Research Africa بحوث افريقيا

Research Africa News: July 26th, 2020 

  

Voices from Kenya and Nigeria: Working With Religious Actors to Prevent Extremism 

By multiple authors, July 8^th, 2020

Over the past five years, the Supporting Leaders programme at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has partnered with local organisations to empower religious actors to counter extremist narratives and build social cohesion. It trained 172 trainers and facilitators, empowered 361 religious leaders and reached more than 29,000 local community members.

In 2019, the Institute and the Alliance for Peacebuilding, with the generous support of the GHR Foundation, convened an Insights Forum in Nairobi. Our aim was to showcase to practitioners and policymakers the impact of working with religious actors to build peaceful and stable societies.

Get the full report here

 

Viewpoint from Sudan – where black people are called slaves 

BBC, July 26. 2000

As anti-racism protests swept through various parts of the world following African-American George Floyd’s death in police custody in the US, Sudan seemed to be in a completely different world. There was little take-up in Sudan of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.

Instead many Sudanese social media users hurled racial abuse at a famous black Sudanese footballer, Issam Abdulraheem, and a light-skinned Arab make-up artist, Reem Khougli, following their marriage. “Seriously girl, this is haram [Arabic for forbidden]… a queen marries her slave,” one man commented on Facebook after seeing a photo of the couple.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

Translating Black Lives Matter into Yiddish  

By Anthony Russell June 5, 2020

ON THE EVENING OF MAY 31st—a week after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer and amid an eruption of protests nationwide—I was tagged in a query on Twitter asking how to translate the phrase “Black Lives Matter” into Yiddish. Working for the past eight years primarily as a performer and composer of Yiddish kunstlider (art song), I am frequently asked to make spontaneous translations into the language in which I work, in spite of my decidedly intermediate level of fluency.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

Will the South embrace Senegalese cooking? One young chef has a plan  

By Todd A. Price The American South/ July 17, 2020

Senegal’s flavors and one-pot cooking gave us gumbo, jambalaya and Hoppin’ John, but we aren’t savoring the originals, says Serigne Mbaye, a young chef born in Harlem but raised in Senegal. Why isn’t Senegalese food as revered as the cooking of France and Italy? At the moment, Mbaye borrows kitchens in New Orleans, popping-up a few times a week to cook black-eyed pea fritters, Senegalese egg rolls and jollof, a deeply flavored rice dish with seafood. But he has bigger plans.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

King of Sudanese jazz Sharhabil Ahmed honoured with compilation 

By Lucy Ilado 8 July 2020

Sudanese jazz musician Sharhabil Ahmed has been honoured in a new compilation of his music and archives titled The King of Sudanese Jazz, which will be out on 10 July. Released by German record label Habibi Funk, the seven-track compilation features music spanning Ahmed’s career, alongside interviews and archival photographs.

Born in 1935 and launching into music in the 1960s, Ahmed set out to modernise Sudanese music with Western instrumentation and influences. The label, which is headed by Jannis Stürtz, describes Ahmed’s music as “a unique combination of surf rock, funk, Congolese music and East African harmonies.”.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

When John Lewis met Malcolm X in Kenya,  

By A. Peter Bailey 7/23/2020, 6 p.m.

In his book, “Malcolm X: The FBI File,” Dr. Clayborne Carson wrote about a first-time meeting between Brother Malcolm X and a young John Lewis while both were traveling in Africa in October 1964.

The goal of Mr. Lewis and his fellow civil rights warrior Donald Harris was to make African students more aware of what the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, was doing in the ongoing war against white supremacy in the United States.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

 

NEW BOOKS          ‫كتب جديدة

 

Conspicuous Consumption in Africa 

[الاستهلاك غير المخفي في أفريقيا] 

Author: (Editors): Deborah Posel, Ilana van Wyk

From early department stores in Cape Town to gendered histories of sartorial success in urban Togo, contestations over expense accounts at an apartheid state enterprise, elite wealth and political corruption in Angola and Zambia, the role of popular religion in the political intransigence of Jacob Zuma, funerals of big men in Cameroon, youth cultures of consumption in Niger and South Africa, queer consumption in Cape Town, middle-class food consumption in Durban and the consumption of luxury handcrafted beads, this collection of essays explores the ways in which conspicuous consumption is foregrounded in various African contexts and historical moments. In 1899, Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase ‘conspicuous consumption’ to describe status-seeking in the obscenely unequal world of late-nineteenth century America. Many of the aspects he described in The Theory of the Leisure Class are still evident in our world today. While Veblen’s crude denunciation of material extravagance finds echoes in media exposés about the lifestyles of the rich worldwide, it is particularly recognisable in reporting on Africa. Here, images of conspicuous consumption have long circulated in local and global media as indictments of political corruption and signs of moral depravity.

Publisher: Wits University Press, 2019.

 

Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion  

[الأدب الكوبي في عصر انتفاضة السود: مانزانو ، بلاسيدو ، ودين الأفرو-لاتيني] 

Author: Matthew Pettway 

Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era. Both nineteenth-century authors used Catholicism as a symbolic language for African-inspired spirituality. Likewise, Plácido and Manzano subverted the popular imagery of neoclassicism and Romanticism in order to envision black freedom in the tradition of the Haitian Revolution. Plácido and Manzano envisioned emancipation through the lens of African spirituality, a transformative moment in the history of Cuban letters. The portrayal of African-Atlantic religious ideas spurned the elite rationale that literature ought to be a barometer of highbrow cultural progress. Cuban debates about freedom and selfhood were never the exclusive domain of the white Creole elite.

Pettway’s emphasis on African-inspired spirituality as a source of knowledge and a means to sacred authority for black Cuban writers deepens our understanding of Manzano and Plácido not as mere imitators but as aesthetic and political pioneers. As Pettway suggests, black Latin American authors did not abandon their African religious heritage to assimilate wholesale to the Catholic Church. By recognizing the wisdom of African ancestors, they procured power in the struggle for black liberation.

Publisher: University Press of Mississippi, 2020.

 

Motorbike People: Power and Politics on Rwandan Streets  

[قوم الدراجة النارية: جدليات السلطة والسياسة في شوارع رواندا] 

Author: Will Rollason

Will’s book is an ethnography of taxi-moto drivers in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city. Not only is his book a rich account of the everyday lives of motorcylists’ (motari) everyday lives, Will’s research challenge anthropological understanding of the concept of power and its relationship to culture. He argues that the concept of power is too expansive, too all-encompassing to provide explanations of how “power” operates in a given culture. Will finds that there is dearth of understanding in the social sciences, leading to a conceptual inability to engage in questions of justice and make common cause with the oppressed.

Publisher: Lexington Books, 2020. 

 

Visionary Animal: Rock Art from Southern Africa  

[بصيرة الحيوانات: فن نحت الصخور في جنوب إفريقيا] 

Author: Renaud Ego 

Why were depictions of animals a crucial trigger for the birth of art? And why did animals dominate that art for so long? In order to answer these questions, Renaud Ego examined some of the world’s finest rock art, that of the San of southern Africa. For thousands of years, these nomadic hunter-gatherers assigned a fundamental role to the visualization of the animals who shared their lives. Some, such as the Cape eland, the largest of antelopes, were the object of a fascinated gaze, as though the graceful markings and shapes of their bodies were the key to secret knowledge safeguarded by the animals’ unsettling silence. The artists sought to steal the animals’ secret through an act of rendering visible a vitality that remained hidden beneath appearances. In this process, the San themselves became the visionary animal who, possessing the gift of making pictures, would acquire far-seeing powers. Thanks to the singular effectiveness of their visual art, they could make intellectual contact with the world in order better to think and, ultimately, to act. They gained access to the full dimension of their human condition through painting scenes that functioned like visual contracts with spiritual and ancestral powers.

Publisher: Wits University Press, 2019.

 

Le Sénégal Entre Illusions et Illuminations  

[السنغال بين الحقائق والأوهام] 

Author: Ngor Dieng 

This book examines the Senegalese society without a sense of complacency. The author discusses real issues that are turning this country away from economic development. The central themes of the study include education, politics, citizenship within a historical framework. From the highest authorities to ordinary citizens, this author describes the behaviors of a people who express a love for  change while in practice they are not acting abiding by the law of change.

Publisher: Harmattan Sénégal, 2020.

 

The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain, and the United Nations during the Congo Crisis, 1960-1964 

[ دبلوماسية التحرر من الاستعمار: أمريكا وبريطانيا والأمم المتحدة خلال أزمة الكونغو ، 1960-1964] 

Author: Alanna O’malley

The Diplomacy of Decolonisation examines the global contours of the Congo crisis, which fragmented the newly independent Republic of the Congo and rocked the international order in the early 1960s. It even led the United Nations, for the first time ever, to dispatch peacekeepers to protect the sovereignty of one of its member states against secessionists. O’Malley guides readers through this complicated story. She charts the sprawling geography of the crisis, pulling readers through foreign capitals, the United Nations, and the Congo itself. And she shows how the crisis transformed the Cold War and the politics of decolonization.

Publication: Manchester University Press, 2020.

 

My Life in Crime  

[حياتي في ارتكاب الجرائم]

Author: John Kiriamiti

The late 1690 and early 70s may be remembered as the years of the great bank and other armed robberies in Kenya. This is the true story of one of the participants in some of those robberies, John Kiriamiti. In raw and candid language, Kiriamiti tells the story of how he dropped out of secondary school when he was only fifteen years old, and for a time became a novice pickpocket, before graduating into crimes like car-breaking and ultimately into violent robbery. This spell-binding story takes the reader into the underworld of crime, and it depicts graphically the criminal’s struggle for survival against the forces of law.

John Kiriamiti was imprisoned on 6 January 1971, after being convicted on a charge of committing robbery at Naivasha on 4 November 1970. Kiriamiti left Naivasha Maximum Security Prison in August 1984, just five months after the publication of this novel and those following which were a sensation with Kenyan youth in the late 1980s and ’90s.
Publisher: East African Educational Publishers, Kenya, 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: July 14th, 2020

 

The Congressional Black Caucus Statement on the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
WASHINGTON, June 23, 2020

In recent months negotiations have stalled and there has been an escalation of tensions on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) that impacts, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan. The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) encourages the continued cooperation and peaceful negotiations of all stakeholders in the construction of the GERD. These negotiations should be based on mutual benefit, good faith, and the principles of international law. The multi-billion-dollar GERD project was announced in 2011, and will have a positive impact in the region by providing Africa’s biggest hydropower dam that will generate approximately 6,000 megawatts of electricity, thus allowing Ethiopia to export power to neighboring countries.

Read the rest of the story here

 

Conference: A turning point for Sudan?
Cameron Hudson , June 26, 2020

The world came to Berlin yesterday (at least virtually) as part of a United Nations, European Union, and German government-sponsored “Partners Forum for Sudan.” By all accounts, it was a triumph, and potentially a turning point, for the fragile transitional civilian government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, pulling in an announced $1.8 billion in assistance to Sudan. But the conference’s success was never going to be judged solely on financial pledges. Rather, it was the pledges of political capital that Hamdok needed to shore up his own position and keep at bay, for at least just a little longer, the still powerful and ascendant forces of Sudan’s military and Rapid Support Forces, who still wield executive authority.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

Senegal slave island, moved by George Floyd’s death, renames Europe Square
Aaron Ross, JULY 7, 2020

DAKAR (Reuters) – Senegal’s Goree Island, which for centuries served as a way station in the Transatlantic slave trade, has changed the name of its Europe Square in response to the death of George Floyd in the United States and the global movement it inspired.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

The Future of Work in Africa : Harnessing the Potential of Digital Technologies for All
By World Bank

The Future of Work in Africa focuses on the key themes of creating productive jobs and addressing the needs of those left behind. It highlights how global trends, especially the adoption of digital technologies, may change the nature of work in Sub-Saharan Africa by creating new opportunities and challenges. It argues that, contrary to global fears of worker displacement by new technologies, African countries can develop an inclusive future of work, with opportunities for lower-skilled workers. Harnessing these opportunities is, however, contingent on implementing policies and making productive investments in four main areas. These are enabling inclusive digital technologies; building human capital for a young, rapidly growing, and largely low-skilled labor force; increasing the productivity of informal workers and enterprises; and extending social protection coverage to mitigate the risks associated with disruptions to labor markets. This companion report to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2019 concludes with important policy questions that should guide future research, whose findings could lead to more inclusive growth for African nations.

Get the book here.

 

Drifting in West Africa: Chinese distant water fishing in Africa
Posted on Dec 6, 2019 by Admin

As I’m going to the Atlantic with the fishing boat, a moist and astringent sea breeze hit the tidal levee outside the pier, and then the slave island of Gorée was blown back. As a transit point for the black slave trade hundreds of years ago, slave islands transported a batch of black slaves from the African continent to Europe and North America, for them never to see this land again. I lowered my head against the fence on the deck, the dark green waves rolling over the boat, and the waves immediately ignited another wave; and Senegal, which entered the rainy season, was gradually buried in the sea floor.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

NEW BOOKS          ‫كتب جديدة

 

Exiles, Entrepreneurs, and Educators: African Americans in Ghana
[المنفيون ورجال الأعمال والمعلمون:  تاريخ الافارقة الأمريكيين في غانا]
Author: Steven Taylor

African Americans have a long history of emigration. In Exiles, Entrepreneurs, and Educators: African Americans in Ghana, Steven J. L. Taylor explores the second wave of African American exiles or repatriates to Ghana in post-1980s. Unlike the first wave of emigrants during the Kwame Nkrumah years (1957-1966), Taylor argues that the second wave is far more diverse and have largely been attracted to entrepreneurial opportunities. More importantly, this book examines the political engagement of African Americans in Ghana’s two-party political system..

Publisher: SUNY Press , 2020.

 

Development as Rebellion: A Biography of Julius Nyerere
[التنمية كما التمرد: السيرة الذاتية ليوليوس نيريري]
Author: Issa G. Shivji, Saida Yahya-Othman, Ng’wanza Kamata

This is the first comprehensive biography of Julius Nyerere, a national liberation leader, the first president of Tanzania and an outstanding statesman of Africa and the global south. Written by three prominent Tanzanians, the work spans over 1200 pages in three volumes. It delves into Nyerere’s early days among his chiefly family, and the traditions, friends and education that moulded his philosophy and political thought. All these provide the backdrop for his entrance into nationalist politics, the founding of the independence movement and his original experiment with socialism. The book does not shy away from a critical assessment of Nyerere’s life and times. It reveals the philosopher ruler’s dilemmas and tensions between freedom and necessity, determinism and voluntarism and, above all, between territorial nationalism and continental Pan-Africanism.

Publisher: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, Tanzania, 2020.

 

Bats of Southern and Central Africa: A biogeographic and taxonomic synthesis
[الخفافيش في جنوب ووسط أفريقيا: تشريح جغرافي وتصنيفي]
Author/s: Ara Monadjem, Fenton (Woody) Cotterill, M. Corrie Schoeman, Peter John Taylor

This revised edition of a book first published in 2010 supplements the original account of the 116 bat species then known to be found in Southern and Central Africa with an additional eight newly described species. The chapters on evolution, biogeography, ecology and echolocation have been updated, citing dozens of recently published papers. The book covers the latest systematic and taxonomic studies, ensuring that the names and relationships of bats in this new edition reflect current scientific knowledge. The species accounts provide descriptions, measurements and diagnostic characters as well as detailed information about the distribution, habitat, roosting habits, foraging ecology and reproduction of each species. The updated species distribution maps are based on 6 100 recorded localities. A special feature of the 2010 publication was the mode of identification of families, genera and species by way of character matrices rather than the more generally used dichotomous keys. Since then these matrices have been tested in the field and, where necessary, slightly altered for this edition. New photographs fill in gaps and updated sonograms aid with bat identification in acoustic surveys. The bibliography, which now contains more than 700 entries, will be an invaluable aid to students and scientists wishing to track down original research..

Publisher: Wits University Press, 2020.

 

 

The History of Kiziba and Its Kings: A Translation of Amakuru Ga Kiziba na Abamkama Bamu
[تاريخ كيزيبا وملوكها في شرق أفريقيا]
Author (Editor): Galasius B. Kamanzi, Peter R. Schmidt

This book is a major contribution to the indigenous historical literature of East Africa and Tanzania. Research by King Mutahangarwa (ruled 1903–1916) of Kiziba Kingdom in the early 20th century brought together oral tradition experts from both royal and non-royal clans, with their testimonies recorded by literate scribes, including F. X. Lwamgira. Four decades later the research was published in Kihaya as a 490 page volume that has remained obscure, despite its significance. This authoritative translation makes available for the first time an accessible account of northwestern Tanzanian and southwestern Ugandan history during the pre-colonial and early colonial periods.

Publisher: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, Tanzania, 2020.

 

Kaboom! Of Stereotypes and Superheroes – African Comics and Comics on Africa
[كابوم: قراءات عن  الصور النمطية والأبطال الخارقين – كاريكاتير أفريقيا وكاريكاتير عن أفريقيا]
Author (Editors): Corinne Lüthy, Reto Ulrich, Antonio Uribe.

We all know the colonial and stereotypical images of the African continent and of the people living there. Especially older comics such as The Adventures of Tintin or Mickey Mouse have taken up the image of the “untamed” continent with its “wild” inhabitants. Moreover, modern superhero comics mirror the western view of Africa. What about the African point of view, though? The true African comic? The editors of this catalogue present a wide range of African comics: superhero and underground comics as well as comics with propaganda content or an educational focus. Comics are more than just a manifestation of pop culture – during the course of the 20th century, they have developed into a socio-politically influential medium worldwide. Comics are now an object of historical research. They transport the history of their time and depict it. Comics are an integral part of our culture and, through the combination of images and words as an artistic expression, have a history of their own..

Publisher: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2020.

 

Jefferson’s Muslim Fugitives: The Lost Story of Enslaved Africans, their Arabic Letters, and an American President
[الهاربون المسلمون من الرئيس الأمريكي توماس جيفرسون: القصة المفقودة للأفارقة المسترقين ورسائلهم العربية مع رئيس أمريكي]
Author: Jeffrey Einboden

On October 3, 1807, Thomas Jefferson was contacted by an unknown traveler urgently pleading for a private “interview” with the President, promising to disclose “a matter of momentous importance”. By the next day, Jefferson held in his hands two astonishing manuscripts whose history has been lost for over two centuries. Authored by Muslims fleeing captivity in rural Kentucky, these documents delivered to the President in 1807 were penned by literate African slaves, and written entirely in Arabic. Jefferson’s Muslim Fugitives reveals the untold story of two escaped West Africans in the American heartland whose Arabic writings reached a sitting U.S. President, prompting him to intervene on their behalf. Recounting a quest for emancipation that crosses borders of race, region and religion, Jeffrey Einboden unearths Arabic manuscripts that circulated among Jefferson and his prominent peers, including a document from 1780s Georgia which Einboden identifies as the earliest surviving example of Muslim slave authorship in the newly-formed United States. Revealing Jefferson’s lifelong entanglements with slavery and Islam, Jefferson’s Muslim Fugitives tracks the ascent of Arabic slave writings to the highest halls of U.S. power, while questioning why such vital legacies from the American past have been entirely forgotten.

Publisher: Oxford 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: June 18th, 2020

 

American Spring: How Trump ‘Africanised’ the United States and Sparked an Anti-Racism Movement
Rasna Warah, June 6, 2020

For Africans watching the unfolding uprising in America, the scenes seem eerily familiar, but disconcerting. Suddenly the tables have turned: America is being described in the same way that many African countries are depicted by the Western media; the US is beginning to resemble a failed African state.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

Black Youth Can Now Take Free Trips To Africa
Janice GassamSenior Contributor Diversity & Inclusion

Being able to connect with one’s culture and background is a critical component in the development of an individual’s identity and self-esteem. For many Black Americans, they were not awarded that luxury. Being a descendant of American slaves has left an entire population of people far removed from their culture and history.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

Manufacturers pulling out of China should consider Africa to diversify their supply chain
Stewart Paterson, May 24, 2020

China’s manufacturing domination, with its share of global manufacturing at 28 per cent, has given it considerable economic power. Covid-19 has laid bare China’s willingness to use this power for geopolitical ends and brought home the very real risks of overreliance on any single source for critical supplies. There is a growing sense of urgency for supply chains to become more diversified, which begs the question: who can fill the void?

Read the rest of the story here.

 

Egypt’s attempt to ride on the shoulders of our government and the World Bank – Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. Thu, May 21, 2020.
Re: Request to Issue a CBC Resolution Against Egypt’s Letter To the UN Security Council About the Nile River.

I hope this letter finds you well and you are keeping safe. I see this as a historic document and find it important to bring to light that our government, the World Bank and the United Nations Security Council are being used as vehicles by the government of Egypt to impose a colonial-era treaty against 11 black African nations. I am writing about a deeply disturbing case, regarding a letter that the government of Egypt has submitted to the UN Security Council to pressure Ethiopia into signing a neo-colonial agreement that will make Egypt a hegemon over the Nile River. This is inexplicable because 85% of the waters of the Nile river originate from Ethiopia. The remaining 15% is contributed by 10 Sub Saharan Africa Nile basin nations. Egypt contributes 0% to the river flow. At the heart of the Ethio-Egypt problem is a colonial legacy that Egypt is trying to hang on to. Here is how the Brookings Institution presented Egypt’s intentions on April 28, 2015.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

NEW BOOKS          ‫كتب جديدة

 

Crimes of Capitalism in Kenya: Press Cuttings on Moi-KANU’s Reign of Terror in Kenya, 1980s-1990s
[جرائم الرأسمالية في كينيا: حصاد الصحافة في عهد موي الدكتاتوري الارهابي في كينيا 1980-1990]
Author (Editor): Shiraz Durrani, Kimani Waweru

This book  covers a shameful period of Kenya’s past under the government of President Daniel arap Moi (1978-2002) who ruled Kenya with an iron fist and conducted his reign of terror on those opposed to his dictatorship. He stifled violently people’s desire for change, equality and justice. He sought to drown the call of the independence movement for land and freedom in blood, torture and loot of national resources. The wounds inflicted on people cannot even begin to be healed unless the full extent of the problem is first brought out in the public domain. But the same comprador regime that instigated these horrors then went on to suppress information about its terrorist rule over unarmed workers, peasants, students, professionals and other progressive people and their underground movements such as the December Twelve Movement and Mwakenya.

Publisher: Vita Books, Kenya, 2020.

 

Decolonising the Academy: A Case for Convivial Scholarship
[نحو تحرير الأكاديميا من الاستعمار: حالة دراسية للمنح الدراسية باسم الصداقة]
Author:  Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Recurrent clamours by students and academics for universities in Africa and elsewhere, to imbibe and exude a spirit of inclusion are a continual reminder that universities can and need to be much more convivial. Processes of knowledge production that champion delusions of superiority and zero-sum games of absolute winners and losers are elitist and un-convivial. Academic disciplines tend to encourage introversion and emphasise exclusionary fundamentalisms of heartlands rather than highlight inclusionary overtures of borderlands. Frequenting crossroads and engaging in frontier conversations are frowned upon, if not prohibited. The scarcity of conviviality in universities, within and between disciplines, and among scholars results in highly biased knowledge processes. The production and consumption of knowledge are socially and politically mediated by webs of humanity, hierarchies of power, and instances of human agency. Given the resilience of colonial education throughout Africa and among Africans, endogenous traditions of knowledge are barely recognised and grossly underrepresented. What does conviviality in knowledge production entail? It involves conversing and collaborating across disciplines and organisations and integrating epistemologies informed by popular universes and ideas of reality. Convivial scholarship is predicated upon recognising and providing for incompleteness – in persons, disciplines, and traditions of knowing and knowledge making.

Publisher: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Namibia, 2020.

Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition
[تاملات ما بعد الاستعمارية: المواطنة والحرية في التقليد الفكري الكاريبي]
Author: Aaron Kamugisha

Against the lethargy and despair of the contemporary Anglophone Caribbean experience, Aaron Kamugisha gives a powerful argument for advancing Caribbean radical thought as an answer to the conundrums of the present. Beyond Coloniality is an extended meditation on Caribbean thought and freedom at the beginning of the 21st century and a profound rejection of the postindependence social and political organization of the Anglophone Caribbean and its contentment with neocolonial arrangements of power. Kamugisha provides a dazzling reading of two towering figures of the Caribbean intellectual tradition, C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, and their quest for human freedom beyond coloniality. Ultimately, he urges the Caribbean to recall and reconsider the radicalism of its most distinguished 20th-century thinkers in order to imagine a future beyond neocolonialism.

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2019.

 

Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health, HIV/AIDS and the Anglican Church in Southern Malawi
[الصحة الجنسية والانجابية  وفيروس نقص المناعة البشرية لدى المرأة و علاقتها بالكنيسة الانجليكانية في جنوب ملاوي]
Author:  Chimwemwe Kalalo

Although research shows that a great percentage of the Malawian population is quite knowledgeable about HIV/Aids transmission and prevention, the epidemic still continues to kill at a fast rate, and the government and other stakeholders including the faith communities are continuously meeting the challenges of HIV/Aids. Many women in Malawi have died, infected and affected by the HIV pandemic because of, among other factors, a negative approach to their own sexuality. Culture, economy, ethics and values do influence a woman’s sexual health, consequently affecting the whole family. In the mid 19th century when Christianity was introduced into Malawi, the missionaries took great concern at improving people’s health. One such mission was the Universities Mission to Central Africa as a pioneer of the Anglican Church in Malawi. Since then to the present, the Church has worked as a team with the government in the provision of medical services in Malawi and in its fight against HIV/Aids This book therefore looks at how adequately the Anglican Church in the Upper Shire Diocese responds to the issue of women’s sexual reproductive health in the context of HIV/Aids. Improving the status of women is not only a matter of theology but of ethics, health and survival. This challenges churches to change some of their attitudes and visions and to undertake new and creative initiatives in their pastoral ministry.

Publisher: Mzuni Press, Malawi, 2020.

 

Black Political Thought: From David Walker to the Present
[الفكر السياسي لدى السود: من ديفيد ووكر الى الوقت الحاضر]
Author:  Sherrow O Pinder.

In Black Political Thought: From David Walker to the Present, Sherrow O. Pinder has brought together the writings and discourses central to black political thought and African American politics, compiling a unique anthology of speeches and articles from over 150 years of African American history. Providing in-depth examinations and critical analyses of topics such as slavery, reconstruction, race and racism, black nationalism and black feminism – from a range of perspectives – students are equipped with a comprehensive and informative account of how these issues have fundamentally shaped and continue to shape black political thinking. Each of the six thematic parts is framed by an introduction written by black scholars working in the field, and a list of further readings. Individual chapters are then enhanced by end-of-chapter questions and author biographies. Written for the interdisciplinary field of black studies, and other social science and humanities disciplines, this textbook offers a unique resource for political scientists, sociologists, historians, feminists, and the general reader of black political thought.

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Dialogues in Climate and Environmental Research, Policy and Planning: A Special Focus on Zimbabwe
[حوارات في مجال البحوث المناخية والبيئية والسياسية والتخطيط مع التركيز على زيمبابوي]
Author: Innocent Chirisa

Climate change is the topic of the century. It is a subject of discussion by sceptics, heretics and those that have immersed in it as a serious debate for engagement. In this volume, the matter is localised to the plateau bordered by the great rivers of Limpopo to the south and Zambezi to the north. Evidence has it that climate change is inducing immense environmental change hitherto unknown including water stress and droughts, heat waves and flooding. The effects span across all sectors – agriculture, forestry, engineering, construction and other socio-economic dimensions of life. When an issue becomes such topical, it becomes political but also courts policy debate. The thrust of this volume is to explore into climate change as an environmental concern begging government attention and requiring prioritisation as a shaper of our future, whether we set to put mitigation or adaptation measures in place, or we choose to do nothing about it, as sceptics would perhaps suggest. The book explores climate change as a theoretical, policy, technical and practical debate as it affects sectors and rural and urban spatialities in Zimbabwe. Contributions explore such themes as regional research, gender, disaster preparedness, policymaking, resilience, governance, urban planning, risk management, environmental law, and the food-water-health-energy-climate change nexus.

Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 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: May 22nd, 2020

 

No-frills education Trust, slavery and the African School of Economics
MAY 23, 2020

AS LEONARD WANTCHEKON was having breakfast with his wife, Catherine Kossou, in 2007, she recalled how one friend could not trust anyone. Even as a child her friend would say: “That person is going to sell you,” or “He will make you disappear.”

The words struck a chord with Mr Wantchekon. Now a professor at Princeton University, he was born in Zagnanado in central Benin. Some of the music he listened to in his youth—such as that of Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou—had songs that warned against trusting those close to you.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

Africa Is Not Waiting to Be Saved From the Coronavirus If reporting doesn’t improve, the creativity and agency of swaths of humanity will be lost to history.
By Nanjala Nyabola, MAY 11, 2020

As Covid-19 races its way across Africa, there are two stories happening at once. The first is of governments using their armies and militarized police to beat, threaten, and shoot their way to public health. This is the story of the Kenyan police killing more people than the disease in the week after its first recorded case and of a pregnant woman dying on the street because the Ugandan police would not let her motorcycle taxi take her to a hospital after curfew. It is the story of governments closing their borders too late, diverting money to security instead of hospitals, and waiting for someone from somewhere else to save them.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

What African Nations Are Teaching the West About Fighting the Coronavirus
By Jina Moore May 15, 2020

In early March, Ingrid Gercama left her home in the Netherlands and flew to war-torn South Sudan. An applied-research anthropologist with a special interest in epidemics, she had spent time on the African continent during a public-health emergency before, remaining in Liberia, in 2014, during that country’s Ebola outbreak. When she landed at the frill-free airport in South Sudan’s capital of Juba, she was taken to a separate screening area, the shape and size of a shipping container, where her temperature was recorded by government health workers, along with her hotel address and her local telephone number. Gercama was asked a series of questions about her travel and health, she recalled, including whether she had recently come into contact with a bat. The screening area’s walls were covered with posters about covid-19 and its symptoms, and she was ushered into the country past a banner explaining the disease and offering a telephone number for a national coronavirus hotline, which she was to call if she developed a fever. She had to wash her hands once to get into the screening area, and again when she left.

Read the details in this link.

 

Three years on the go: A Reflection on the status of Civic Space in The Gambia after the removal of Jammeh
By Muhammed Lamin Saidykhan – Human Rights Defender and Movement Coordinator at Africans Rising, May 17, 2020

The Gambia has embraced a more open civic and political space for social justice organisations, movements and activists in the country compared to Yaya Jammeh’s time, although certain rights like those related to freedom of expression and rights to assembly remain limited because of lack of reforms, for instance, of the Public Order Act. The last three years under the transitional government have seen CSOs, and more specifically movements, coming together on a number of occasions to take actions aimed at holding the government accountable.

Read the details in this link.

 

NEW BOOKS          ‫كتب جديدة

 

The Integrated east African Financial System: Is It Feasible? The Policy Version
(النظام المالي المتكامل لشرق أفريقيا: هل هو ممكن؟

إصدار السياسة:)
Author:  Mugerwa Paul

As the EAC regional bloc is soon celebrating 20 years since its inception, is it any closer to being fully integrated? Is the regional financial integration still feasible? How can it work for every member State and every East African? How can other RECs learn from the EAC experience? What should be further considered to optimise the business sense in the entire financial integration drive? In an analysis of more than 70 financial and other institutions the author addresses the levels of financial inclusion, financial system development, and regional integration to assess the feasibility of a financially integrated EAC and provides benchmarks which inform policy. The author explores not only conventional finance and banking but also introduces one area that is usually not captured in most writings and books in this areas i.e. Islamic Finance. While Islamic Finance is slowly becoming a mainstream area of finance, there has been limited research, works and writing in the area.

Publisher: Asante Capital Hub, Uganda, 2020.

 

Kwaito Bodies: Remastering Space and Subjectivity in Post-Apartheid South Africa
(رقصات كويتو: نقاشات في إعادة تشكيل المكان والذات في جنوب إفريقيا ما بعد الفصل العنصري)
Author: Xavier Livermon

In Kwaito Bodies Xavier Livermon examines the cultural politics of the youthful black body in South Africa through the performance, representation, and consumption of kwaito, a style of electronic dance music that emerged following the end of apartheid. Drawing on fieldwork in Johannesburg’s nightclubs and analyses of musical performances and recordings, Livermon applies a black queer and black feminist studies framework to kwaito. He shows how kwaito culture operates as an alternative politics that challenges the dominant constructions of gender and sexuality. Artists such as Lebo Mathosa and Mandoza rescripted notions of acceptable femininity and masculinity, while groups like Boom Shaka enunciated an Afrodiasporic politics. In these ways, kwaito culture recontextualizes practices and notions of freedom within the social constraints that the legacies of colonialism, apartheid, and economic inequality place on young South Africans. At the same time, kwaito speaks to the ways in which these legacies reverberate between cosmopolitan Johannesburg and the diaspora. In foregrounding this dynamic, Livermon demonstrates that kwaito culture operates as a site for understanding the triumphs, challenges, and politics of post-apartheid South Africa.

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2020.

 

Tippu Tip: Ivory, Slavery and Discovery in the Scramble for Africa
(نصيحة تيبو: العاج والرق والاستكشافات حين التدافع على أفريقيا)
Author: Stuart Laing

With this new life setting Tippu Tip, the Arab trader in ivory and slaves, in his wider context, Stuart Laing gives us the seamy underside of the Scramble for Eastern Africa. It was as much an Arab, Indian, and indeed African, scramble, based on the island market of ‘Stinkibar’, as European. White explorers, soldiers, and officials were the foam on the top of this multicultural tide..

Publisher: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, 2019.

 

Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park
(قوم سفاري: التاريخ الاجتماعي لمتنزه كروجر الوطني)
Author: Jacob S. T. Dlamini

Safari Nation opens new lines of inquiry in the study of national parks in Africa and the rest of the world. The Kruger National Park is South Africa’s most iconic nature reserve, renowned for its rich flora and fauna. According to author Jacob Dlamini, there is another side to the park, a social history neglected by scholars and popular writers alike in which blacks (meaning Africans, Coloureds, and Indians) occupy center stage. Safari Nation details the ways in which black people devoted energies to conservation and to the park over the course of the twentieth century—engagement that transcends the stock (black) figure of the laborer and the poacher..

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2020.

Limpopo’s Legacy: Student Politics & Democracy in South Africa
(تراث ليمبوبو: مسائل في السياسة نحو الطلاب والديمقراطية في جنوب أفريقي)
Author:  Anne K. Heffernan, Anne Heffernan.

In 2015 and 2016 waves of student protest swept South African campuses under the banner of FeesMustFall. This book brings an historical perspective to the recent risings by analysing regional influences on the ideologies that have underpinned South African student politics from the 1960s to the present. The author considers the history of student organization in the Northern Transvaal (today Limpopo Province) and the ways in which students and youth in this relatively isolated area in the north of South Africa have influenced political change on a national scale, over generations. Organized around the stories of several key political actors, the book introduces the reader to critical spaces of political mobilization in the region. Among the most prominent is the University of the North at Turfloop, which played an integral role in building the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) in the late 1960s and propagating Black Consciousness in the 1970s. It became an ideological battleground where Black Consciousness advocates and ANC-affiliates competed for influence in the 1980s. Turfloop has remained politically significant in the post-apartheid era: it was here in 2007 that Julius Malema stumped for Jacob Zuma’s ascension to the presidency during the ANC’s pivotal party conference that resulted in the ousting of Thabo Mbeki.

Publisher: James Currey, 2019.

A Brutal State of Affairs: The Rise and Fall of Rhodesia
(حوادث وحشية: صعود وهبوط روديسيا)
Author: Henrik Ellert and Dennis Malcolm Anderson 

A Brutal State of Affairs analyses the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe and challenges Rhodesian mythology. The story of the BSAP, where white and black officers were forced into a situation not of their own making, is critically examined. The liberation war in Rhodesia might never have happened but for the ascendency of the Rhodesian Front, prevailing racist attitudes, and the rise of white nationalists who thought their cause just. Blinded by nationalist fervour and the reassuring words of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and army commanders, the Smith government disregarded the advice of its intelligence services to reach a settlement before it was too late. By 1979, the Rhodesians were staring into the abyss, and the war was drawing to a close. Salisbury was virtually encircled, and guerrilla numbers continued to grow. A Brutal State of Affairs examines the Rhodesian legacy, the remarkable parallels of history, and suggests that Smith’s Rhodesian template for rule has, in many instances, been assiduously applied by Mugabe and his successors.

Publisher: Weaver Press, Zimbabwe, 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: May 5^th, 2020

 

Can Trump resolve the Egypt-Ethiopia Nile dam dispute?
By Mehari Taddele Maru 24 Apr 2020

In early February, officials from Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan announced in a joint statement that they had cleared the way for the filling and operation of a disputed mega-dam being built by the Ethiopian government on the Nile River. The statement, which came on the back of months of US-led negotiations, caused many to believe the three northeast African countries may finally reach a deal on the multi-billion-dollar project.

Read the rest of the story here.

 

In Old Cairo, a Subdued Ramadan Looms as Virus Shutters the City
By Declan Walsh, 20 April 2020

The holiest month in the Islamic calendar promises this year to be the strangest ever for the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims. In Cairo, known as the city of a thousand minarets, the coronavirus has cast a long shadow.

Read the details in this link.

 

How Angolan Elites Built a Private Banking Network to Move Their Riches Into the European Union
By Khadija Sharife and Mark Anderson 13 April 2020

A group of Angolan government officials and senior bank executives funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars out of the country with little oversight, creating their own private banking network through which they sent the money to Portugal and elsewhere in the European Union, an OCCRP investigation has found. The network sent at least $324 million through its banks, with most of the funds originating in Angola. In addition, $257 million was found to be held by European companies closely affiliated with these officials.

Read the details in this link.

 

The pandemic can be a catalyst for decolonisation in Africa
By David Mwambari 15 Apr 2020

The Western “brand” is suffering from what many see as a “slow and haphazard” response by Western governments to the COVID-19 outbreak. As the epicentre of the pandemic moved from China to Europe and now to the US, the weakness of Western neoliberal and neo-colonial systems has come to the fore.

Read the details in this link.

 

 

NEW BOOKS          ‫كتب جديدة

 

The Integrated East African Financial System: Is It Feasible? The Policy Version
(النظام المالي المتكامل لشرق أفريقيا: هل يمكن تنفيذه؟ مراجعة سياسة)
Author: Mugerwa Paul

As the EAC regional bloc is soon celebrating 20 years since its inception, is it any closer to being fully integrated? Is the regional financial integration still feasible? How can it work for every member State and every East African? How can other RECs learn from the EAC experience? What should be further considered to optimise the business sense in the entire financial integration drive? In an analysis of more than 70 financial and other institutions the author addresses the levels of financial inclusion, financial system development, and regional integration to assess the feasibility of a financially integrated EAC and provides benchmarks which inform policy. The author explores not only conventional finance and banking but also introduces one area that is usually not captured in most writings and books in this areas i.e. Islamic Finance. While Islamic Finance is slowly becoming a mainstream area of finance, there has been limited research, works and writing in the area.

Publisher: Asante Capital Hub, Uganda, 2020.

 

Music, Health, and Power: Singing the Unsayable in The Gambia
(الموسيقى والصحة والسلطة: التغني بالمحظور في غامبيا)
Author: Bonnie B. McConnell

Music, Health, and Power offers an original, on-the-ground analysis of the role that music plays in promoting healthy communities. The book brings the reader inside the world of kanyeleng fertility societies and HIV/AIDS support groups, where women use music to leverage stigma and marginality into new forms of power. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over a period of 13 years (2006–2019), the author articulates a strengths-based framework for research on music and health that pushes beyond deficit narratives to emphasize the creativity and resilience of Gambian performers in responding to health disparities. Examples from Ebola prevention programs, the former President’s AIDS “cure,” and a legendary underwear theft demonstrate the high stakes of women’s performances as they are caught up in broader contestations over political and medical authority. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of ethnomusicology, medical anthropology, and African studies. The accompanying audio examples provide access to the women’s performances discussed in the text.

Publisher: Routledge, 2020.

 

Boxing Is No Cakewalk! Azumah ‘Ring Professor’ Nelson in the Social History of Ghanaian Boxing
(الملاكمة ليست نزهة!  دور أزوما نيلسون (أستاذ الحلبة) في التاريخ الاجتماعي للملاكمة الغانية)
Author: De-Valera NYM Botchway

Boxing is no cakewalk! Azumah ‘Ring Professor’ Nelson in the Social History of Ghanaian Boxing explores the social history of boxing in Ghana and its interesting nexus with the biography of Azumah Nelson, unquestionably Ghana’s most celebrated boxer. The book posits that sports constitute more than mere games that people play. They are endowed with enormous political, cultural, economic and social power that can influence people’s lives in various ways. Boxing is no cakewalk! interrogates the social meaning and impact of boxing within the colonial and postcolonial milieux of popular culture in Ghana. Consequently, it reconsiders the prevailing conception of boxing as adversative to ‘enlightened’ human culture by arguing that it is a positive formulator of individual and national identities. The historicising of sports and the lives of sportspersons in Ghana provides an eloquent backdrop for an understanding of the past social dynamics and their effect in the present. The book’s analytical narrative offers an intellectual contribution to the promising areas of social and cultural history in Ghana’s historiography and the scholarly discourse on identity formation and social empowerment through the popular culture of sports.

Publisher: NISC (Pty) Ltd, South Africa, 2020.

 

Understanding the Higher Education Market in Africa
(فهم سوق التعليم العالي في أفريقيا)
Author (Editor): Emmanuel Mogaji, Felix Maringe and Robert Ebo Hinson

This book offers theoretical and practical insights into the marketing of higher education in Africa. It explores the key players, challenges and policies affecting higher education across the continent; their marketing strategies and the students’ selection process. While acknowledging the vast size of the continent, this book aims to provide an understanding of the dynamics of higher education in Africa. This book recognises the private and government involvement in higher education provision and students and staff as stakeholders in the marketisation process. Strategic efforts are directed by universities to attract prospective students. This book further addresses issues such as the responses of higher education sectors to the notion of markets and marketing; consumerism and competition in higher education in Africa; conceptions of the commodification of higher education in Africa; and the dominance of Western epistemologies and their influence in transforming higher education sectors. Students as consumers in increasingly marketised higher education sectors in Africa are also discussed. Though primarily for marketing students and academic researchers, the book’s feature of blended theoretical and practical knowledge means that it will also be of interest to marketing practitioners and university managers.

Publisher: Routledge, 2020.

 

Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896
(الأفارقة المحررون وإلغاء تجارة الرقيق ، 1807-1896)
Author: /(Editors): Richard Anderson and Henry B. Lovejoy

In 1807, Britain and the United States passed legislation limiting and ultimately prohibiting the transoceanic slave trade. As world powers negotiated anti-slave-trade treaties thereafter, British, Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian, French, and US authorities seized ships suspected of illegal slave trading, raided slave barracoons, and detained newly landed slaves. The judicial processes in a network of the world’s first international courts of humanitarian justice not only resulted in the “liberation” of nearly two hundred thousand people but also generated an extensive archive of documents. Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896 makes use of these records to illuminate the fates of former slaves, many of whom were released from bondage only to be conscripted into extended periods of indentured servitude. Essays in this collection explore a range of topics related to those often referred to as “Liberated Africans”-a designation that, the authors show, should be met with skepticism. Contributors share an emphasis on the human consequences for Africans of the abolitionist legislation. The collection is deeply comparative, looking at conditions in British colonies such as Sierra Leone, the Gambia, and the Cape Colony as well as slave-plantation economies such as Brazil, Cuba, and Mauritius.

Publisher: University of Rochester Press, 2020.

 

Tacky’s Revolt The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
(ثورة تاكي: قصة عن التجارة الأطلسية للرقيق)
Author: Vincent Brown

In the second half of the eighteenth century, as European imperial conflicts extended the domain of capitalist agriculture, warring African factions fed their captives to the transatlantic slave trade while masters struggled continuously to keep their restive slaves under the yoke. In this contentious atmosphere, a movement of enslaved West Africans in Jamaica (then called Coromantees) organized to throw off that yoke by violence. Their uprising—which became known as Tacky’s Revolt—featured a style of fighting increasingly familiar today: scattered militias opposing great powers, with fighters hard to distinguish from noncombatants. It was also part of a more extended borderless conflict that spread from Africa to the Americas and across the island. Even after it was put down, the insurgency rumbled throughout the British Empire at a time when slavery seemed the dependable bedrock of its dominion. That certitude would never be the same, nor would the views of black lives, which came to inspire both more fear and more sympathy than before. Tracing the roots, routes, and reverberations of this event across disparate parts of the Atlantic world, Vincent Brown offers us a superb geopolitical thriller. The book expands our understanding of the relationship between European, African, and American history, as it speaks to our understanding of wars of terror today.

Publisher: Harvard University Press 2020.

 

To Be Or Not To Be: Sudan at Crossroads A Pan-African Perspective
(تكون أو لا تكون: السودان في مفترق الطرق، وجهة نظر أفريقي قاري)
Author: M. Jalāl Hāshim

To Be or Not to Be is an analysis of linguistic, cultural, political, economic and social factors, which explain the intricate root causes of conflicts which have ravished Sudan. It stands in stark contrast to the dominant simplification and distortions which have come to typify presentations of the region. Central to the book is an unapologetic explanation of Arabization; which often is portrayed as individual choices of religious loyalty, but, in fact, masks an intentional power-system which viciously corrupts Afrikan identities. By highlighting the detrimental complexities of manipulation, geopolitics, identity confusion and cultural imperialism, Hashim has not only written an authoritative book about Sudan, but also presented a comprehensive case study that all of Afrika must learn from. Rarely are we presented with such a vigourous inside-view to an area of Afrika which once was held in the highest civilizational esteem, but has been reduced to an ideological field of Arab-led terror, massacres and disintegration.

Publisher: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, Tanzania, 2019.

——– ———— ———–
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: April 1, 2020

A Place for Indigenous Languages in African Fiction
By Adipo Sidang, March 7th 2020
African mother tongue languages are increasingly being abandoned, with sub-Saharan. Africa being one of the regions with the most endangered languages. But the solution will not come from simply promulgating policy. The “African society” must hold conversations with itself and overhaul its value system, because language is culture, and culture is empty without its set of values and truths.
Read the details in this link here.

Introducing ‘African Arguments- Debating Ideas’
By Alex Dewaal on MARCH 16, 2020
Alex de Waal (Director at the World Peace Foundation and editor at African Arguments) introduces the ethos of Debating Ideas – the latest addition to the African Arguments website. Welcome to African Arguments—Debating Ideas. Our vision to publish writing that is engaged – and when needed, enraged – from the African continent, and by those in intellectual and moral solidarity with Africans. We aim to provide a forum for debate and controversy. We will pick up on the issues of the day; we will use the titles in the African Arguments book series as the basis for discussion; and we will seek to set an agenda for the debates of tomorrow.
Read the rest of the story here.

The desperate final days of a domestic worker in Lebanon
By Timour Azhari 24 Mar 2020
Beirut, Lebanon – On the morning of March 13, Faustina Tay sent a final desperate message to an activist group she had contacted about the abuse she was suffering at the hands of her Lebanese employers. “God please help me,” the 23-year-old Ghanaian domestic worker wrote. About 18 hours later, she was found dead.
Read the details in this link.

Colonial-era treaties are to blame for the unresolved dispute over Ethiopia’s dam
The Conversation: March 25, 2020
Disputes over the filling and operation of Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam have, once again, threatened security in North-East Africa. The dam – a huge project on one of the River Nile’s main tributaries, the Blue Nile in Ethiopia – is designed to generate 6,000 megawatts of electricity. Its reservoir can hold more than 70 billion cubic metres of water. That’s nearly equal to half of the Nile’s annual flow. Filling the immense reservoir will diminish the flow of the Nile.
Read the details in this link.

Why black Americans are moving to Africa
By Princess Jones, March 28, 2020
Monique John wasn’t sure what to expect when she stepped off the plane in her new home: the West African nation of Liberia. “It was very rundown looking,” the Brooklyn-born 28-year-old recalled of her first glimpse of the capital, Monrovia, nearly three years ago. “But my feeling as I was walking along the city’s main streets was a sense of excitement . . . it felt almost like an out-of-body experience to finally be in Africa.” John is one of a number of African Americans moving to the Motherland, some inspired by the recent “Year of Return” movement initiated by Ghana, 400 years after the first Africans were brought in chains to Jamestown, Va. Last year, Ghana gave citizenship to 126 people of African descent, many of them Americans.
Read the details in this link.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Shaping the African Savannah: From Capitalist Frontier to Arid Eden in Namibia
[صناعة السافانا الأفريقية: من تخومات الرأسمالية إلى أقطام عدن في ناميبيا]
Author: Michael Bollig

The southern African savannah landscape has been framed as an ‘Arid Eden’ in recent literature, as one of Africa’s most sought after exotic tourism destinations by twenty-first century travellers, as a ‘last frontier’ by early twentieth-century travellers and as an ancient ancestral land by Namibia’s Herero communities. In this 150-year history of the region, Michael Bollig looks at how this ‘Arid Eden’ came into being, how this ‘last frontier’ was construed, and how local pastoralists relate to the landscape. Putting the intricate and changing relations between humans, arid savannah grasslands and its co-evolving animal inhabitants at the centre of his analysis, this history of material relations, of power struggles between commercial hunters and wildlife, between wealthy cattle patrons and foraging clients, between established homesteads and recent migrants, conservationists and pastoralists. Finally, Bollig highlights how futures are being aspired to and planned for between the increasing challenges of climate change, global demands for cheap ores and quests for biodiversity conservation.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

The Challenge of African Potentials: Conviviality, Informality and Futurity
[تحديات إفريقيا: العيش المشترك ، المجالات غير الرسمية والمسقبل]
Author (Editor): Yaw Ofosu-Kusi, Motoji Matsuda

This collection of articles is based on presentations and discussions at the 2018 African Potentials Forum, held in Accra, Ghana. This forum was a part of the African Potentials Project, which aims to clarify the latent problem-solving abilities, ways of thinking, and institutions that have been created, accumulated, unified, and deployed in the everyday experiences of Africans. The notion of Africa’s latent power/potential is not related to romanticisation of the traditional knowledge of African society and its institutions as fixed, essentialised ‘magic wands’. This notion also raises objections against political dogmas that seek to smoke out and eliminate thought and values originating in Western modernity. The keyword of the Accra Forum was futurity. Africa’s future is laden with possibilities, latent power, and potential. It is bright and hopeful but, simultaneously, bleak and thought-provoking. For nascent democracies and economically challenged communities, the value of this potential lies not in its static qualities but in how these qualities can be harnessed and translated into beneficial practical outcomes. As a concept, ‘potential’ connotes a time to come; a futurity that is full of known and unknown possibilities, challenges, and opportunities.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2020.

Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention
[قطاع موبيوس ملك الإمبراطورية: أصداء التاريخ في أزمتي الهجرة و الاعتقال في إيطاليا]
Author: Stephanie Malia Hom

Italy’s current crisis of Mediterranean migration and detention has its roots in early twentieth century imperial ambitions. Stephanie Malia Hom‘s new book Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention investigates how mobile populations were perceived to be major threats to Italian colonization, and how the state’s historical mechanisms of control have resurfaced, with greater force, in today’s refugee crisis. What is at stake in Empire’s Mobius Strip is a deeper understanding of the forces driving those who move by choice and those who are moved. Hom focuses on Libya, considered Italy’s most valuable colony, both politically and economically. Often perceived as the least of the great powers, Italian imperialism has been framed as something of “colonialism lite.” But Italian colonizers carried out genocide between 1929–33, targeting nomadic Bedouin and marching almost 100,000 of them across the desert, incarcerating them in camps where more than half who entered died, simply because the Italians considered their way of life suspect. There are uncanny echoes with the situation of the Roma and migrants today. Hom explores three sites, in novella-like essays, where Italy’s colonial past touches down in the present: the island, the camp, and the village.
Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2019.

Hollywood and Africa: Recycling the ‘Dark Continent’ Myth, 1908-2020
[هوليوود وأفريقيا: إعادة صناعة أسطورة “القارة المظلمة” ، 1908-2020]
Author: Okaka Opio Dokotum

This book is a study of over a century of stereotypical Hollywood film productions about Africa. It argues that the myth of the Dark Continent continues to influence Western cultural productions about Africa as a cognitive-based system of knowledge, especially in history, literature and film. Hollywood and Africa identifies the ‘colonial mastertext’ of the Dark Continent mythos by providing a historiographic genealogy and context for the term’s development and consolidation. An array of literary and paraliterary film adaptation theories are employed to analyse the deep genetic strands of Hollywood–Africa film adaptations. The mutations of the Dark Continent mythos across time and space are then tracked through the classical, neoclassical and new wave Hollywood–Africa phases in order to illustrate how Hollywood productions about Africa recycle, revise, reframe, reinforce, transpose, interrogate — and even critique — these tropes of Darkest Africa while sustaining the colonial mastertext and rising cyberactivism against Hollywood’s whitewashing of African history.
Publisher: NISC (Pty) Ltd, South Africa, 2020.

Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performance of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain
[في رفقة مسرحية السود: الحركة الابداعية في المهجر الافريقي في باكورة اسبانيا الحديثة]
Author: Nicholas R. Jones
This book analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, when performing habla de negros—how Africanized Castilian was commonly referred to—was in fashion. Jones problematizes long-held beliefs among literary critics and linguists that habla de negros as represented in dominant Spanish literature was exclusively racist stereotypes, and instead seeks to theorize habla de negros as a radical performance that “allow[s] black expression and black sensibilities to emerge whether there are black bodies present or not.” This elegant book demonstrates that black voices, speakers, bodies, subjects, were visible, present, and constitutive parts of the early modern Castilian soundscape and society and succeeds in drawing modern readers’ attention to their importance. By centering black historical and literary figures, Jones shows how black populations of early modern Spain participated in the formation of Black experience beyond Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States.
Publisher: Penn State University Press, 2019.

Crossroads of Dreams: A Poetry Anthology
[مفترق طرق الأحلام: مختارات شعرية]
Auther (s):Franklin Agogho, Jude A. Fonchenalla, MD Mbutoh

Crossroads of Dreams is a steamy potpourri of poetry by Franklin Agogho, Jude A. Fonchenalla and M.D. Mbutoh which redefine representations of African youth through the prisms of politics, emigration and the enduring threat of underdevelopment. How would one explain the persistence of poverty and oppression in Africa amidst the superabundance of natural and human resources? In their search for answers, the poets not only chastise but also to point to a verdant and promising future – free of corruption, greed, violence and neo-colonialism. Other themes covered in the anthology include gender, identity and family ties. Animated by three distinctive styles, the eighty-eight poems in this volume will surely enrage, provoke laughter, sorrow, disgust but also hope, courage and visions of a promising Africa in all its splendour and tribulations.
Publisher: Spears Media Press, Cameroon, 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: March 5th, 2020

US ambassador blasts Trump, Mnuchin on Ethiopia-Egypt dispute
Teshome Borago
March 1, 2020
Former United States Ambassador David H. Shinn accused the Trump administration of “putting its thumb on the scale in favor of Egypt,” in the dispute with Ethiopia and Sudan over a new hydro-dam.
The latest crisis began after the U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin sent a letter warning Ethiopia not to operate its hydropower dam, using inflammatory rhetoric similar to the former Egyptian government of Morsi that threatened military action.
You can read the rest of the story here.

The battle of Adwa: an Ethiopian victory that ran against the current of colonialism February 29, 2020 2.28am EST
On the first day of March 124 years ago, traditional warriors, farmers and pastoralists as well as women defeated a well-armed Italian army in the northern town of Adwa in Ethiopia. The outcome of this battle ensured Ethiopia’s independence, making it the only African country never to be colonised. Adwa turned Ethiopia into a symbol of freedom for black people globally. It also led to a change of government in Italy.
Read the details of the scholarship in this link

Indigenous languages matter – but all is not lost when they change or even disappear
January 27, 2020 1.53pm EST
UNESCO’s International Year of Indigenous Languages recently came to an end after a year of celebration of linguistic diversity. And with a “decade of Indigenous languages” now under consideration, it’s a good time to review what these celebrations mean.
Read the rest of the story in this link.

Meet the Iowa Architect Documenting Every Slave House Still Standing
BY SABRINA IMBLER FEBRUARY 26, 2020

Jobie Hill has visited 700 former residences. Many have been abandoned. Some have become storage space. Others are B&Bs.
THE CURRENT RESIDENTS OF THE historic Mount Zion home in Warren County, Virginia, were rifling through the attic of their garage when they found a yellowed fragment of paper. It was the corner of a larger document, soiled by mold, water, and time. But the snaking cursive writing on it was still legible. It was the bill of sale for an enslaved girl named Chalotte (more likely Charlotte, with the letter “r” long faded away).
Read the details in this link.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

White Ferocity: From Non-Whites to Non-Aryans Concealed Genocides from 1492 to Date [همجية العلوج ضد غيرهم: خفايا الإبادة الجماعية من 1492 إلى اليوم]
Author: Rosa Amelia Plumelle-Uribe

Rosa Amelia Plumelle-Uribe’s book La Férocité blanche: Des non-blancs aux non-aryens, génocides occultés de 1492 à nos jours was first published in March 2001. A German translation was published soon after. CODESRIA is honoured to release the first publication of the book in English, which includes a detailed preface and recommendation from the late Samir Amin, CODESRIA’s first Executive Secretary. This book deserves attention today, perhaps more than two decades ago when it was first published. We are witnessing a reincarnation in the shameless celebration of ‘empire’ in all its manifestations and the resurgence of academics regurgitating already discredited notions of a “balance sheet” approach to imperialism; the reawakening of fascist tendencies and the minimization of fascism to one “exceptional” case of Nazi German and limited to the time of Hitler. There is revisionism in the air and a reading of Rosa Amelia Plumelle-Uribe’s book draws us to the reality of how perverse Nazism and Fascism have been as part of a Western project to dominate the rest of the world. The book reminds us that these tendencies have a long history and the task ahead is how to handle the question of memory and how the production of knowledge will help set records straight and frame the right questions for a proper understanding of the biggest calamities ever to confront humanity. The publication of the original edition in French was momentous; this English edition coming from an African knowledge producing institution is more momentous and relevant. The 135th anniversary of the Berlin conference that prefaced Africa’s colonial conquest was marked in November 2019. On the other hand, the year 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the ending of the Second World War, and the ending of the Holocaust. The silences which mark the genocide resulting from colonial conquest and the ‘ noisy’ proclamations of Auschwitz and the holocaust as an exceptional case of genocide in human history, are the contradictions that Rosa Amelia examines in this publication.
Publisher: Dakar: CODESRIA, 2020.

Africa and the World: Navigating Shifting Geopolitics
[أفريقيا والعالم: تأملات في المتغيرات الجيوبوليتيكية]
Author (editor): Francis A. Kornegay

Africa and the World: Navigating Shifting Geopolitics is one of the first books to analyse the global geopolitical landscape from an African perspective, with a view to the opportunities and challenges facing the African continent. Authors in this edited volume argue for the need to re-imagine Africa’s role in the world. As a cradle of humanity, a historical fountain of profound scientific knowledge, an object of colonial conquest and, today, a collective of countries seeking to pool their sovereignties in order to improve the human condition, Africa has a unique opportunity to advance its own interests. Authors reflect on all these issues; they outline how developments in the global political economy impact on the continent and, inversely, how Africa can develop a strategic perspective that takes into account the dynamics playing out in a fraught global terrain.
Publisher: Mapungubwe Institute (MISTRA), South Africa, 2020.

Seeking Urban Transformation: Alternative Urban Futures in Zimbabwe
[نحو التغيير الحضري: قراءات في مستقبل البديل الحضري في زمبابوي]
Author: Davison Muchadenyika

Seeking Urban Transformation. Alternative Urban Futures in Zimbabwe tells the stories of ordinary people’s struggles to remake urban centres. It interrogates and highlights the principle conditions in which urban transformation takes place. The main catalysts of the transformation are social movements and planning institutions. Social movements pool resources and skills, acquire land, install infrastructure and build houses. Planning institutions change policies, regulations and traditions to embrace and support a new form of urban development driven by grassroots movements. Besides providing a comprehensive analysis of planning and housing in Zimbabwe, there is a specific focus on three urban centres of Harare, Chitungwiza and Epworth. In metropolitan Harare, the books examines new housing and infrastructure series to the predominantly urban poor population; vital roles played by the urban poor in urban development and the adoption by planning institutions of grassroots-centered, urban-planning approaches.
Publisher: Weaver Press, Zimbabwe, 2020.

Age of Concrete: Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique
[عصر الخرسانة: البيوت وأشكال الطموحات السكنية في عاصمة موزمبيق]
Author: David Morton

Age of Concrete is a history of the making of houses and homes in the subúrbios of Maputo (Lourenço Marques), Mozambique, from the late 1940s to the present. Often dismissed as undifferentiated, ahistorical “slums,” these neighborhoods are in fact an open-air archive that reveals some of people’s highest aspirations. At first people built in reeds. Then they built in wood and zinc panels. And finally, even when it was illegal, they risked building in concrete block, making permanent homes in a place where their presence was often excruciatingly precarious. Unlike many histories of the built environment in African cities, Age of Concrete focuses on ordinary homebuilders and dwellers. David Morton thus models a different way of thinking about urban politics during the era of decolonization, when one of the central dramas was the construction of the urban stage itself. It shaped how people related not only to each other but also to the colonial state and later to the independent state as it stumbled into being. Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2019.

African Personhood and Applied Ethics
[انسانية الأفارقة وعلم الأخلاق التطبيقي]
Author: Motsamai Molefe

Recently, the salient idea of personhood in the tradition of African philosophy has been objected to on various grounds. Two such objections stand out – the book deals with a lot more. The first criticism is that the idea of personhood is patriarchal insofar as it elevates the status of men and marginalises women in society. The second criticism observes that the idea of personhood is characterised by speciesism. The essence of these concerns is that personhood fails to embody a robust moral-political view. African Personhood and Applied Ethics offers a philosophical explication of the ethics of personhood to give reasons why we should take it seriously as an African moral perspective that can contribute to global moral-political issues. The book points to the two facets that constitute the ethics of personhood – an account of (1) moral perfection and (2) dignity. It then draws on the under-explored view of dignity qua the capacity for sympathy inherent in the moral idea of personhood to offer a unified account of selected themes in applied ethics, specifically women, animal and development.
Publisher: NISC (Pty) Ltd, South Africa, 2020.

Are You Entertained? Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century
[هل تسليت؟ الثقافة الشعبية لدى السود في القرن الحادي والعشرين]
Author: Simone C. Drake, Dwan K. Henderson

The advent of the internet and the availability of social media and digital downloads have expanded the creation, distribution, and consumption of Black cultural production as never before. At the same time, a new generation of Black public intellectuals who speak to the relationship between race, politics, and popular culture has come into national prominence. The contributors to Are You Entertained? address these trends to consider what culture and blackness mean in the twenty-first century’s digital consumer economy. In this collection of essays, interviews, visual art, and an artist statement the contributors examine a range of topics and issues, from music, white consumerism, cartoons, and the rise of Black Twitter to the NBA’s dress code, dance, and Moonlight.
Publisher: Duke 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: February 21, 2020

Google PhD Fellowship Program Google
PhD Fellowships directly support graduate students as they pursue their PhD, as well as connect them to a Google Research Mentor. Nurturing and maintaining strong relations with the academic community is a top priority at Google. The Google PhD Fellowship Program was created to recognize outstanding graduate students doing exceptional and innovative research in areas relevant to computer science and related fields. Fellowships support promising PhD candidates of all backgrounds who seek to influence the future of technology. Google’s mission is to foster inclusive research communities and encourages people of diverse backgrounds to apply. We currently offer Fellowships in Africa, Australia and New Zealand, East Asia, Europe, India, the United States and Canada.
Read the details of the fellowship in this link

African Guest Researchers’ Scholarship Programme
An opportunity for postdoctoral researchers in Africa to pursue their own research projects, thereby indirectly strenghtening the academic milieux in African countries. The scholarship offers access to the Institute’s library and other resources that provide for a stimulating research environment.
Read the details of the scholarship in this link

Oil giant BP accused of racism in Mauritania after overlooking black students
By Amandla Thomas-Johnson, 18 February 2020

At least nine out of ten BP-sponsored scholarships went to Arab-Berber students in the majority black nation.
BP has been accused of contributing to “state racism” in Mauritania after awarding at least nine out of ten study abroad scholarships to students drawn from the country’s minority Arab-Berber group, with none appearing to go to the majority black population. The London-based oil giant, which has stepped up its investments in the West African country in recent years, also came under fire for the few women awarded the scholarship. However, it insists the students were chosen on merit.
Read the rest of the story in this ME link.

The Last Poets: the hip-hop forefathers who gave black America its voice
By Rebecca Bengal Fri 18 May 2018
It is half a century since the Last Poets stood in Harlem, uttered their first words in public, and created the blueprint for hip-hop. At an intimate open house session, they explain why their revolutionary words are still needed. You can trace the birth of hip-hop to the summer of 1973 when Kool Herc DJ’d the first extended breakbeat, much to the thrill of the dancers at a South Bronx block party. You can trace its conception, however, to five years earlier – 19 May 1968, 50 years ago this weekend – when the founding members of the Last Poets stood together in Mount Morris park – now Marcus Garvey park – in Harlem and uttered their first poems in public. They commemorated what would have been the 43rd birthday of Malcolm X, who had been slain three years earlier. Not two months had passed since the assassination of Martin Luther King. “Growing up, I was scheduled to be a nice little coloured guy. I was liked by everybody,” says the Last Poets’ Abiodun Oyewole. He was 18 and in college when he heard the news. “But when they killed Dr King, all bets were off.”
Read the details in this link.

The Georgetown Student Who Became Justice Minister of Sudan He was preparing for life as an academic. A new government in his homeland had bigger plans for him.
By Rebecca Hamilton FEBRUARY 5, 2020

Late last summer, Nasredeen Abdulbari, 41, was in the Georgetown University Library, editing the fifth chapter of his dissertation on constitutional law and human rights, when he received a text message from a Sudanese civil society leader asking him to call urgently. Seismic changes were underway in Abdulbari’s home country of Sudan, where protesters had succeeded in ousting President Omar Hassan al-Bashir after 30 years of dictatorship. Abdulbari closed his laptop and stepped outside to make the call. “Civil society is nominating you to be the minister of justice,” the man on the other end of the line told him.
Read the details in this link.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Financing Africa
[تدبير الموارد المالية في أفريقيا]
Author: Attiya Waris

Financing Africa’s development requires ingenuity, discipline, and an understanding of fiscal systems – the entirety of government revenues and expenditures, including taxation and debt. This book makes fascinating what might seem at first glance complex. It describes diverse approaches that have been adjusted to local circumstances across the continent and reflects on the push to unite and harmonise toward African union. Africa is rich, yet resources are lost through loopholes in fiscal systems. Financial resources come from the people, are not unlimited, and do not come easily or without cost. Africans must therefore cherish these resources and use them in nation-building and national and regional development. Efficient, effective, transparent and accountable fiscal systems that are fair and just will go a long way toward financing Africa’s development. Using examples from all of Africa’s 54 countries, the book makes fiscal matters real and understandable for people, no matter their field. It demonstrates the importance of fiscal law and policy for development and the impact it has on individuals, communities, nations, regional groupings, and the continent.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2019.

Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger
[فادا: نقاشات حول الملل وهوية الانتماء في النيجر]
Author: Adeline Masquelier

Niger most often comes into the public eye as an example of deprivation and insecurity. Urban centers have become concentrated areas of unemployment filled with young men trying, against all odds, to find jobs and fill their time with meaningful occupations. At the heart of Adeline Masquelier’s groundbreaking book is the fada—a space where men gather to escape boredom by talking, playing cards, listening to music, and drinking tea. As a place in which new forms of sociability and belonging are forged outside the unattainable arena of work, the fada has become an integral part of Niger’s urban landscape. By considering the fada as a site of experimentation, Masquelier offers a nuanced depiction of how young men in urban Niger engage in the quest for recognition and reinvent their own masculinity in the absence of conventional avenues to self-realization. In an era when fledgling and advanced economies alike are struggling to support meaningful forms of employment, this book offers a timely glimpse into how to create spaces of stability, respect, and creativity in the face of diminished opportunities and precarity
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2019

Religion and Development in Southern and Central Africa: Vol. 2
[الدين والتنمية في جنوب ووسط أفريقيا: المجلد 2]
Author (Editor): James N. Amanze, Maake Masango, Chitando Ezra, Lilian Siwila

This book is a result of a joint conference, which was held from 18th-22nd July 2017 under the theme Religion, Citizenship and Development – Southern African Perspectives.” The theme of the conference was adopted in order to underline the importance and significance of religion in the socio-economic development of people in the world generally and in Southern and Central Africa in particular. The papers in the book are divided into two volumes. Volume one consists of papers which directly discuss religion and development in one form or another. The second volume contains papers that discuss religion and other pertinent issues related to development. The papers are grouped into sub-themes for ease of reference. These include Citizenship and Development, Migration and Development, Disability and Development, Pentecostal Churches and Development and Religion and Society. All in all, despite a divergence of sub-themes in volume two, all point to issues to do with the role of religion in development in Southern and Central Africa today..
Publisher: Mzuni Press, Malawi, 2019.

Histories of Dirt Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos
[تاريخ الأوساخ: وسائل الإعلام والحياة الحضرية في مدينة لاغوس في عهد الاستعمار وما بعده]
Author: Stephanie Newell

In Histories of Dirt Stephanie Newell traces the ways in which urban spaces and urban dwellers come to be regarded as dirty, as exemplified in colonial and postcolonial Lagos. Newell conceives dirt as an interpretive category that facilitates moral, sanitary, economic, and aesthetic evaluations of other cultures under the rubric of uncleanliness. She examines a number of texts ranging from newspaper articles by elite Lagosians to colonial travel writing, public health films, and urban planning to show how understandings of dirt came to structure colonial governance.
Publisher: Duke University Press, 2019.

Caravans of Gold: Fragments in Time Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa
[قوافل من الذهب: الفن والثقافة والمقايضات عبر إفريقيا جنوب الصحراء في القرون الوسطى]
Author: Kathleen Bickford Berzock

Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time draws on the latest archaeological discoveries and art historical research to construct a compelling look at medieval trans-Saharan exchange and its legacy. Contributors from diverse disciplines present case studies that form a rich portrayal of a distant time. Topics include descriptions of key medieval cities around the Sahara; networks of exchange that contributed to the circulation of gold, copper, and ivory and their associated art forms; and medieval glass bead production in West Africa’s forest region. The volume also reflects on Morocco’s Gnawa material culture, associated with descendants of West African slaves, and movements of people across the Sahara today. Featuring a wealth of color images, this fascinating book demonstrates how the rootedness of place, culture, and tradition is closely tied to the circulation of people, objects, and ideas. These “fragments in time” offer irrefutable evidence of the key role that Africa played in medieval history and promote a new understanding of the past and the present. Published in association with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University.
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Things Left Unsaid
[المسكوت عنه]
Author: Rosabelle Boswell

In South Africa issues of identity remain a pressing concern and preoccupation. For some, the experience of feeling that one does not belong in South Africa, especially among Africans and African descendants, appears to be intensifying. In this first collection of poems, Rosabelle Boswell speaks of the many places in which ordinary Africans born outside of South Africa try to achieve belonging. They do so in the family context, the backyard, language, the meeting, familiar landscapes and dreams. The poems also foreground the tumult of emotions that rise from the experience of exclusion and the results of pressure when one must conform. There is panic and dislocation, desperation, fear and sense of marginality when one’s work and achievements are reduced to whether one is born in South Africa or not. According to the poet, in such a context, one can only achieve true freedom from the tyranny of belonging by psychologically walking away from the expectations of those in power and putting oneself in a ‘clearing’ where flexibility, openness and newness reside. The forest of expectations remains, but we can achieve temporary respite from it by walking away now and again. The collection spans two years of writing identity in a different form, poetry.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 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 9th, 2020

Who was Omar ibn Said? New research reconsiders Muslim slave’s writings
By Yonat Shimron, February 7, 2020 (Religion News Services)

(RNS) — He was a slave from Senegal who wrote in Arabic. Or was he an Arab prince? He was a scholar who memorized vast passages of the Quran and mastered numerous Islamic texts. Or were his writings unintelligible? He was a devout Muslim. Or did he convert to Christianity? These are just some of the conflicting narratives about Omar ibn Said (or more correctly Sayyid), a black Muslim scholar captured in Senegal in 1807 and transported by boat to Charleston, South Carolina. He eventually fled to North Carolina and lived out his days as a house slave to James Owen and Owen’s brother, onetime North Carolina Governor John Owen.

Read the rest of the story in RNS link.

Buried in Sand For A Millennium: Africa’s Gus Roman City
By Messynessy, Jan. 15, 2020

Got your archeologist’s cap on? Today we invite you to touch down in Algeria and explore Timgad, a lost Roman city on the edge of the Sahara desert that remained hidden beneath the sand for nearly a thousand years. Positively obscure compared to the international notoriety of Pompeii, this ancient city is nonetheless one of the best surviving examples of Roman town planning anywhere in the historical Empire. No one believed the first 18th century European explorer who claimed to have found a Roman city poking out of the sand in the North African desert, and the full extent of the 50-hectare site wouldn’t be realised and excavated in its entirety until the 1950s. Rome is still well worth the visit, but it’s in Algeria that some of the most impressive Roman remains in the whole world are to be found…Read the details in this link here.

African Union: Implementation of #Agenda2063

The First Continental Report on the implementation of #Agenda2063 has been launched!
The report is an assessment of 31 African Union Member States & 6 Regional Economic Communities towards achieving Africa’s blueprint and master plan for sustainable development and economic growth.
The report is available here

Africa has 1.2 billion people and only six labs that can test for coronavirus. How quickly can they ramp up?
DAKAR, Senegal — After Africa’s first suspected case of the Wuhan coronavirus emerged last month in the Ivory Coast, doctors sent a sample from the coughing college student to the closest equipped lab — 4,500 miles north, in Paris.
Officials said the wait for the results, which came back negative, highlighted the need to rapidly expand testing capacity on the continent, where health authorities are scrambling to prepare for a potential outbreak.

Read the rest of the story here

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Perspectives of Youth Language Practices in Africa: Codes and Identity Writings
[المنظو اللغوي والاجتماعي للممارسات اللغوية بين الشباب في أفريقيا: حالة دراسية
للرموزوالهوية الانتمائية في الكتابة]
Author (Editor): Gratien G. Atindogbé, Augustin Emmanuel Ebongue

With the demographic explosion of young people in major African cities, we are witnessing the emergence of youth languages and new speech forms. In search of well-being, these young people, plagued by poverty, social injustice, unemployment and idleness, invent linguistic codes that allow them to find themselves. The linguistic and sociolinguistic description of these youth languages is the object of this volume. The contributions inform on the statutes and functions of the youth languages of Africa, their forms and structures, their representations, and envisage perspectives and prospective didactics. Avec l’explosion démographique des jeunes dans les grandes villes africaines, on assiste, à une émergence de langues et de parlers jeunes. En quête de bien-être, ces jeunes, en proie à la pauvreté, aux injustices sociales, au chômage et à l’oisiveté, inventent des codes linguistiques leur permettant de se retrouver. C’est la description linguistique et sociolinguistique de ces parlers, qui fait l’objet de ce collectif. Les contributions informent à cet effet sur les statuts et fonctions des parlers et langues jeunes d’Afrique, leurs formes et structures, les représentations entretenues à leur égard, et envisage des perspectives et prospectives didactiques.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2019.

Democratic Engineering in Rwanda and Burundi
[هندسة الديمقراطية في رواندا وبوروندي]
Author: Jean-Marie Kagabo

In Democratic Engineering in Rwanda and Burundi the author argues that a democratic model which is suitable for single-cultural societies may not be applicable in multicultural societies; he illustrates that the liberal and socialist theories have not addressed the issue of national minorities which threatens peace and stability in most African countries. The author investigates the form of democratic engineering that would harmonise ethnic relations and guard against ethnic discrimination and violence. He explores the consociational and integrative theories to identify a suitable democratic system that would stabilise Rwanda and Burundi. He analyses the pros and the cons of the present options adopted by Rwanda and Burundi to address the question of ethnicity and also assesses the potential of a number of other solutions.
Publisher: Fountain Publishers, Uganda, 2018.

Wanted Dead and Alive the Case for South Africa’s Cattle
[مطلوب حيا أم ميتا: دراسة حالة المواشي في جنوب أفريقيا]
Author: Gregory Mthembu-Salter

Given what we know about climate change, should we still be raising and eating cattle? And how do we weigh the cultural and economic value of cattle against their environmental impact? This engaging book brings history, science, economics and popular culture together in a timely discussion about whether current practices can be justified in a period of rapid climate change. Journalist Gregory Mthembu-Salter first encountered South Africa’s love of cattle during his own lobola negotiations. The book traces his personal journey through kraals, rangelands and feedlots across South Africa to find out more about the national hunger for cattle. He takes a broad sweep – drawing on such diverse sources as politicians involved in land reform, history, braai-side interviews with cattle farmers and abattoir owners, conversations with his mother-in-law, and analysis of cutting-edge science.
Publisher: Cover2Cover Books, South Africa,2019.

Letter from America Memoir of an Adopted Child
[رسالة من أمريكا: مذكرة طفل متبنى]
Author: Gil Ndi-Shang

Inspired by Alistair Cooke’s masterpiece “Letter from America” (1934-2004) that depicted the transformation of British culture in the United States of America, Ndi-Shang’s text redefines ‘America’, focusing on the melting pot engendered by African, indigenous, European and Asian cultures in Latin America through the case of Peru, the erstwhile epicentre of Spanish empire in Latin America. It is a reflection on the triangular relationship between Africa, Europe and America against the backdrop of slavery and (neo-)colonialism which continue to define intimate experiences, daily interactions, personal trajectories and human relations in a ‘globalized world’. Ndi-Shang probes into the legacies of racial inequalities but also the possibilities of a new ethic of encounter amongst human beings/cultures. The text is based on an intricate interweaving of the humorous with the tragic, the personal with the global, the historical with the current and the real with the creative.
Publisher: Spears Media Press, Cameroon, 2019

Black Feminism Reimagined After Intersectionality
[الحركة النسوية بين السود: اعادة تصور نظرية تداخل الهويات]
Author: Jennifer C. Nash

In Black Feminism Reimagined Jennifer C. Nash reframes black feminism’s engagement with intersectionality, often celebrated as its primary intellectual and political contribution to feminist theory. Charting the institutional history and contemporary uses of intersectionality in the academy, Nash outlines how women’s studies has both elevated intersectionality to the discipline’s primary program-building initiative and cast intersectionality as a threat to feminism’s coherence. As intersectionality has become a central feminist preoccupation, Nash argues that black feminism has been marked by a single affect—defensiveness—manifested by efforts to police intersectionality’s usages and circulations. Nash contends that only by letting go of this deeply alluring protectionist stance, the desire to make property of knowledge, can black feminists reimagine intellectual production in ways that unleash black feminist theory’s visionary world-making possibilities..

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2019

Locating Politics in Ethiopia’s Irreecha Ritual
[تحديد ماهية السياسة في طقوس مجموعات إريشا الإثيوبية]
Author: Serawit Bekele Debele

In Locating Politics in Ethiopia’s Irreecha Ritual Serawit Bekele Debele gives an account of politics and political processes in contemporary Ethiopia as manifested in the annual ritual performance. Mobilizing various sources such as archives, oral accounts, conversations, videos, newspapers, and personal observations, Debele critically analyses political processes and how they are experienced, made sense of and articulated across generational, educational, religious, gender and ethnic differences as well as political persuasions. Moreover, she engages Irreecha in relation to the hugely contested meaning making processes attached to the Thanksgiving ritual which has now become an integral part of Oromo national identity.
Publisher: Brill Publications, 2019.

Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia
[قصص عن الأمل المرارة: حالة دراسة مشيدي الطرق الصينيين في إثيوبيا]
Author: Miriam Driessen

China’s new globalism plays out as much in the lives of ordinary workers who shoulder the task of implementing infrastructure projects in the world as in the upper echelons of power. Through unprecedented ethnographic research among Chinese road builders in Ethiopia, Miriam Driessen finds that the hope of sharing China’s success with developing countries soon turns into bitterness, as Chinese workers perceive a lack of support and appreciation from Ethiopian laborers and state entities. The bitterness is compounded by their position at the margins of Chinese society, suspended as they are between China and Africa and between a poor rural background and a precarious urban future. Workers’ aspirations and predicaments reflect back on a Chinese society in flux as well as China’s shifting place in the world. Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia sheds light on situations of contact in which disparate cultures meet and wrestle with each other in highly asymmetric relations of power. Revealing the intricate and intimate dimensions of these encounters, Driessen conceptualizes how structures of domination and subordination are reshaped on the ground. The book skillfully interrogates micro-level experiences and teases out how China’s involvement in Africa is both similar to and different from historical forms of imperialism.
Publisher: Hong Kong 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: January 15th, 2020

Volume 3, Issue 3– December, 2019
The Third Issue of Research Africa Reviews, Volume 3, was published in early January 2020. The reviews may be found on the Research Africa Reviews website.

Open Call for Papers
The 4th AEGIS Thematic Conference on Africa in the Indian Ocean is planned to take place at Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon, on 23-24 April 2020.
Like the previous thematic conferences, we are bringing together researchers from Europe, Africa and Asia working on Africa in the Indian Ocean, with the aim of expanding the network of the AEGIS Collaborative Research Group on Africa in the Indian Ocean (CRG-AIO), and of producing an international peer-reviewed publication, either in the form of a book or a special issue of an Africanist journal.
The general theme of the two-day Conference is “New Gulf Streams – Middle East and Eastern Africa intersected”, and is organised in interdisciplinary thematic panels focussing on the interconnections between Horn of Africa & Eastern Africa societies and the Middle East countries, with a special focus on the challenges of recent geopolitical, religious and economic ties between these regions.
Read the details for proposals here

A Database of Fugitive Slave Ads Reveals Thousands of Untold Resistance Stories

Freedom on the Move from Cornell University is the first major digital database of fugitive slave ads from North America.

Readers of the May 24, 1796 Pennsylvania Gazette found an advertisement offering ten dollars to any person who would apprehend Oney Judge, an enslaved woman who had fled from President George Washington’s Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon.
Read the details in this link here

This Saharan Village Is Home to Thousands of Ancient Texts Preserved in Desert Libraries
By Jessica Stewart on August 8, 2019

Nestled in the Sahara, the medieval village of Chinguetti in Mauritania is an incredible jewel of Berber culture. Once an important outpost on trade and pilgrimage routes, the desert village contains wonderful examples of Berber Saharan architecture. It is also an important center of learning thanks to its desert libraries, which are filled with scientific and Qur’anic texts dating to the Middle Ages.
Read the details in this link here

Who Is Competing to Own Researcher Identity?
By Roger C. Schonfeldjan 6, 2020

Tweet Share 2 Pin Buffer Share 2SHARES PRINT THIS PAGE The largest scholarly publishers today are driven by one major near-term strategic concern — to reduce leakage and thereby bolster the value of the subscription bundle. But while they work belatedly to address this priority through Seamless Access (RA21), GetFTR, and even partnerships with ResearchGate, the savviest of them are keeping their eyes on the true structural transformation that the internet has wrought. We are witnessing the transformation away from a journal-centric model of scholarly publishing towards a researcher-centric model of scholarly communication. Success in this new environment requires engagement with researcher identity, which is a struggle even for most of the largest publishing houses. Who is competing to own researcher identity and how can other publishers engage this vital role?
Read the details in this link here.
The Emperor from Africa
It is tranquil these days at the triumphal arch of Septimius Severus in Leptis Magna, on the coast of Libya. The cube of white marble, scooped through by four arches and decorated with friezes of Septimius and his family, stands like a museum piece on the city’s southern edge. But it’s easy to imagine dusty foot, hoof and cart traffic bustling around the edifice some 18 centuries ago when the arch straddled the coast road running west to Carthage, in what is now Tunisia, and the road south into the Sahara. Like many of the city’s magnificent ruins, the arch speaks to the power and resourcefulness of the first African to rule the Roman Empire. Septimius, who ruled from 193 to 211 CE, was the 18th emperor in a line dating back to Julius Caesar in the first century BCE.
Read the rest of the story in this link.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Ethiopia’s Wildlife Treasures
[ثروة الحيوانات البرية في اثيوبيا]
Author (Editor): Håkan Pohlstrand

Ethiopia is a treasure trove of wildlife secrets that are to be discovered, marvelled and preserved. The diversity of mammals and birds have evolved because of the unique geographic conditions of the land: highland forests, lofty plateaus, dense jungles, fertile valleys, parches pans, and the Great Rift Valley that splits the country in the middle. Ethiopia is a huge country with rare animals such as the elusive Dibatag and the endemic Walia Ibex. Nearly every year, a new species is discovered. Recognition and appreciation of the diversity and extraordinary number of endemics in Ethiopia is needed to keep these treasures for future generations. Understanding and finding a healthy balance between the needs for habitat preservation for wildlife as well as human populations is an important key if Ethiopia has hopes of keeping her treasures..
Publisher: Shama Books, Ethiopia, 2019.

The Algerian War Retold: Of Camus’s Revolt and Postwar Revolt
[اعادة رواية الحرب الجزائرية: تمرد كاموس و مسألة ثورة ما بعد الحرب]
Author: Meaghan Emery

The Algerian War Retold: Of Camus’s Revolt and Postwar Reconciliation focuses on specific aspects of Albert Camus’s ethical thought through a study of his writings in conjunction with late 20th- and early 21st-century works written by Franco-Maghrebi authors on the topic of the Algerian War (1954-1962). It combines historical inquiry with literary analysis in order to examine the ways in which Camus’s concept of revolt — in his novels, journalistic writing, and philosophical essays — reverberates in productions pertaining to that war. Following an examination of Sartre’s and Camus’s debate over revolution and violence, one that in another iteration asks whether FLN-sponsored terrorism was justified, The Algerian War Retold uncovers how today’s writers have adopted paradigms common to both Sartre’s and Camus’s oeuvres when seeking to break the silence and influence France’s national narrative. In the end, it attempts to answer the critical questions raised by literary acts of violence, including whether Camusian ethics ultimately lead to justice for the Other in revolt. These questions are particularly poignant in view of recent presidential declarations in response to years of active pressure applied by associations and other citizens’ groups, prompting the French government to acknowledge the state’s abandonment of the harkis, condemn the repression of peaceful protest, and recognize the French army’s systematic use of torture in Algeria..
Publisher: Routledge 2019.

Alienation and Freedom
[الاغتراب والحرية]
Author: Frantz Fanon Editor(s): Jean Khalfa, Robert J. C. Young Translator: Steven Corcoran.

Since the publication of The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, Fanon’s work has been deeply significant for generations of intellectuals and activists from the 60s to the present day. Alienation and Freedom collects together unpublished works comprising around half of his entire output – which were previously inaccessible or thought to be lost. This book introduces audiences to a new Fanon, a more personal Fanon and one whose literary and psychiatric works, in particular, take centre stage. These writings provide new depth and complexity to our understanding of Fanon’s entire oeuvre revealing more of his powerful thinking about identity, race and activism which remain remarkably prescient. Shedding new light on the work of a major 20th-century philosopher, this disruptive and moving work will shape how we look at the world.
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2018.

African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church.
[الكاثوليكية الأفريقية: التحرر من الاستعمار واعادة هيكلة الكنيسة]
Author: Elizabeth A. Foster,

……
Publisher: Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019.

The Politics of Disease Control: Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890–1920
[سياسة الحد من الأمراض: تاريخ مرض النوم القهري في شرق إفريقيا 1890-1920]
Author: Mari K. Webel

Webel draws case studies from colonial Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda to frame her arguments within a zone of vigorous mobility and exchange in eastern Africa, where African states engaged with the Belgian, British, and German empires. Situating sleeping sickness control within African intellectual worlds and political dynamics, The Politics of Disease Control connects responses to sleeping sickness with experiences of historical epidemics such as plague, cholera, and smallpox, demonstrating important continuities before and after colonial incursion. African strategies to mitigate disease, Webel shows, fundamentally shaped colonial disease prevention programs in a crucial moment of political and social change.
Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2019

Zimbolicious Anthology: An Anthology of Zimbabwean Literature and Arts, Vol 4
[مختارات زيمبوليس: مختارات الأدب والفن الزيمبابوي ، المجلد 4]
Author (Editor): Tendai Rinos Mwanaka, Jabulani Mzinyathi

The latest Zimbolicious offering has nonfiction, poetry, an interview, fiction and incisive visual art. Works were received from regular contributors and relatively new artists. The poets with their collective audacious eye keenly observe society and reveal the pimples, warts and all that is afflicting the society; talk about the dying, already dead and decaying Zimbabwean currency or nonexistent currency, the emancipation of women, the grinding poverty and the political challenges Zimbabwe faces. Others deal with spirituality and religion, love, growing up without a father figure. Nonfiction work leaves one under a barrage of questions: What it means to be a Zimbabwean, the defining and dissecting of Zimbabwe’s literature, writing, self-publishing are put under serious scrutiny. Some delicious slices of the scenic Zimbabwean landscape are featured and a continuation in investigating what home is in a selection of visual art pieces The fiction is speculative, bittersweet and stays on your mind like a memory of that long, long forgotten summer of love as each fictionist deal with issues related to relationships, love, the lack of, the impermanence of which is an ever recurring leitmotiv in these works, thus therefore, this Zimbolicious is a must read, robust, incisive collection of Zimbabwean Literature and the arts.
Publisher: Mwanaka Media and Publishing, Zimbabwe, 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.