Research Africa بحوث افريقيا

Research Africa News: January 24th, 2021

Rethinking African Studies: Four Challenges and the Case for Comparative African Studies

By Matthias BasedauFirst Published November 17, 2020 (Research Article)

This article takes stock of the state of African Studies and argues that (1) research on Africa is strongly dominated by outside, non-African, mostly Western views; (2) there is a tendency towards undifferentiated views on “Africa,” which usually concentrate on negative aspects, overlooking progress in many areas; (3) methodologies that focus on causal identification are rarely used; and (4) the field focuses on micro-perspectives while few works examine the big picture and the longue durée. The article then argues that Comparative African Studies, which builds upon the concept of Comparative Area Studies, can address some of these challenges.

Read the research article here.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: “Europe and the West must also be decolonised”

We talk with one of the leading voices of contemporary African literature about linguistic imperialism and the importance of decolonising minds and the imagination.

By Tania Adam 10 SEPTEMBER 2019

Writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has always questioned the literary tradition written in colonial languages, analysing the dynamics and the functioning off colonised societies and their relationship with the colonisers. Thiong’o defends the mother tongue as a weapon against linguistic imperialism, and recommends decolonising minds and the imagination, in Africa and Europe alike. We talk with him on the occasion of the publication in Catalan of his book La revolució vertical (Raig Verd, 2019).

Read the rest of the story here.

Performing Modernity

By Rafia Zakaria, December 11

THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES has worked long and hard at looking like the West—even better than the best. The world’s tallest building, with its glistening spire, looms over the shoreline of the gleaming city of Dubai, proof of the Emiratis’ technocratic zeal. The streets are clean; a brown or black person is always nearby to pick up any errant piece of litter. For entertainment, there are bars and clubs where liquor flows much like it does in New York or London or any place that draws the young and the affluent. Blazing lights shine from malls full of wares from around the world: perfumes that cost hundreds of dollars, couture houses that make their own statement by refusing to pin prices, cars that cost more than a small suburban home in the American Midwest.

Read the rest of the story here.

Becoming Kwame Ture

By Roape -December 15, 2020

In Guinea, doors fly open at the mere mention of Kwame Ture’s name. A senior government minister met me within a few hours’ notice. And when I arrived at Villa Syli to meet a member of Sékou Touré’s old party, the PDG (Parti démocratique de Guinée), I was unexpectedly ushered into a luxurious salon, where I was instead met by Hadja Touré, the former president’s wife. Now in her eighties, she sat on a red and gold wooden carved chair, at the centre of a discussion with three men dressed in expensive fabrics cut in traditional styles. I recognised one of the men as the brother of the Senegalese radical Omar Blondin Diop. Hadja Touré acknowledged me with a deft nod of the head, as I tried to find the most appropriate French expression for the occasion..

Read the rest of the story here.

Eager to Appropriate On the Supreme Court decisions that created “Indian Country.”

By Mahmood Mamdani, November 30, 2020

In the early period of American colonization, there was no reference to a place called Indian country. That is because every place was Indian country. Settlers in Maine rented land from Indians. In the Dutch and English colonies, settlers purchased land from Indians, either wholesale or piecemeal.

Read the rest of the story here.

Studying Religion in and from Africa

By Birgit Meyer, December 11, 2020

Featured as the continent of religion par excellence, Africa is often situated in contrast to Europe, where religion – especially Christianity – is in decline. There certainly is some truth to such a view. Over and over again, when I touched ground again in Ghana in the course of my longstanding research since the late 1980s, I have been amazed by the strong public presence of preachers and prophets, loud religious soundscapes and colorful proliferation of visual signs, including posters, stickers, advertisements, motto’s on shops and mini-buses, and so on. Gradually getting used to this situation during my stay, upon returning home in turn I would be rather surprised about the relative invisibility of religion over here.

Read the rest of the story here.

‘Africapitalism’ and the limits of any variant of capitalism

By Roape, July 16, 2020

In a contribution to ROAPE’s debate on capitalism in Africa, Stefan Ouma provides a critical account of Africapitalism as well as an assessment of the future/s it imagines, what it silences and its potential to transform African economies. Ouma concludes that the ecologically destructive and dehumanizing architecture of our global economic system provides further evidence to condemn any variant of capitalism.

Read the rest of the story here.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

The Social and Political Thought of Archie Mafeje: A Pan-African Social Scientist Ahead of His Time.

[الفكر الاجتماعي والسياسي لدى أرتشي مافيجي: العالم الاجتماعي البانأفرقاني الذي جاء قبل عصره.]

Author: Bongani Nyoka

Social scientist Archie Mafeje, who was born in the Eastern Cape but lived most of his scholarly life in exile, was one of Africa’s most prominent intellectuals. This groundbreaking book is the first to consider the entire body of Mafeje’s oeuvre and offers much needed engagement with his ideas. The most inclusive and critical treatment to date of Mafeje as a thinker and researcher, it does not aim to be a biography, but rather offers an analysis of his overall scholarship and his role as a theoretician of liberation and revolution in Africa. Bongani Nyoka argues that Mafeje’s superb scholarship developed out of both his experience as an oppressed black person and his early political education. These, merged with his university training, turned him into a formidable cutting-edge intellectual force. Nyoka begins with an evaluation of Mafeje’s critique of the social sciences; his focus then shifts to Mafeje’s work on land and agrarian issues in sub-Saharan Africa, before finally dealing with his work on revolutionary theory and politics. By bringing Mafeje’s work to the fore, Nyoka engages in an act of knowledge decolonisation, thus making a unique contribution to South studies in sociology, history and politics.

Publisher: Wits University Press, 2020.

Sea Level: A Portrait of Zanzibar

[مناظر حول البحر: صورة من زنجبار]

Author: Sarah Markes

Sea Level is a creative celebration of Zanzibar’s rich and fascinating heritage as seen today. Captured in drawings by artist and designer Sarah Markes, this is a unique and personal portrait of Stone Town’s colourful streets, and a portrayal of the island’s natural beauty and culture. It is also a plea for recognition of the threats posed to Zanzibar’s heritage and the inestimable value of conserving it.

Publisher: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, Tanzania, 2020.

Decolonization and Afro-Feminism

[قراءات حول التحرر من الاستعمار وفكرة النسوية الافريقية]

Author: Sylvia Tamale

Why do so many Africans believe they cannot break the “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” cycle? Six decades after colonial flags were lowered and African countries gained formal independence, the continent struggles to free itself from the deep legacies of colonialism, imperialism and patriarchy. Many intellectuals, politicians, feminists and other activists, eager to contribute to Africa’s liberation, have frustratingly felt like they took the wrong path. Analyzed through the eyes of Afro-Feminism, this book revisits some of the fundamental preconditions needed for radical transformation. It challenges the traditional human rights paradigm and its concomitant idea of “gender equality,” flagging instead, the African philosophy of Ubuntu as a serious alternative for reinvigorating African notions of social justice. If you are a student of Africa or in a space where you wish to recalibrate your compass and reboot your consciousness in the struggle for Africa’s liberation, this book is for you.

Publisher: Daraja Press, Canada, 2020.

Nigeria’s Soldiers of Fortune: The Abacha and Obasanjo Years

[جنود نيجيريا الأثرياء: سنوات أباتشا وأوباسانجو]

Author: Max Siollun.

In the cataclysmic decade that is the focus of this book, Nigeria was subject to several near-death experiences. These began when the country nearly tore itself apart after the northern-led military government annulled the results of a 1993 presidential election won by the southerner Moshood Abiola, and ended with former military ruler General Olusegun Obasanjo being the unlikely conduit of democracy. This mini-history of a nation’s life also reflects on three mesmerizing protagonists who personified that era. First up is Abiola: the multi-billionaire businessman who had his election victory voided by the generals who made him rich, and who was later assassinated. General Sani Abacha was the mysterious, reclusive ruler under whose watch Abiola was arrested and pro-democracy activists (including Abiola’s wife) were murdered. He also oversaw a terrifying Orwellian state security operation. Although Abacha is today reviled as a tyrant, the author eschews selective amnesia, reminding Nigerians that they goaded him into seizing power. The third protagonist is Obasanjo, who emerged from prison to return to power as an elected civilian leader.

Publisher: Hurst, 2019.

Village Gone Viral: Understanding the Spread of Policy Models in a Digital Age

[حين تصبح القرية حديث الانترنت: انتشار أنماط السياسات العامة في العصر الرقمي]

Author: Marit Tolo Østebø

In 2001, Ethiopian Television aired a documentary about a small, rural village called Awra Amba, where women ploughed, men worked in the kitchen, and so-called harmful traditional practices did not exist. The documentary radically challenged prevailing images of Ethiopia as a gender-conservative and aid-dependent place, and Awra Amba became a symbol of gender equality and sustainable development in Ethiopia and beyond. Village Gone Viral uses the example of Awra Amba to consider the widespread circulation and use of modeling practices in an increasingly transnational and digital policy world. With a particular focus on traveling models—policy models that become “viral” through various vectors, ranging from NGOs and multilateral organizations to the Internet—Marit Tolo Østebø critically examines the hidden dimensions of models and model making. While a policy model may be presented as a “best practice,” one that can be scaled up and successfully applied to other places, the local impacts of the model paradigm are far more ambivalent—potentially increasing social inequalities, reinforcing social stratification, and concealing injustice. With this book, Østebø ultimately calls for a reflexive critical anthropology of the production, circulation, and use of models as instruments for social change.

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2021.

The Implicated Subject Beyond Victims and Perpetrators

[الرعايا المتورطون: حوارمابعد محوري الضحايا والجناة]

Author: Michael Rothberg

When it comes to historical violence and contemporary inequality, none of us are completely innocent. We may not be direct agents of harm, but we may still contribute to, inhabit, or benefit from regimes of domination that we neither set up nor control. Arguing that the familiar categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander do not adequately account for our connection to injustices past and present, Michael Rothberg offers a new theory of political responsibility through the figure of the implicated subject. The Implicated Subject builds on the comparative, transnational framework of Rothberg’s influential work on memory to engage in reflection and analysis of cultural texts, archives, and activist movements from such contested zones as transitional South Africa, contemporary Israel/Palestine, post-Holocaust Europe, and a transatlantic realm marked by the afterlives of slavery. As these diverse sites of inquiry indicate, the processes and histories illuminated by implicated subjectivity are legion in our interconnected world.

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2019.

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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 edition.

Research Africa News: February 28th , 2021

Duke-UNICEF Innovation Accelerator.

Building on a 70-year history of innovating for children, UNICEF has partnered with Duke University to identify the world’s most pressing challenges for youth today—and to find the bold minds who can come up with the solutions. By pairing UNICEF’s commitment to children and global reach with Duke’s expertise in social innovation, the Innovation Accelerator will make a real and lasting difference in the lives of children around the world. Teams accepted into the Duke-UNICEF Innovation Accelerator will receive funding, mentorship, and other capacity building support from Duke University staff, faculty, students and our global networks.

For more details, visit this site: https://dukeunicef.org

From An Egyptian African Story

By Helmi Sharawy

An Important Meeting Muhammad Fayiq and his colleagues always visited the African Association unannounced, and all we knew then was that he was a senior figure in the world of the presidency and intelligence, personally close to the president of the republic. On one such visit, he noticed me carrying the newspapers that I had just collected from Professor Ishaq. He was kind and warm and voiced his surprise that I read such publications. Wondering how he could benefit from this, he asked Professor Ishaq whether I could present him with a good summary of the information they contained. His request was a boon for several reasons: these papers began to be delivered more regularly, I was benefitting from details about the world of the colonies (the British ones at least) that nobody in Egypt knew, and I was presenting an important source of information to a senior figure in the presidency. And, more important than all that, I was earning five pounds every month for my valuable work!

Read the research article here.

Lost for Decades, These Stunning Color Photos of Africa in the 1950s Have Finally Been Published

The United Nations sent photographer Todd Webb to capture eight African countries during a period of rapid industrialization—but the pictures he came back with included beauty, fashion, jubilation, and much more.

By Bill Shapiro January 28,2021

In 1955, two photographers, Guggenheim Fellowships in their back pockets, set off across America. One was Robert Frank, who returned from his epic road trip with the 27,000-plus images he would draw from to make his soon-to-be-iconic book, The Americans. The other was Todd Webb.

Read the rest of the story here.

The tortured, touching love saga of Cicely Tyson and Miles Davis

By Randall Roberts, staff writer, Feb. 1, 2021

Starting in the mid-1960s, Cicely Tyson had a decades-long, on-again, off-again romance with trumpeter Miles Davis that peaked with their 1981 marriage and ended in a 1989 divorce. Behind the scenes it was a turbulent relationship, according to both, but during their time in the spotlight, they were one of the most striking, stylish couples in America: she an Oscar-nominated, barrier-breaking dramatic actress and movie star known for an unwavering dedication to her craft; he a revered, charismatic jazz musician and innovator with an addictive personality and a bad reputation.

Read the rest of the story here.

Muslims in America: A forgotten history

For more than 300 years, Muslims have influenced the story of the US – from the ‘founding fathers’ to blues music today.

By Sylviane A Diouf, 10 Feb 2021

In the summer of 1863, newspapers in North Carolina announced the death of “a venerable African”, referred to, in a paternalistic manner, as “Uncle Moreau”. Omar ibn Said, a Muslim, was born in 1770 in Senegal and by the time of his death, he had been enslaved for 56 years. In 2021, Omar, an opera about his life, will premiere at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina.

Read the rest of the story here.

Free Article s from Miṣriqiyā, an international peer-reviewed African Studies Journal

Recently established by Faculty of Women, Ain Shams University (Egypt)

Welcome to Miṣriqiyā, an international peer-reviewed academic journal published quarterly by the Faculty of Women, Ain Shams University. Miṣriqiyā aims to publish high-quality research papers relevant to Africa. The journal publishes articles in the fields of anthropology, history, sociology, politics, geography, linguistics, and literary and cultural studies. Miṣriqiyā is published in both print and online versions. With an active editorial board that encompasses scholars from a variety of disciplines based at both Egyptian and international universities, the journal seeks to foster an interdisciplinary and global conversation from, with and about Africa. The journal is open to Arab and international scholars and guarantees a fair and accurate reviewing process. Submissions are accepted throughout the year.

Read the rest of the story here.

Mali fails to face up to the persistence of slavery

The Conversation, February 15, 2021

The internal African slave trade was officially abolished in colonial Mali in 1905. But a form of slavery – called “descent-based slavery” – continues today. This is when “slave status” is ascribed to a person, based on their ancestors having allegedly been enslaved by elite slave-owning families.

Read the rest of the story here.

‘Africapitalism’ and the limits of any variant of capitalism

By Roape, July 16, 2020

In a contribution to ROAPE’s debate on capitalism in Africa, Stefan Ouma provides a critical account of Africapitalism as well as an assessment of the future/s it imagines, what it silences and its potential to transform African economies. Ouma concludes that the ecologically destructive and dehumanizing architecture of our global economic system provides further evidence to condemn any variant of capitalism.

Read the rest of the story here.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Buried in the Debris of Independence: The Life and Death of Rev Alexander Kutchona

[مدفون تحت أنقاض الاستقلال: حياة وموت القس ألكسندر كوتشونا]

Author: T.S.E. Katsulukuta

As a boy I heard my mother warn my father never to walk alone and never to come home late lest he be killed like Kutchona. But why could people kill an innocent pastor? For Alexander Kutchona God stood above politics and God came first in all areas of life. The Party leaders believed differently. Politics to them could not be separated from Church life and that the church should be used as a platform for the political agenda. They labeled him traitor and removed him out of their path and memory.

Publisher: Luviri Press, Malawi, 2021.

Writing the Black Decade: Conflict and Criticism in Francophone Algerian Literature

[عقد الشؤم: الصراع والنقد في الأدب الجزائري الفرنكوفوني]

Author: Joseph Ford

Writing the Black Decade examines how literature—and the way we read, classify, and critique literature—impacts our understanding of the world at a time of conflict. Using the bitterly-contested Algerian Civil War as a case study, Joseph Ford argues that, while literature is frequently understood as an illuminating and emancipatory tool, it can, in fact, restrain our understanding of the world during a time of crisis and further entrench the polarized discourses that lead to conflict in the first place. Ford demonstrates how Francophone Algerian literature, along with the cultural and academic criticism that has surrounded it, has mobilized visions of Algeria over the past thirty years that often belie the complex and multi-layered realities of power, resistance, and conflict in the region. Scholars of literature, history, Francophone studies, and international relations will find this book particularly useful.

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.

Growing Wild: The Correspondence of a Pioneering Woman Naturalist from the Cape

[عن منابت القفار مراسلات سيدة رائدة في دراسة حياة الطبيعة في مدينة كيب]

Author/ (editor): Jasmin Rindlisbacher, Alan Cohen

Mary Elizabeth Barber (1818-1899), born in Britain, arrived in the Cape Colony in 1820 where she spent the rest of her life as a rolling stone, as she lived in and near Grahamstown, the diamond and gold fields, Pietermaritzburg, Malvern near Durban and on various farms in the eastern part of the Cape Colony. She has been perceived as ‘the most advanced woman of her time’, yet her legacy has attracted relatively little attention. She was the first woman ornithologist in South Africa, one of the first who propagated Darwin’s theory of evolution, an early archaeologist, keen botanist and interested lepidopterist. In her scientific writing, she propagated a new gender order; positioned herself as a feminist avant la lettre without relying on difference models and at the same time made use of genuinely racist argumentation. This is the first publication of her edited scientific correspondence. The letters – transcribed by Alan Cohen, who has written a number of biographical articles on Barber and her brothers – are primarily addressed to the entomologist Roland Trimen, the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, London. Today, the letters are housed at the Royal Entomological Society in St Albans. This book also includes a critical introduction by historian Tanja Hammel who has published a number of articles and is about to publish a monograph on Mary Elizabeth Barber.

Publisher: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Namibia, 2020.

Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds

[ يوتوبيا السود: الحياة التأملية وموسيقى العوالم الأخرى]

Author: Jayna Brown

In Black Utopias Jayna Brown takes up the concept of utopia as a way of exploring alternative states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture. Musical, literary, and mystic practices become utopian enclaves in which Black people engage in modes of creative worldmaking. Brown explores the lives and work of Black women mystics Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson, musicians Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, and the work of speculative fiction writers Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler as they decenter and destabilize the human, radically refusing liberal humanist ideas of subjectivity and species. Brown demonstrates that engaging in utopian practices Black subjects imagine and manifest new genres of existence and forms of collectivity. For Brown, utopia consists of those moments in the here and now when those excluded from the category human jump into other onto-epistemological realms. Black people—untethered from the hope of rights, recognition, or redress—celebrate themselves as elements in a cosmic effluvium.

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2021.

Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement

[نحو تعبئة الألمان السود]

Author: Tiffany N. Florvil

Tiffany N. Florvil examines the role of queer and straight women in shaping the contours of the modern Black German movement as part of the Black internationalist opposition to racial and gender oppression. Florvil shows the multifaceted contributions of women to movement making, including Audre Lorde’s role in influencing their activism; the activists who inspired Afro-German women to curate their own identities and histories; and the evolution of the activist groups Initiative of Black Germans and Afro-German Women. These practices and strategies became a rallying point for isolated and marginalized women (and men) and shaped the roots of contemporary Black German activism. Richly researched and multidimensional in scope, Mobilizing Black Germany offers a rare in-depth look at the emergence of the modern Black German movement and Black feminists’ politics, intellectualism, and internationalism..

Publisher: University of Illinois Press 2020.

Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being

[كينونة السود أو شاعرية الوجود]

Author: Kevin Quashie

In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study. Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics of poetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary texts by Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical and creative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This worldmaking conceptualizes Blackness as capacious, relational beyond the normative terms of recognition—Blackness as a condition of oneness. Reading for poetic aliveness, then, becomes a means of exploring Black being rather than nonbeing and animates the ethical question “how to be.” In this way, Quashie offers a Black feminist philosophy of being, which is nothing less than a philosophy of the becoming of the Black world.

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2021.

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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).

Research Africa News: March 19th , 2021

A Chapter in U.S. History Often Ignored: The Flight of Runaway Slaves to Mexico

February 28, 2021

In a forgotten cemetery on the edge of Texas in the Rio Grande delta, Olga Webber-Vasques says she’s proud of her family’s legacy — even if she only just learned the full story. Turns out her great-great-grandparents, who are buried there, were agents in the little-known underground railroad that led through South Texas to Mexico during the 1800s. Thousands of enslaved people fled plantations to make their way to the Rio Grande, which became a river of deliverance.

Read the rest of the article here.

All futurism is Afrofuturism: Can Africa industrialize? I think it can.

Noah Smith, 3/ 1/ 2021

Every so often I get the urge to blog about something really important, so today I think I’ll write about Africa. Afrofuturism is a fun and interesting subgenre of science fiction and philosophy, but I kind of chuckle every time I see the word, because all futurism is actually Afrofuturism. Africa is literally the future of the entire world. Here is one of the two or three most important charts you will ever see:

Read the research article here.

Covid-19 drove hundreds of Africans out of Guangzhou. A generation of mixed-race children is their legacy

By Jenni Marsh, CNN, March 18, 2021

(CNN)When the coronavirus pandemic ground China to a near-halt in early February last year, Youssouf Dieng jetted back to Dakar for, he thought, a brief sojourn. In reality, it was a year before Dieng — who had worked as a goods trader in the manufacturing hub of Guangzhou in southern China for two decades — could return, on an air ticket three times the usual cost, and a complicated business visa. By then, the pandemic had driven hundreds of Africans out of Guangzhou, sparked the most severe anti-Black racial clashes in China in decades, and remade business operations, with Chinese factories connecting with African customers directly over e-commerce platforms.

Read the rest of the story here.

Nourin Mohamed Siddig: The African art of reciting the Koran

Isma’il Kushkush, 9 February

When Nourin Mohamed Siddig recited the Koran, people around the world described his tone as sad, soulful and bluesy. His unique sound made him one of the Muslim world’s most popular reciters. As a consequence, his death at the age of 38 in a car accident in Sudan in November was mourned from Pakistan to the United States. “The world has lost one of the most beautiful [voices] of our time,” tweeted Imam Omar Suleiman of Texas.

Read the rest of the story here.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Africa and the Disruptions of the Twenty-first Century

[أفريقيا واضطرابات القرن الواحد والعشرين]

Author: Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

This collection of essays interrogates the repositioning of Africa and its diasporas in the unfolding disruptive transformations of the early twenty-first century. It is divided into five parts focusing on America’s racial dysfunctions, navigating global turbulence, Africa’s political dramas, the continent’s persistent mythologisation and disruptions in higher education. It closes with tributes to two towering African public intellectuals, Ali Mazrui and Thandika Mkandawire, who have since joined the ancestors.

Publisher: CODESRIA, Senegal, 2021.

From Handmaiden of Colonialism to Esteemed Discipline: Professor Paul Nchoji Nkwi on the Reinvention of Anthropology in Africa

[ من حياة في خدمة الاستعمار إلى حياة الانضباط والاحترام: أفكار البروفيسور بول نشوجي نكوي عن إعادة اختراع الأنثروبولوجيا في إفريقيا]

Author: Paul Nchoji Nkwi

This book documents key features in the life of the father of anthropology in Cameroon, Professor Paul Nchoji Nkwi. The conversations within these pages chronicle, in his own words, how he came to anthropology and how the discipline shaped and still shapes his trajectory. One work does not suffice to elucidate all that Nkwi has contributed to the discipline of Anthropology in Cameroon and beyond; nevertheless, this book is a starting point. As the founding president of the Pan-African Association of Anthropologists (PAAA), Nkwi has been a trail blazer, sowing the seeds, nurturing the shoots, and grooming budding African anthropologists in their investigation of that great anthropological question: what it means to be human. In discussing the transformation of anthropology from the handmaiden of colonialism to the advocate of identity, voice, and a means for Africa to engage with and interact within contemporary society, Nkwi reveals insights regarding, among others, the birth and growth of the discipline in Cameroon, the founding of the PAAA, and the applicability of the subject to the changing and challenging landscape that characterizes today’s globalized world. Likewise, blending theory and practice, he weaves a formidable tale of anthropological thought from an Africanist perspective through his notion of an African Pragmatic Socialism as a way of delving into, making sense of, and addressing the reality of the 21st century on the African continent and possibly beyond.

Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2021.

The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans

[قضية الحرية: تاريخ موجز للأمريكيين الأفريقيين]

Author: Jonathan Scott Holloway

This book considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called “the cause of freedom.” It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement. It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery, the eventual dismantling of that system in the national bloodletting of the Civil War, and the ways that civil rights disputes have continued to erupt in the more than 150 years since Emancipation. The Cause of Freedom carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement, a grass-roots activist convulsion that declared that African Americans’ present and past have value and meaning. At a moment when political debates grapple with the nation’s obligation to acknowledge and perhaps even repair its original sin of racialized slavery, The Cause of Freedom tells a story about our capacity and willingness to realize the ideal articulated in the country’s founding document, namely, that all people were created equal..

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Turkey in Africa. Turkey’s Strategic Involvement in Sub-Saharan Africa

[ تركيا في إفريقيا: التورط الاستراتيجي التركي في أفريقيا جنوب الصحراء]

Author: Federico Donelli

Africa is increasingly becoming an arena for geopolitical competition over its resources and, in the last two decades, has seen many emerging powers such as China, India, Russia, Japan & Brazil attempting to strengthen their ties with the continent. Turkey’s involvement has been much less discussed, despite the fact that Turkey’s strategic involvement with several sub-Saharan African states has been deepening since its active engagement in the Somali crisis of 2011. Federico Donelli brings to light the extent of Turkey’s involvement in Africa and analyses the unique characteristics, benefits, challenges and limits of Turkish policy in the region. The book examines the Turkish diplomatic programme as well as its domestic reception, which includes humanitarian aid, religious links such as the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation), as well as private business links. Crucially, Donelli examines what makes Turkish involvement different from that of other international actors in the region – its historic ties with North Africa under the Ottoman Empire.

Publisher: Bloomsbury, London, 2021.

Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature

[التحرر من الاستعمار في أدب المهجر: نحو نهج جوهري في الأدب الأفرو-أطلسي]

Author: Yomaira C Figueroa-Vásquez

Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Decolonizing Diasporas argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists from Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba offer new worldviews that unsettle and dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. With women of color feminisms and decolonial theory as frameworks, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez juxtaposes Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic diasporic artists, analyzing work by Nelly Rosario, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Trifonia Melibea Obono, Donato Ndongo, Junot Díaz, Aracelis Girmay, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ernesto Quiñonez, Christina Olivares, Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, Ibeyi, Daniel José Older, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Figueroa-Vásquez’s study reveals the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another. Decolonizing Diasporas examines how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in these works by tracing interlocking structures of oppression, including public and intimate forms of domination, sexual and structural violence, sociopolitical and racial exclusion, and the haunting remnants of colonial intervention.

Publisher: Northwestern University Pres, 2020.

Blackness in Morocco: Gnawa Identity through Music and Visual Culture

[السواد في المغرب: دراسة هوية كناوة من خلال الموسيقى والثقافة المرئية]

Author: Cynthia J. Becker

For more than thirteen centuries, caravans transported millions of enslaved people from Africa south of the Sahara into what is now the Kingdom of Morocco. Today there are no museums, plaques, or monuments that recognize this history of enslavement, but enslaved people and their descendants created the Gnawa identity that preserves this largely suppressed heritage. This pioneering book describes how Gnawa emerged as a practice associated with Blackness and enslavement by reviewing visual representation and musical traditions from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, 2020

——– ———— ———–
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).

Research Africa News: March 19th , 2021

A Chapter in U.S. History Often Ignored: The Flight of Runaway Slaves to Mexico

February 28, 2021

In a forgotten cemetery on the edge of Texas in the Rio Grande delta, Olga Webber-Vasques says she’s proud of her family’s legacy — even if she only just learned the full story. Turns out her great-great-grandparents, who are buried there, were agents in the little-known underground railroad that led through South Texas to Mexico during the 1800s. Thousands of enslaved people fled plantations to make their way to the Rio Grande, which became a river of deliverance.

Read the rest of the article here.

All futurism is Afrofuturism: Can Africa industrialize? I think it can.

Noah Smith, 3/ 1/ 2021

Every so often I get the urge to blog about something really important, so today I think I’ll write about Africa. Afrofuturism is a fun and interesting subgenre of science fiction and philosophy, but I kind of chuckle every time I see the word, because all futurism is actually Afrofuturism. Africa is literally the future of the entire world. Here is one of the two or three most important charts you will ever see:

Read the research article here.

Covid-19 drove hundreds of Africans out of Guangzhou. A generation of mixed-race children is their legacy

By Jenni Marsh, CNN, March 18, 2021

(CNN)When the coronavirus pandemic ground China to a near-halt in early February last year, Youssouf Dieng jetted back to Dakar for, he thought, a brief sojourn. In reality, it was a year before Dieng — who had worked as a goods trader in the manufacturing hub of Guangzhou in southern China for two decades — could return, on an air ticket three times the usual cost, and a complicated business visa. By then, the pandemic had driven hundreds of Africans out of Guangzhou, sparked the most severe anti-Black racial clashes in China in decades, and remade business operations, with Chinese factories connecting with African customers directly over e-commerce platforms.

Read the rest of the story here.

Nourin Mohamed Siddig: The African art of reciting the Koran

Isma’il Kushkush, 9 February

When Nourin Mohamed Siddig recited the Koran, people around the world described his tone as sad, soulful and bluesy. His unique sound made him one of the Muslim world’s most popular reciters. As a consequence, his death at the age of 38 in a car accident in Sudan in November was mourned from Pakistan to the United States. “The world has lost one of the most beautiful [voices] of our time,” tweeted Imam Omar Suleiman of Texas.

Read the rest of the story here.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Africa and the Disruptions of the Twenty-first Century

[أفريقيا واضطرابات القرن الواحد والعشرين]

Author: Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

This collection of essays interrogates the repositioning of Africa and its diasporas in the unfolding disruptive transformations of the early twenty-first century. It is divided into five parts focusing on America’s racial dysfunctions, navigating global turbulence, Africa’s political dramas, the continent’s persistent mythologisation and disruptions in higher education. It closes with tributes to two towering African public intellectuals, Ali Mazrui and Thandika Mkandawire, who have since joined the ancestors.

Publisher: CODESRIA, Senegal, 2021.

From Handmaiden of Colonialism to Esteemed Discipline: Professor Paul Nchoji Nkwi on the Reinvention of Anthropology in Africa

[ من حياة في خدمة الاستعمار إلى حياة الانضباط والاحترام: أفكار البروفيسور بول نشوجي نكوي عن إعادة اختراع الأنثروبولوجيا في إفريقيا]

Author: Paul Nchoji Nkwi

This book documents key features in the life of the father of anthropology in Cameroon, Professor Paul Nchoji Nkwi. The conversations within these pages chronicle, in his own words, how he came to anthropology and how the discipline shaped and still shapes his trajectory. One work does not suffice to elucidate all that Nkwi has contributed to the discipline of Anthropology in Cameroon and beyond; nevertheless, this book is a starting point. As the founding president of the Pan-African Association of Anthropologists (PAAA), Nkwi has been a trail blazer, sowing the seeds, nurturing the shoots, and grooming budding African anthropologists in their investigation of that great anthropological question: what it means to be human. In discussing the transformation of anthropology from the handmaiden of colonialism to the advocate of identity, voice, and a means for Africa to engage with and interact within contemporary society, Nkwi reveals insights regarding, among others, the birth and growth of the discipline in Cameroon, the founding of the PAAA, and the applicability of the subject to the changing and challenging landscape that characterizes today’s globalized world. Likewise, blending theory and practice, he weaves a formidable tale of anthropological thought from an Africanist perspective through his notion of an African Pragmatic Socialism as a way of delving into, making sense of, and addressing the reality of the 21st century on the African continent and possibly beyond.

Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2021.

The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans

[قضية الحرية: تاريخ موجز للأمريكيين الأفريقيين]

Author: Jonathan Scott Holloway

This book considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called “the cause of freedom.” It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement. It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery, the eventual dismantling of that system in the national bloodletting of the Civil War, and the ways that civil rights disputes have continued to erupt in the more than 150 years since Emancipation. The Cause of Freedom carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement, a grass-roots activist convulsion that declared that African Americans’ present and past have value and meaning. At a moment when political debates grapple with the nation’s obligation to acknowledge and perhaps even repair its original sin of racialized slavery, The Cause of Freedom tells a story about our capacity and willingness to realize the ideal articulated in the country’s founding document, namely, that all people were created equal..

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Turkey in Africa. Turkey’s Strategic Involvement in Sub-Saharan Africa

[ تركيا في إفريقيا: التورط الاستراتيجي التركي في أفريقيا جنوب الصحراء]

Author: Federico Donelli

Africa is increasingly becoming an arena for geopolitical competition over its resources and, in the last two decades, has seen many emerging powers such as China, India, Russia, Japan & Brazil attempting to strengthen their ties with the continent. Turkey’s involvement has been much less discussed, despite the fact that Turkey’s strategic involvement with several sub-Saharan African states has been deepening since its active engagement in the Somali crisis of 2011. Federico Donelli brings to light the extent of Turkey’s involvement in Africa and analyses the unique characteristics, benefits, challenges and limits of Turkish policy in the region. The book examines the Turkish diplomatic programme as well as its domestic reception, which includes humanitarian aid, religious links such as the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation), as well as private business links. Crucially, Donelli examines what makes Turkish involvement different from that of other international actors in the region – its historic ties with North Africa under the Ottoman Empire.

Publisher: Bloomsbury, London, 2021.

Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature

[التحرر من الاستعمار في أدب المهجر: نحو نهج جوهري في الأدب الأفرو-أطلسي]

Author: Yomaira C Figueroa-Vásquez

Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Decolonizing Diasporas argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists from Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba offer new worldviews that unsettle and dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. With women of color feminisms and decolonial theory as frameworks, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez juxtaposes Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic diasporic artists, analyzing work by Nelly Rosario, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Trifonia Melibea Obono, Donato Ndongo, Junot Díaz, Aracelis Girmay, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ernesto Quiñonez, Christina Olivares, Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, Ibeyi, Daniel José Older, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Figueroa-Vásquez’s study reveals the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another. Decolonizing Diasporas examines how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in these works by tracing interlocking structures of oppression, including public and intimate forms of domination, sexual and structural violence, sociopolitical and racial exclusion, and the haunting remnants of colonial intervention.

Publisher: Northwestern University Pres, 2020.

Blackness in Morocco: Gnawa Identity through Music and Visual Culture

[السواد في المغرب: دراسة هوية كناوة من خلال الموسيقى والثقافة المرئية]

Author: Cynthia J. Becker

For more than thirteen centuries, caravans transported millions of enslaved people from Africa south of the Sahara into what is now the Kingdom of Morocco. Today there are no museums, plaques, or monuments that recognize this history of enslavement, but enslaved people and their descendants created the Gnawa identity that preserves this largely suppressed heritage. This pioneering book describes how Gnawa emerged as a practice associated with Blackness and enslavement by reviewing visual representation and musical traditions from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, 2020

——– ———— ———–
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).

Research Africa News: December 16^th , 2020 

 

Decolonizing Islamic Art in Africa, Edited Volume 

CFP: Decolonizing Islamic Art in Africa, Edited Volume

Type: Call for Papers

Date: January 15, 2021

Subject Fields: African History / Studies, Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Architecture and Architectural History, Black History / Studies, Islamic History / Studies

 

This publication examines the status of Muslim visual and expressive cultures in the wake of decolonization in Africa.  It asks, in the years leading up to and following struggles for independence from colonial regimes across the continent, how was “Islamic art” mobilized, interpreted, transformed, or even erased in relation to projects of nation-building and in the context of new cultural and religious identities emerging across Africa and its diasporas?  It will consider the different strategies through which diverse actors–political leaders, architects, artists, museum curators, members of local religious communities, and others–approached the social and conceptual structures upheld by previous colonial regimes and explore the consequences of such processes of negotiation for the visual, spatial, and intellectual parameters framing Muslim institutions, practices, and cultural works in “postcolonial” Africa.

https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/6937910/cfp-decolonizing-islamic-art-africa-edited-volume

 

Will China move Africa up from the end of coronavirus vaccine queue? 

In previous pandemics African countries have had to wait for vaccinations and analysts fear it could happen again Many are banking on Covax, while Beijing has also said it will make its vaccines available as a ‘public good’

By Jevans Nyabiage, 28 Nov, 2020 

 

African countries are expected to be last in the queue for Covid-19 vaccinations, complicating the global fight against the coronavirus pandemic. With encouraging results from late-stage trials for several candidates, attention is turning to the distribution of billions of doses around the world, and there are concerns most African countries will be left to the mercy of rich nations in the race for access to affordable vaccines.

Read the rest of the story here. 

 

War ravaged home

By Samuel Getachew, 8 June 2019

There is no place that is as humbling as Badme. It is hard to imagine the many thousands that have died for it fighting in one of the world’s bloodiest wars. There are few that live here and many are entering the uncertain prospect of joining Eritrea with no local input.

Read the rest of the story here. 

 

A curator’s museum is filled with looted African art. Now he wants it returned CNN, 3rd December 2020

 

The Kingdom of Benin took centuries to build and just a few days to raze to the ground. In February 1897, British forces stormed the ancient kingdom’s capital city with rockets, shells and Maxim guns capable of firing 600 rounds per minute. A flotilla of warships joined the assault from adjacent waterways. Benin’s defenders, fighting with blades and muskets, were swiftly massacred. The British burned the city and built a golf course on the ruins.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

The English Translation of Eritrean Novelist Haji Jabir’s Black Foam is Set for 2021  

By CHUKWUEBUKA IBEH November 18, 2020

 

Black Foam by Eritrean novelist Haji Jabir is finally going to be available in English. The novel, which explores the experiences of Ethiopian Jewish immigrants in Israel, is set for a 2021 release through Amazon Publishing.

 

Eritrean-born Jabir is the author of four novels. Black Foam, which is being translated in English, was published in 2018 and longlisted for the International Prize for Arab Fiction, one of the most prestigious prizes for fiction in Arabic

Read the rest of the story here.

 

NEW BOOKS          ‫كتب جديدة

 

For a Pragmatics of the Useless 

[نحو تفعيل المهدورين] 

Author: Erin Manning

 

What has a use in the future, unforeseeably, is radically useless now. What has an effect now is not necessarily useful if it falls through the gaps. In For a Pragmatics of the Useless Erin Manning examines what falls outside the purview of already-known functions and established standards of value, not for want of potential but for carrying an excess of it. The figures are various: the infrathin, the artful, proprioceptive tactility, neurodiversity, black life. It is around the latter two that a central refrain echoes: “All black life is neurodiverse life.” This is not an equation, but an “approximation of proximity.” Manning shows how neurotypicality and whiteness combine to form a normative baseline for existence.

Publisher: Duke University Press.

 

Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism  

[احتلال مصر: الاقتصاد الاستعماري وأزمات الرأسمالية] 

Author: Aaron Jakes

 

The history of capitalism in Egypt has long been synonymous with cotton cultivation and dependent development. From this perspective, the British occupation of 1882 merely sealed the country’s fate as a vast plantation for European textile mills. All but obscured in such accounts, however, is Egypt’s emergence as a colonial laboratory for financial investment and experimentation. Egypt’s Occupation tells for the first time the story of that financial expansion and the devastating crises that followed.

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2020.

 

La politique africaine du Maroc: Identité de rôle et projection de puissance Series: Studies in the History and Society of the Maghrib, Volume: 12  

[سياسات المغرب في أفريقيا]

Author: Yousra Abourabi 

 

Since the advent of the reign of Mohammed VI in 1999, Morocco has deployed a new continental foreign policy. The Kingdom aspires to be recognized as an emerging African power in its identity as well as in its space of projection. In order to meet these ambitions, the diplomatic apparatus is developing and modernizing, while a singular role identity is emerging around the notion of the “golden mean”. This study presents, on an empirical level, the conditions of the elaboration and conduct of this African policy, and analyzes, on a theoretical level, the evolution of the Moroccan role identity in the international system.

Publisher: Brill, 2020.

 

The Transformative Power of Language: From Postcolonial to Knowledge Societies in Africa.  

[القوة التأثيرية للغة: من مجتمعات ما بعد الكولونيالية إلى مجتمعات المعرفة في إفريقيا] 

Author/ (Editors): Kaschula, Russell H. and H. Ekkehard Wolff.

 

The German/South-African team of co-editors has brought together contributions by 27 academics all from Southern Africa in order to shed light on the issue of language choice for transformation and (mental) decolonization in postcolonial Africa, thereby mirroring ongoing interdisciplinary discourse in the wake of #RhodesMust Fall (2015) on South African university campuses. The book addresses the need of and some relevant (pre-) conditions for transforming postcolonial societies in Africa into globally competitive knowledge societies and achieving full mental decolonisation. Such transformation poses challenges for education and academic research – in particular with regard to higher education and to the benefit of knowledge production. This implies provisions and applications of human language technology devices in the service of mass education and lifelong education. It also refers to academic research in general under the new umbrella of digital humanities. One of the key issues in such transformation is language, more specifically the recognition of multilingualism as resource rather than barrier to sociocultural modernisation and economic progress.

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

 

Great Zimbabwe: Reclaiming a ‘Confiscated’ Past

[عن زيمبابوي العظمى: نحو استعادة الماضي المغصوب] 

Author: Shadreck Chirikure

 

It combines archaeological knowledge, including recent material from the author’s excavations, with native concepts and philosophies. Working from a large data set has made it possible, for the first time, to develop an archaeology of Great Zimbabwe that is informed by finds and observations from the entire site and wider landscape. In so doing, the book strongly contributes towards decolonising African and world archaeology. Written in an accessible manner, the book is aimed at undergraduate students, graduate students, and practicing archaeologists both in Africa and across the globe. 

Publisher: Routledge, 2020.

 

Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities   

 [ليسوا بمستوطنين ولا بأبناء البلد الأصليين: جدليات تاريخية في ظهور مفهوم الأقليات الحديثة ] 

Author: Mahmood Mamdani

 

In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe—from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence. Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors—victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries—based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2020.

 

Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France 

[النساء السوداوات وأوهام الاستعمار في فرنسا أثناء القرن التاسع عشر] 

Author: Robin Mitchell

 

The book looks at the French appropriation and production of Black female bodies and attempts to show how these symbolic bodies helped French writers and artists talk about the nation’s defeat by what would become known as Haiti— and I am thankful all the reviewers highlighted this point. This defeat, represented as a white male loss (based on the rather maddening tendency to see Revolution as an overwhelmingly masculine space), helped fuel certain types of colonial fantasies about a colony lost, and helped white French men and women imagine a new identity after the Revolution’s end. I explain that “[t]he discursive presence of Black women in nineteenth-century France—how they were seen, perceived, produced, and represented—suggests that French elites were deeply unsettled by the Haitian Revolution and that this disturbance contributed to an unclaimed and ignored radicalized national identity” (p.11).

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2020.

——– ———— ———–
Research Africa (research_africa-editor@duke.edu) welcomes submissions of books, events, funding opportunities, and more to be included in the next edition.

Research Africa News: December 2^nd, 2020

 

Diego Maradona: Comrade of the Global South

 

As much as for his genius with the soccer ball, he will be remembered for his willingness to fight power and be a voice for the voiceless.

By Dave Zirin, 11/ 24/ 2020

 

The world mourns today the passing of Diego Maradona, the soccer god and revolutionary from Argentina whose play inspired all manner of poetry and prose. The best description of Maradona’s abilities came from the late Eduardo Galeano, who wrote of Maradona in his book

Read the rest of the story here.

 

Destination wonder: a journey through Ghana’s feelgood fashion world

By Chidozie Obasi

 

Against the backdrop of West Africa’s heritage, Ghana’s fashion scene is culturally rich and diverse. Nestling between Togo and Ivory Coast, it oozes with vital energy. It was once home to the celebrated Yaa Asantewaa, queen mother of the Edweso tribe of the Asante (Ashanti). As Ghana’s history continues to unfold, its precolonial past has woven its essence into the work of its modern artists. Today’s generation of designers explores the depths of the nation’s heritage, without trivialising its value. Through experimentation and by devoting their tradition to the streets of Accra, young designers are bringing Ghana’s colourful culture into sharp focus.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

CAMEROON | WHITE WASHING THE DICTATOR Blog /

By Arne Gillis / MO*02/11/2020

 

In 2020, locking up opposition members and forging ballot papers is passé for dictators. A better strategy is to call in PR companies to boost the reputation of your state abroad. This investigation shows how Cameroonian President Paul Biya uses American companies for that purpose, paid for by the tax money of his own citizens.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

GROUP URGES ATLANTIC SEAFLOOR BE LABELED A MEMORIAL TO SLAVE TRADING

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 10, 2020 IN RESEARCH

 

BEAUFORT, N.C. – Before deep-sea mining begins on the seafloor in international waters of the Atlantic Basin, a group of scholars is suggesting that a portion of the seabed be marked on maps and charts as a virtual memorial to the estimated 1.8 million Africans who lost their lives at sea during the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the 11 million who completed the voyage and were sold into slavery.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

The Ethical, Epistemological, and Conceptual Need to Resume Fieldwork For the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, Adam Baczko and Gilles Dorronsoro argue for the necessity of resuming fieldwork.

 

They trace how subcontracting research or shifting to methodologies which are remote in time and space—solutions often touted in the pandemic age—in fact produce unreliable, exploitative, and undertheorized work incapable of accurately analyzing dynamic conditions on the ground. These transformations relate to broader research trends toward neoliberal privatization, and the authors outline how they can be resisted by returning, carefully, to the field.

By Adam Baczko and Gilles Dorronsoro November 19, 2020

 

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has provided an additional justification—the protection of researchers and their interlocutors—for already existing but ethically, epistemologically, and politically problematic research practices. In fact, as Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka and Kanisha D. Bond, Milli Lake and Sarah E. Parkinson rightly point out, the novel coronavirus only partially transforms the context for researchers (and individuals) already living in crisis contexts rife with other immediate risks.

Read the rest of the rest of the story here.

 

NEW BOOKS          ‫كتب جديدة

 

Les Sénégalais de Boko Haram

[السنغاليون في جماعة بوكوحرام]

Author : Mamadou Mouth Bane

 

After a careful analysis of terrorism in the Sahel, this book presents the details of the interrogations of suspected Senegalese terrorists who are associated with Boko Haram. The book reveals news and facts that have not been published before because they fall under the secrecy of the investigation. The author reveals the process of recruiting candidates for Jihad, their motivations, the financing of their activities, their travels, their routes which led them to Northern Nigeria, and to the court of Aboubacar Shekau, at the head of Boko Haram. The author also addresses the approach of the Senegalese authorities in the fight against terrorism and suggest perspectives for a better management of this problem.

Publisher: Harmattan Sénégal, 2020.

 

Collected Poems

[مجموعة شعرية]

Author: Bernard Levinson

 

Poems from Bernard Levinson’s four published collections as well as a new unpublished collection are gathered together into one volume, Collected Poems. Those previously published collections are From Breakfast to Madness (Ravan Press 1974); Welcome to the Circus (Justified Press 1991); I See You (Southern College Publishers 2001) and I Dreamt I Was Flying (Nimrod Publishers 2007).

Publisher: Hands-On Books, South Africa, 2020.

 

The Pan-African Pantheon

[البانثيون الأفريقي]

Author/ (Editor): Adekeye Adebajo

 

This collection of lively biographical essays examines historical and contemporary Pan-Africanism as an ideology of emancipation and unity. The volume covers thirty-six major figures, including well-known Pan-Africanists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko, and Thabo Mbeki, as well as popular figures not typically identified with mainstream Pan-Africanism such as Maya Angelou, Mariama Bâ, Buchi Emecheta, Miriam Makeba, Ruth First, Wangari Maathai, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, V.Y. Mudimbe, Léopold Senghor, Malcolm X, Bob Marley, and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. The book explores the history and pioneers of the movement; the quest for reparations; politicians; poets; activists, as well as Pan-Africanism in the social sciences, philosophy, literature, and its musical activists. With contributions from a diverse and prominent group of African, Caribbean, and African-American scholars, The Pan-African Pantheon is a comprehensive and diverse introductory reader for specialists and general readers alike.

Publisher: Manchester University Pres, 2021.

 

Sports in Africa, Past and Present

[الرياضة في أفريقيا: الماضي والحاضر]

Author/ (Editors): Todd Cleveland, Tarminder Kaur, and Gerard Akindes

 

Since the late nineteenth century, modern sports in Africa have both reflected and shaped cultural, social, political, economic, generational, and gender relations on the continent. Although colonial powers originally introduced European sports as a means of “civilizing” indigenous populations and upholding then current notions of racial hierarchies and “muscular Christianity,” Africans quickly appropriated these sporting practices to fulfill their own varied interests. This collection encompasses a wide range of topics, including women footballers in Nigeria, Kenya’s world-class long-distance runners, pitches and stadiums in communities large and small, fandom and pay-to-watch kiosks, the sporting diaspora, sports pedagogy, sports as resistance and as a means to forge identity, sports heritage, the impact of politics on sports, and sporting biography.

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2020.

 

The Algerian War, The Algerian Revolution

[الحرب الجزائرية والثورة الجزائرية]

Author: Vince, Natalya

Examines how the most recent research has revisited key events of the Algerian War and brought forward new approaches and themes. Brings together an engaging account of its origins, course and legacies with an incisive analysis of how interpretations of the conflict have shifted and why it continues to provoke intense debate. Assesses the historiography of the end of a colonial empire, the rise of anti-colonial nationalism and their post-colonial aftermaths.

Publisher: Palgrave, 2020.

 

Africa Every Day Fun, Leisure, and Expressive Culture on the Continent

[الحياة اليومية في أفريقيا: المرح والترفيه وثقافة الكلمة في القارة الأفريقية]

Author: (Editors) Oluwakemi M. Balogun, Lisa Gilman, Melissa Graboyes, and Habib Iddrisu

 

Africa Every Day presents an exuberant, thoughtful, and necessary counterpoint to the prevailing emphasis in introductory African studies classes on war, poverty, corruption, disease, and human rights violations on the continent. These challenges are real and deserve sustained attention, but this volume shows that adverse conditions do not prevent people from making music, falling in love, playing sports, participating in festivals, writing blogs, telling jokes, making videos, playing games, eating delicious food, and finding pleasure in their daily lives.

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2020.

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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 edition.

Research Africa News: October 14th, 2020 

 

A Singaporean firm has become the go-to master planner for African cities 

 

Surbana Jurong has signed contracts to do city master plans in ten African countries. Why is the continent relying on outside firms to map its future?

By Robert Neuwirth 09 Oct 2020

In early September 2020, the municipality of Kigali in Rwanda released a new master plan to guide development for the coming 30 years. It is called “Kigali Yacu” – “Our Kigali” in Kinyarwanda. Despite the friendly local name, the plan for the country’s capital city was actually produced by a foreign entity: Surbana Jurong, a global firm owned by the government of Singapore that has emerged as a dominant force in city planning across Africa.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

Normalizing Sudan-Israel Relations Now is a Dangerous Game As Sudan is mentioned among the next states to normalize relations with Israel, concerns about what that would do to the democratic transition arise.  

Payton Knopf, Thursday, September 24, 2020 

 

With the UAE and Bahrain having joined Egypt and Jordan in declaring peace with Israel, those asking “who’s next?” often look enthusiastically westward, toward Khartoum. Adding new chapters to the Abraham Accords is in the U.S. interest, but so is a successful transition in Sudan. And the sequence of these steps is critical. 

Read the rest of the story here. 

 

New find reveals grim truth of colonial Belgium’s ‘human zoos’ 

Antwerp exhibition tells of the lives and deaths of Congolese shipped over to be put on show in cities from 1885 to 1958

 

Two names stand out from the yellowing cemetery register: Sabo and Bitio, 24 and 20 years old, Described as “Congolanders” and buried in row 13, plot K of Kiel cemetery in Antwerp. The newly unearthed document, on show for the first time this weekend in an exhibition at Antwerp’s Museum aan de Stroom, has sparked renewed debate about how Belgium should come to terms with the darkest moments of a bloody colonial past – by shining a light on a long-forgotten tragedy.

Read the rest of the rest of the story here.

 

NEW BOOKS          ‫كتب جديدة

 

Chadian Sister Engages Kansas City Youth About Peace and Justice: citoyenne du monde en construction à Kansas City

[فتاة من تشاد تحاور شباب مدينة كانساس الأمريكية حول مسائل  السلام والعدالة]

Author: Jeannette Nelkem Londadjim

 

A woman meets young people from various backgrounds – at a U.S. university. She is African, from Chad. The students, eager to learn about her life, ask probing questions. She tells them about the war, her flight, her refugee status, her experiences in West Africa and Algeria. In turn, she discovers that they are still exposed to racism in their country – an outrage compounded by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. As an activist in residence, she dialogues with the students about their aspirations and encourages them to become artisans of peace and justice. We look forward, in turn, to the thoughts and writings of young people about the encounters shared here and the illustrations by a young Kenyan woman that accompany the essays.

Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2020.

 

Not My Time to Die 

[لم يحن بعد وقت مماتي] 

Author: Yolande Mukagasana

 

Yolande Mukagasana is a Rwandan nurse and mother of three children who likes wearing jeans and designer glasses. She runs her own clinic in Nyamirambo and is planning a party for her wedding anniversary. But when genocide starts everything changes. Targeted because she’s a successful woman and a Tutsi, she flees for her life. This gripping memoir describes the betrayal of friends and help that comes from surprising places. Quick-witted and courageous, Yolande never loses hope she will find her children alive.

Publisher: Huza Press, Rwanda, 2019.

 

Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence 

[التضامن والروحانية: دروس أفريقية حول الدين والعنصرية وإنهاء العنف بين الجنسين] 

Author: Traci C. West

 

West traveled to Ghana, South Africa, and Brazil to interview activists involved in the struggle against gender violence. In each of these places, as in the United States, Christianity and anti-black racism have been implicated in violence against women. In Ghana and Brazil, in particular, their Christian colonial and trans-Atlantic slave trade histories directly connect with the socioeconomic development of the Americas and historic incidents of rape of black slave women. With a transnational focus on religion and racism, West brings a new perspective to efforts to systemically combat gender violence. Calling attention to forms of violence in the U.S. and international settings, such as marital rape, sex trafficking of women and girls, domestic violence, and the targeting of lesbians, the book offers an expansive and nuanced view of how to form activist solidarity in tackling this violence. It features bold and inspiring approaches by black women leaders working in each setting to uproot the myriad forms of violence against women and girls..

Publisher: New York University Press, 2020.

 

La Parole Chez les Seerer : Anthropologie et langage  

[الكلمة عند السيرير:اللغة والانتربولوجيا]

Author : A. Raphaël Ndiaye

 

This book defines speech from a viewpoint of the Seereer language in Senegal. It illustrates a set of common expressions and terminologies, analyzing their presentations as well as their morphosyntactic. It is a product of surveying Seereer’s communal life in four main sectors: working the land, fishing in the sea, raising cattle, and inter-individual relationships in society. The Seereer are in fact farmers, breeders, fishermen, hunters,. These life styles allows the author to follow them step by step to observe their speech patterns in all functions and social relationships.

Publisher: L’Harmattan, Senegal, 2020.

 

Zimbabwe Will Never be a Colony Again! Sanctions and Anti-Imperialist Struggles in Zimbabwe 

[لن تصبح زيمبابوي مستعمرة من جديد] 

Authors: Munoda Mararike

 

This is a thought-provoking original book, based on a wealth of empirical case studies of how Zimbabwe experienced illegal economic sanctions. It is a study of how the humanly constructed obstructions – from external remittances/finance flows into the country to finance embargos or total financial blockages – are deliberately created by so-called ‘powerful’ governments to deal with an ‘errand’ country. The book is an insightful contribution on Africa’s contemporary post-colonial liberation politics of development economics. It focuses on Zimbabwe as a synthesis of microcosmic study that provides accessible in-depth analysis of key aspects of sanctions as a weapon of control wielded by the so-called ‘powerful’ governments of the Global North. The book invites the reader to see power differently: as compassion and the capacity to right past wrongs by protecting all and sundry from inequality and poverty.

Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2019.

 

Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016 (Historical Materialism)  

[إثيوبيا في النظريات] 

Author: Elleni Centime Zeleke

 

Between the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, and in North America produced a number of journals. In them, these students explored the relationship between social theory and social change within the project of building a socialist Ethiopia. Ethiopia in Theory examines the literature of this student movement, together with the movement ‘s afterlife in Ethiopian politics and society, in order to ask a vital question: what does it mean to write today about the appropriation and indigenisation of Marxist and mainstream social science ideas in an Ethiopian and African context? And, further, what does the archive of revolutionary thought in Africa teach us about the practice of critical theory more generally?

Publisher: Haymarket Books, 2020.

 

States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court  

[حول العدالة: سياسات المحكمة الجنائية الدولية] 

Author: Oumar Ba

 

This book theorizes the ways in which states that are presumed to be weaker in the international system use the International Criminal Court (ICC) to advance their security and political interests. Ultimately, it contends that African states have managed to instrumentally and strategically use the international justice system to their advantage, a theoretical framework that challenges the “justice cascade” argument. The empirical work of this study focuses on four major themes around the intersection of power, states’ interests, and the global governance of atrocity crimes: firstly, the strategic use of self-referrals to the ICC; secondly, complementarity between national and the international justice system; thirdly, the limits of state cooperation with international courts; and finally the use of international courts in domestic political conflicts. This book is valuable to students, scholars, and researchers who are interested in international relations, international criminal justice, peace and conflict studies, human rights, and African politics..

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

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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 edition.

Research Africa News: September 25th, 2020 

 

NEW CURRENCY, OLD POWER PLAY Blog  

40 years after that attempt, the crowd of young Beninese men had congregated in the West African capital of Cotonou in August 2017 to rid the region of a symbol of its French colonial era: by burning banknotes of the CFA franc, the France-backed currency. They were just one of many groups in West Africa inspired by the actions of the controversial yet influential Franco-Beninese activist Kemi Seba. Seba was among the first on the continent to take to the streets of Dakar, Senegal to burn the very same CFA franc notes just days earlier.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

After the monuments have been removed  

BY Mohamadou Mbougar Sarr TRANSLATION BY Jeremy Dell

 

As interesting and necessary as it may be, it seems to me that the current critique of the presence of colonial symbols in our public spaces needs to be, as of this moment, reexamined. Let me emphasize “as of this moment.” I readily acknowledge that there will be some who believe the time has not yet come for internal criticism of a process that remains incomplete and that has even, in a certain sense, just begun. Is there not, as they say, a time and place for everything? Should we not prioritize certain actions and deeds? Demolish all of the problematic statues first, rename certain spaces, and only then, once we have recovered the feeling (or the illusion) of a sovereign liberty beyond all humiliation, turn our thoughts to other challenges?  

Read the rest of the story here.

 

Protecting Nigeria’s Entrepreneurial Future: A whitepaper with policy recommendations for Nigeria’s innovation ecosystem as startups and scaleups navigate the fallout of the global pandemic.

 

If you are the founder of a high-growth startup or scaleup in Nigeria, then you have inevitably been affected by the crisis that has tilted the entire world on its axis since early in the year. Necessary measures by governments to mitigate the health impact has had ripple effects on businesses worldwide. Governments have had to very quickly respond to stymie the potential disaster, including providing support programs to keep both large and small businesses afloat.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

Mozambique Can’t Contain Its Insurgency Alone Without a coherent counterterrorism strategy or regional assistance, the odds are stacked against the Mozambican military.  

BY TONDERAYI MUKEREDZI | SEPTEMBER 11, 2020. 

On Aug. 11, militants with links to the Islamic State captured the port of Mocímboa da Praia in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province. The extremists have so far managed to hold the port city, signaling that the national government may have lost control over the conflict in its resource-rich north that began with a few attacks in 2017.

Read the rest of the article here.

 

Africa and the idea of the University  

By Editorial -September 20, 2020

 

Why do universities around the world require the donning of academic gowns that look like the Danshiki, Babariga, or Kosankosa of Africans? The modern university originated in Africa with its inception in 859 AD at Fez, Morocco, by Fathima, a Muslim woman, and it continues today as the oldest university in the world named in 1965, University of Al Quaraouiyine. This was followed in 989 AD in present-day Mali by the Mosque of Sankore or Timbuctoo which doubled as a higher learning center or Madrasa still known as the University of Sankore or Timbuctoo.

Read the rest of the rest of the story here.

 

NEW BOOKS          ‫كتب جديدة

 

Babel Unbound: Rage, Reason and Rethinking Public Life 

[الوصول الى برج بابل: تأملات في الهياج والتعقل وإعادة التفكير في الحياة العامة] 

Author (Editors): Dr. Lesley Cowling, Dr. Carolyn Hamilton

 

The notion that societies mediate issues through certain kinds of engagement is at the heart of the democratic project and often centres on an imagined public sphere where this takes place. But this imagined foundation of how we live collectively appears to have suffered a dramatic collapse across the world in the digital age, with many democracies apparently unable to solve problems through talk – or even to agree on who speaks, in what ways and where.This collection offers a new theory of the public sphere. The notion that societies mediate issues through certain kinds of engagement is at the heart of the democratic project and often centres on an imagined public sphere where this takes place. Through news media, photography, archives, hashtags, ‘art-rage’, Muslim manuscripts, and much more, this incisive book illuminates the underlying dynamics of public engagement.

Publisher: Wits University Press 2020

 

Power and the Presidency in Kenya: The Jomo Kenyatta Years  

 [ السلطة والرئاسة في كينيا: سنوات حكم جومو كينياتا ] 

Author: Anaïs Angelo

 

In December 1963, Kenya formally declared its independence yet it would take a year of intense negotiations for it to transform into a presidential republic, with Jomo Kenyatta as its first president. Archival records of the independence negotiations, however, reveal that neither the British colonial authorities nor the Kenyan political elite foresaw the formation of a presidential regime that granted one man almost limitless executive powers. Even fewer expected Jomo Kenyatta to remain president until his death in 1978. Power and the Presidency in Kenya reconstructs Kenyatta’s political biography, exploring the links between his ability to emerge as an uncontested leader and the deeper colonial and postcolonial history of the country.

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2020

 

Tell our Story; Multiplying voices in the news media 

[كيف نحكي قصصنا: تضافر الأصوات في وسائل الإعلام] 

Authors: Dale T McKinley& Julie Reid

 

The dominant news media is often accused of reflecting an ‘elite bias’, privileging and foregrounding the interests of a small segment of society, while ignoring the narratives of the majority. Tell Our Storyinvestigates the problem of disproportionate media representation. Focusing on three very different communities in South Africait delves into the life and struggle narratives of each, exposing the divide between the stories told by the people who actually live in the communities and the way in which those stories have been understood and shaped by the media.

Publisher: Wits University Press 2020

 

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World [ 

[العرض الطالح: الأفريقيات والعلاقات العاطفية والحريات أثناء في العالم الأطلسي] 

Author: Jessica Marie Johnson

 

Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women’s experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women’s practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the New World.

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020

 

Power and Loss in South African Journalism: News in the age of social media 

[مسائل القوة والضعف في صحافة جنوب إفريقيا: الأخبار في عصر وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي] 

Author: Glenda Daniels

This book examines the job losses in SA journalism industry but also the powerful contribution of investigative journalism. The book argues for the power of public interest journalism, including investigative journalism, and a diversity of voices and positions to be reflected in the news. It addresses the gains and losses from decolonial and feminist perspectives and advocates for a radical shift in the way power is constituted by the media in the South African postcolony.

Publisher: Wits University Press 2020

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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 edition.

Research Africa News: September 9th, 2020

 

The Day Malcolm X Was Killed  

At the height of his powers, the Black Nationalist leader was assassinated, and the government botched the investigation of his murder.

By Les Payne August 27, 2020 

 

At 2 p.m. on Sunday, February 21, 1965, Malcolm X arrived at the Audubon Ballroom, in Harlem, to give a speech. Malcolm was thirty-nine, tall and serious, with a dark suit and a new beard, and he was in the midst of remaking himself. He had recently left the Nation of Islam, the Black-Muslim group that had nurtured his rise to prominence.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

The Conscience of Silicon Valley  

Tech oracle Jaron Lanier warned us all about the evils of social media. Too few of us listened. Now, in the most chaotic of moments, his fears—and his bighearted solutions—are more urgent than ever.

BY Zach Baron, August 24, 2020

 

There Jaron Lanier and I were, side by side on my computer screen, in a virtual space that looked a little like a conference room and a little like a movie theater. We could’ve been jurors, maybe. I was able to approximate rubbing his head. “As you have discovered,” Lanier said, noticing, “you can reach and interact with people a little bit. So there is this shared-space quality.” He was in Berkeley, California, in the hills above the city, in a house that looks out over the bay. I was in Los Angeles. Five minutes ago we were in our own separate video-chat windows, the ones many of us now see as we’re going to sleep, our dumb faces staring back at us. Then he had hit some buttons. Now we were together.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

The University of Zimbabwe’s First Pan-African History Conference 

By Brooks Marmon

 

From 5 – 15 September 1960, an intimate, yet opulent (by academic standards) pan-African history conference convened in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (present-day Harare, Zimbabwe). Funded by the London-based Leverhulme Trust, the conference aimed to provide a forum for members of history departments across ‘tropical Africa’ to confer. In addition to several Rhodesian-based delegates, historians resident in Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, the UK, and South Africa attended.

Read the rest of the article here.

 

Senegal’s quiet COVID success: Test results in 24 hours, temperature checks at every store, no fights over masks 

Deirdre Shesgreen USA TODAY, Sept. 6, 2020

 

COVID-19 test results come back within 24 hours – or even faster. Hotels have been transformed into quarantine units. Scientists are racing to develop a cutting-edge, low-cost ventilator. This isn’t the pandemic response in South Korea, New Zealand or another country held up as a model of coronavirus containment success. It’s Senegal, a west African country with a fragile health care system, a scarcity of hospital beds and about seven doctors for every 100,000 people. And yet Senegal, with a population of 16 million, has tackled COVID-19 aggressively and, so far, effectively. More than six months into the pandemic, the country has about 14,000 cases and 284 deaths.

Read the rest of the rest of the story here.

 

Nation Building and Legacies of Slavery: The Intersections of Being Black and Arab in the Gulf  

“Populations from the Arabian Peninsula and those from the African continent have crossed, migrated, and mixed both within and outside the institution of slavery for thousands of years. In many places and communities, it would be difficult to even distinguish who is ‘African’ from who is ‘Arabian.’”

BY DALIA AWAD 03 Sep 2020 SHARE TWEET

 

Born to a Black Sudanese mother and Black Kuwaiti father, AlMoataz’s story is all too familiar for Black and Afro-Arab Gulf nationals. “I’ve also been rejected by people because of my skin tone. One girl told me her parents would not be okay with me because I am a Black man. Being stripped of all your qualities and saying you aren’t worth it or people don’t want you around because of the colour of your skin really hurts.”

Read the rest of the rest of the story here.

 

NEW BOOKS          ‫كتب جديدة

 

Slave between Empires: A Transimperial History of North Africa  

[رقيق بين الامبراطوريات: نحو تاريخ موسع لشمال أفريقيا] 

Author: M’Hamed Oualdi

 

In light of the profound physical and mental traumas of colonization endured by North Africans, historians of recent decades have primarily concentrated their studies of North Africa on colonial violence, domination, and shock. The choice is an understandable one. But in his new monograph, A Slave between Empires: A Transimperial History of North Africa (Columbia University Press, 2020), M’hamed Oualdi asks how a history of the modern Maghreb might look if we did not perceive it solely through the prism of European colonization, and argues that widening our gaze might force us to redefine our understanding of colonialism — and its limits.

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2020.

 

Afropessimism 

[التطير الافريقي] 

Author: Frank B. Wilderson

 

How should we understand the pervasiveness – and virulence – of anti-Black violence in the United State? Why and how is anti-Black racism different from other forms of racism? How does it permeate our moral and political ideals? Frank Wilderson III combines memoir and works of political theory, critical theory, literature, and film to offer a philosophy of Blackness

Publisher: Liveright, 2020

 

Collecting Food, Collecting People Subsistence and Society in Central Africa  

[الاقتتات وتحسين أوضاع المجتمع في أفريقيا الوسطى] 

Author: Kathryn M. de Luna 

 

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.

 

Sports in Africa, Past and Present  

[الرياضة في أفريقيا: الماضي والحاضر] 

Author: (editors) Todd Cleveland, Tarminder Kaur, and Gerard Akindes

 

Since the late nineteenth century, modern sports in Africa have both reflected and shaped cultural, social, political, economic, generational, and gender relations on the continent. Although colonial powers originally introduced European sports as a means of “civilizing” indigenous populations and upholding then current notions of racial hierarchies and “muscular Christianity,” Africans quickly appropriated these sporting practices to fulfill their own varied interests. This collection encompasses a wide range of topics, including women footballers in Nigeria, Kenya’s world-class long-distance runners, pitches and stadiums in communities large and small, fandom and pay-to-watch kiosks, the sporting diaspora, sports pedagogy, sports as resistance and as a means to forge identity, sports heritage, the impact of politics on sports, and sporting biography.

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2020

 

The State of Open Data: Histories and Horizons  

[حالة المعلومات المفتوحة: دراسة حول التواريخ والآفاق] 

Author: (Edited)  Tim Davies, Stephen B. Walker, Mor Rubinstein & Fernando Perini

 

It’s been ten years since open data first broke onto the global stage. Over the past decade, thousands of programmes and projects around the world have worked to open data and use it to address a myriad of social and economic challenges. This book brings together over 60 authors from around the world to address these questions and to take stock of the real progress made to date across sectors and around the world, uncovering the issues that will shape the future of open data in the years to come.
Publisher: African Minds, South Africa, 2019.
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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 edition.

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.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

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.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

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.

Read the rest of the article here.

 

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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Research Africa (research_africa-editor@duke.edu) welcomes submissions of books, events, funding opportunities, and more to be included in the next edition.