in place to serve the French state during the colonial period ended up functioning as the crucible of postcolonial revolt. Hendrickson not only unearths complex connections among activists and their transnational networks across Tunis, Paris, and Dakar but also weaves together their overlapping stories and participation in France’s May ’68.

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2022.

Baptists and TheOordination of Women in Malawi

[المعمدانيين من النساء في ملاوي]

Author: Klaus Fiedler and Hany Longwe.

Baptists are keen to go directly to the New Testament in all major issues of faith. If the Bible is the first argument, then history (and therefore tradition) is another line of argument, that both promoters and opponents of women’s ordination can and do use. This book is largely concerned with not just the history of women’s ordination, or even of Baptists and women’s ordination, but offers perspectives from history that may be useful for the discussion of this issue. The thrust of the arguments are aimed at highlighting that differing biblical interpretations are possible, and it must be admitted that Baptists have their own history, over which, much diversity has developed.

Publisher: Luviri Press, Malawi, 2022.

White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa

[خبث البيض: وكالة المخابرات المركزية الامريكية وإعادة الاستعمار السري لأفريقيا]

Author: Susan Williams.

In 1958 in Accra, Ghana, the Hands-Off Africa conference brought together the leading figures of African independence in a public show of political strength and purpose. Led by the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, who had just won Ghana’s independence, his determined call for Pan-Africanism was heeded by young, idealistic leaders across the continent and by African Americans seeking civil rights at home. Yet, a moment that signified a new era of African freedom simultaneously marked a new era of foreign intervention and control. In White Malice, Susan Williams unearths the covert operations pursued by the CIA from Ghana to the Congo to the UN in an effort to frustrate and deny Africa’s new generation of nationalist leaders. This dramatically upends the conventional belief that the African nations failed to establish effective, democratic states on their own accord. As the old European powers moved out, the US moved in.

Publisher: Public Affairs, 2021.

Obesiance to Frogs

[الرضوخ للضفادع]

Author: Robin Winckel-Mellish.

Obeisance to Frogs is Robin Winckel Mellish’s third poetry collection. In these pieces the contrast between the natural worlds of South Africa and Europe are brought into sharp focus, and her eye for detail and emotional connectedness to place and people are especially highlighted. The poems cross thresholds between animals, love and finally The Kaggen cycle, which is rich in mythology both personal and cultural. These poems offer up a precise honouring of the wild, with a deeply felt sense of attachment to a planet in peril..

Publisher: Hands-On Books, South Africa, 2022.

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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 Research Africa News edition. To share with the general mailing list, please send your contents directly to (research_africa@duke.edu).