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Although there is widespread food availability in urban areas across the Global South, it is not correlated with universal access to adequate amounts of nutritious foods. This report is based on a household survey conducted in 2015 in six low-income informal areas in Malawi's capital city, where three-quarters of the population live in informal settlements. Understanding the dimensions of household food insecurity in these neighbourhoods is critical to sustainable and inclusive growth in Lilongwe. The survey findings provide a complementary perspective to the 2008 AFSUN survey conducted in Blantyre, which suggested a level of food security in urban Malawi that was probably more typical of peri-urban areas where many people farm. Given that informal settlements house most of Malawi's urban residents, the Lilongwe research presents a serious public policy challenge for the country's leaders. Poverty is a profound problem in Malawi's rapidly expanding cities. Of particular concern is the poor quality of diets among residents of informal settlements. Precarity of income, reflected in the survey findings of frequent purchasing of staple foods and the need for food sellers to extend credit, appears to be a key driver of food insecurity in these communities. Economically inclusive growth, with better prospects for stable employment and protection for informal-sector workers, appears to be the surest route to improved urban food security in Malawi.
Shimmer Chinodya, winner of the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa region) is one of Zimbabwe's foremost fiction writers. This collection of short stories reveals his development as a writer of passionate questioning integrity. The first stories, 'Hoffman Street' and 'The Man who Hanged Himself' capture the bewildered innocence of a child's view of the adult world, where behaviour is often puzzling and contradictory; stories such as 'Going to See Mr B.V.' provide the transition between the world of the adult and that of the child where the latter is required to act for himself in a situation where illusions founder on a narrow reality. 'Among the Dead' and 'Brothers and Sisters' look wryly at the self-conscious, self-centred, desperately serious world of young adulthood while 'Playing your Cards', 'The Waterfall', 'Strays' and 'Bramson' introduce characters for whom ambition, disillusion, and disappointment jostle for attention in a world where differences of class, culture, race and morality come to the fore. Finally, in 'Can we Talk' we conclude with an abrasive, lucid, sinewy voice which explores the nature of estrangement. The charge is desolation. Can we Talk and Other Stories speaks of the unspoken and unsaid. The child who watches but does not understand, the young man who observes but cannot participate, the man who stands outside not sure where his desires and ambitions lead, the older man, estranged by his own choices. 'Can we Talk' is not a question but a statement that insists on being heard, and demands a reassessment of our dreams.
This book weaves together a rich tapestry on football fandom in Zimbabwe. Based on empirical research focusing on the different dimensions of fan practices and experiences, the book is the result of multiple fieldwork processes with fans in Zimbabwe spanning a period of eight years including desk research, interviews, observation, focus group discussions and netnography. It demonstrates the nexus between social identities and supporting a sports team, highlighting that there are deeper underlying meanings and assumptions to one's support of a sporting team. Manase Chiweshe highlights the various nuances of supporting football clubs. This book provides an alternative way to understanding communities and how sport can be viewed as a serious lens into societal organisations. It offers important insights into how Zimbabweans are also engaged in leisure activities and that play is also part of their life worlds. Given the major focus on poverty, disease and conflict, African stories of intimate play and enjoyment tend to be sidelined. Soccer has the power to bring together or divide communities. In many an African context, just as in Zimbabwe, everyday ethnic and religious rivalries are played out through football matches. It is thus important to capture this space and use football as a way to heal historic and deep-seated conflicts.
The primary goal of this study is to present the results of a comprehensive scope of key opportunities and challenges for harnessing migration for inclusive growth and development at the regional level in Southern Africa. The main objectives were as follows: Provide an overview of regional migration stocks and flows identifying regional trends, drivers and impacts from existing research literature and official data; Profile migrant characteristics at the regional level including demographic composition, types of migration and occupational profile; Examine the relevance of multilateral, continental and regional migration instruments, policies, protocols, agreements and forums with a view to identifying actions required to move the regional migration management agenda forward and align with the goal of enhancing migration for inclusive growth and development in Southern Africa; Analyze the key initiatives, opportunities and obstacles to developing a coherent, integrated and rights-regarding approach to migration management including areas of common commitment and ownership, and points of actual and potential conflict and disagreement between states; Conduct a gender analysis of regional migration dynamics including gender dimensions of migration, challenges, dangers and vulnerabilities confronting migrant women and other vulnerable groups, and gender analysis of migration management in Southern Africa; Identify potential programming areas that are weak or underdeveloped.
To understand the policy environment within which refugees establish and operate their enterprises in South Africa's informal sector, this report brings together two streams of policy analysis. The first concerns the changing refugee policies and the erosion of the progressive approach that characterized the immediate post-apartheid period. The second concerns the informal sector policy, which oscillates between tolerance and attempted destruction at national and municipal levels. While there have been longstanding tensions between foreign and South African informal sector operators, an overtly anti-foreign migrant sentiment has increasingly been expressed in official policy and practice. This report describes the strategies being used to turn South Africa into an undesirable destination for refugees, including the setting up of additional procedural, administrative and logistical hurdles; the undercutting of court judgments affirming the right of asylum-seekers and refugees to employment and self-employment; ensuring that protection is always temporary by making it extremely difficult for refugees to progress to permanent residence and eventual citizenship; and restricting opportunities to pursue a livelihood in the informal sector. The authors conclude that the protection of refugee rights is likely to continue to depend on a cohort of non-governmental organizations prioritizing migrant livelihood rights and being willing and able to pursue time-consuming and costly litigation on their behalf.
This report compares the business operations of over 2,000 South Africans and refugees in the urban informal economy and systematically dispels some of the myths that have grown up around their activities. First, the report takes issue with the perception that South Africans are inexperienced and unmotivated participants in the informal economy. Many have years of experience and have successfully grown their businesses. Second, it contests the view that refugees enjoy a competitive advantage because they come to South Africa with inherent talent and already honed skills. On the contrary, over 80% of those surveyed had no prior informal sector experience and learned their skills on the job and after coming to South Africa. Third, the report shows that there is fierce competition in the urban informal sector between and within the two groups. However, business competition between refugees and South Africans is mitigated by the fact that they tend to dominate different sections of the informal economy with South Africans dominant in the food sector and refugees in the household products and personal services sectors. Finally, the report takes issue with recent arguments that all informal sector businesses are equally at risk from robbery, extortion and other crimes. It shows that South Africans are affected but that refugees are far more vulnerable than their South African counterparts. The report therefore confirms that xenophobia and xenophobic violence are major threats to refugees seeking a livelihood in the informal sector, especially if they venture into informal settlements.
One of the defining characteristics of many large cities in the rapidly urbanizing global South is the high degree of informality of shelter, services and economic livelihoods. It is these dynamic, shifting and dangerous informal urban spaces that refugees often arrive in with few resources other than a will to survive, a few social contacts and a drive to support themselves in the absence of financial support from the host government and international agencies. This report addresses the question of variability in economic opportunity and entrepreneurial activity between urban environments within the same destination country - South Africa - by comparing refugee entrepreneurship in Cape Town, South Africas second largest city, and several small towns in the province of Limpopo. The research shows that refugee entrepreneurial activity in Limpopo is a more recent phenomenon and largely a function of refugees moving from large cities such as Johannesburg where their businesses and lives are in greater danger. The refugee populations in both areas are equally diverse and tend to be engaged in the same wide range of activities. This report shows that different urban geographies do shape the local nature of refugee entrepreneurial economies, but there are also remarkable similarities in the manner in which unconnected refugee entrepreneurs establish and grow their businesses in large cities and small provincial towns.
This report examines the impact of xenophobic violence on Zimbabweans who are trying to make a living in the South African informal sector and finds that xenophobic violence has several key characteristics that put them at constant risk of losing their livelihoods and their lives. The businesses run by migrants and refugees in the informal sector are a major target of South Africa's extreme xenophobia. Attitudinal surveys clearly show that South Africans differentiate migrants by national origin and that Zimbabweans are amongst the most disliked. This report is based on a survey of informal sector enterprises in Cape Town and Johannesburg; and 50 in-depth interviews with Zimbabwean informal business owners in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Polokwane who had been affected by xenophobic violence. In many areas, community leaders are ineffective in dealing with the violence and, in some cases, they actively foment hostility and instigate attacks. The fact that migrant entrepreneurs provide goods, including food, at competitive prices and offer credit to consumers is clearly insufficient to protect them when violence erupts. However, the deep-rooted crisis in Zimbabwe makes return home a non- viable option and Zimbabweans instead adopt several self-protection strategies, none of which is ultimately an insurance against xenophobic attack. The findings in this report demonstrate that xenophobic violence fails in its two main aims: to drive migrant entrepreneurs out of business and to drive them out of the country.
The volume draws from René Devischs encounters with groups in southsaharan Africa, primarily. The author had the privilege to immerse himself, around the clock, in the Yakaphones activities and thoughts in southwest DR Congo from 1972 to 1974, and intermittently in Kinshasas shanty towns, from 1986 to 2003. The author first examines what sparked his choice to come to Congo, and then to pursue research among the Yakaphones in the borderland with Angola. He then invites us to follow the trajectory of his plural anthropological view on todays multicentric world. It leads us to his praise for honorary doctor Jean-Marc Elas work. He then examines the proletarian outbursts of violence that rocked Congos major cities in 1991 and 1993. These can be read as a settling of scores with the disillusioning colonial and missionary modernisation, along with president Mobutus millenarian Popular Movement of the Revolution. Furthermore, after considering the morose reduction of a major Yaka dancing mask into a mere museum-bound curio in Antwerp, the book unravels the Yakaphones perspectives on spirits and sorcerys threat. It also analyses their commitment to classical Bantu-African healing cults, along with their parallel consulting physicians and healers. By sharing the Yakaphones life-world, the analysis highlights their body-group-world weave, interlaced by the principle of co-resonance. A phenomenological and perspectivist look unfolds the local actors views, thereby disclosing the Bantu-African genius and setting for a major reversal of perspectives. Indeed, seeing 'here' from 'there' allows the author to uncover some alienating dynamics at work in his native Belgian Flemish-speaking culture. To better grasp the realm of life beyond the speakable and factual reasoning, the approach occasionally turns to the later Lacans focus on the unconscious desire, the body and its affects. The book addresses students and researchers in the humanities and, more broadly, all those immersed in the heat of the encounter with the culturally different.
Lament for Kofifi Macu
(2017)
Angifi Dladla is a poet and playwright who writes in both English and Zulu. He is the author of eight plays and a poetry book in Zulu titled Uhambo. For many years he has been a writing teacher and director of Femba Writing Project, publishing school and prison newspapers, and the anthologies Wa lala, Wa sala and Reaching Out: Voices from Groenpunt Maximum-Security Prison. Lament for Kofifi Macu is Angifi Dladla's first collection of poems in English since The Girl Who Then Feared To Sleep (2001).
The publication is the latest in the African Studies in Russia series of compilations and contains full articles and annotations of the most important - from the point of view of editors - works of Russian Africanists over a certain period. The authors work at the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS).The present issue covers the years 2014 to 2016 and consists of two sections. The first section presents conceptual articles on Africa published in authoritative journals. The second section offers synopses of books by Russian authors on economics, cultural anthropology, social and political development, gender studies, and international relations of African countries.The main objective of the triennial series of compilations is to introduce new findings of Russian Africanists to interested foreign scholars who do not speak Russian.
In this collection, Doh straddles the Atlantic with voices that doubt, question, and lament the black predicament; voices that evoke the wisdom of Africa's cultural values in a manner reminiscent of the continent's orality. Like the echoing of the talking drums in the forests and the savannahs, these voices acknowledge the challenges and vexing truths of the hour: the plight of a people that have been buffeted repeatedly by waves of invasion, deceit, and betrayals, yet against which onslaught they remain standing, frighteningly tall in dignity and integrity.
'It is my duty to take the message of revolt to other[s]. is is the only way to liberate the victims of suffering and slavery,' Nazmi Durrani quotes W.L. Sohan in this book. Resistance to imperialism in pre-independence Kenya by progressive South Asian Kenyans propelled the Kenyan liberation struggle to new heights. They were active in almost every field, from publishing progressive newspapers to supplying arms and material to Mau Mau. Liberating Minds consists of biographies of progressive South Asian Kenyans written by Nazmi Durrani. Originally published in Gujarati in the 1980s, they are available here in English for the first time, together with the original Gujarati. Also included is Naila Durrani's 1987 conference paper, 'Kenya Asian Participation in People's Resistance,' while Benegal Pereira introduces Eddie H. Pereira (1915-1995) and his resistance letters to the Colonial Times Newspaper.
Ivory Stars is Tanzanias first ever all-girls football team, but what makes this team even more unique is that they are people with albinism. Disregarded by society, the team is determined to show the world that they wont be held back. As International Albinism Awareness Day approaches, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro would defy stereotypes and prove that they are extraordinarily capable. Join Tatu, the team leader, and the Ivory Stars on their quest to reach the summit of the highest peak in Africa. Find out whether their determination will meet the challenges ahead. How will they manoeuvre through the twists and turns that lie in wait for them? What would it mean for them if they failed?
The Love Sheet
(2017)
The title should have warned me. On reading the title poem, I realise any of the poems is a gateway into this passion with compassion, into a garden whose fragrances colour every sound lovers make when words have to cope. Make the lovers poets, see how each facet is etched, each jewel worked and polished. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Hugh Hodge
When African Theology was first formulated, women played just a small role. In 1989 Mercy Amba Oduyoye set out to change this by creating the Circle of Concerned African Theologians in order to them a voice. The Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians is an African Baby, born in an ecumenical surrounding. Though there were other movements addressing the issue of gender inequalities in church and society, circle theologies are distinct from other women's liberation movements in that they are theologies formed in the context of African culture and religion. This book traces the Circle history from 1989 to 2007.
That Kind of Door
(2017)
Accident
(2017)
Carol Trehorne's only child, Max, is in ICU with severe burns. Max, a performance artist, has set himself alight. He recovers but it becomes clear that he is planning further performances that will put him at risk of serious injury or death. Carol, a single parent and a GP in a busy suburban practice, is worried that her son is not the genius his friends think he is, but might be on drugs or going psychotic. As she discusses her concerns with her son's psychiatrist, she wonders if her past behaviour, in particular her relationship with the adventurous and anti-social Jack, has influenced Max's determination to use his body as a site of violent art in the pursuit of revelation. Carol cannot accept that Max's self-harm will have any effect other than to add to the meaningless violence in the world. Accident raises questions about what kind of life is worth living and what death is worth dying. It explores the different responses artists and scientists can have to violence and self-destructive behaviour, and throws into sharp relief the difficulties parents face when their children me decisions that appear incomprehensible.
'Cape Towns public cultures can only be fully appreciated through recognition of its deep and diverse soundscape. We have to listen to what has made and makes a city. The ear is an integral part of the research tools one needs to get a sense of any city. We have to listen to the sounds that made and make the expansive mother city. Various of its constituent parts sound different from each other [T]here is the sound of the singing men and their choirs (teams they are called) in preparation for the longstanding annual Malay choral competitions. The lyrics from the various repertoires they perform are hardly ever written down. [] There are texts of the hallowed Dutch songs but these do not circulate easily and widely. Researchers dream of finding lyrics from decades ago, not to mention a few generations ago back to the early 19th century. This work by Denis Constant Martin and Armelle Gaulier provides us with a very useful selection of these songs. More than that, it is a critical sociological reflection of the place of these songs and their performers in the context that have given rise to them and sustains their relevance. It is a necessary work and is a very important scholarly intervention about a rather neglected aspect of the history and present production of music in the city.' Shamil Jeppie, Associate Professor, Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town
Otuzo twOvaherero
(2017)
Otuzo twOvaherero provides valuable information on Ovaherero patriclans and records folklore and praise poems in Otjiherero. Previously, these did not exist in written form. The book attempts to preserve these oral traditions before they disappear. It aims to restore pride to the Ovaherero, particularly in patrilineages that were displaced by the Ovaherero-German war of 1904-1907. Otuzo twOvaherero is structured around the Ovaherero patrilineal descent system (otuzo) which is the basis of the Ovaherero religion Oupwee. The surnames and homesteads that belong to the same patrilineage are grouped together under each patriclan to help the reader to easily trace the homesteads that belong to one patriclan (and thus have a common ancestry). The distinct features of each patriclan are specified in terms of totems, taboos, patriclans which collaborate, and praise poems of homesteads. All the patriclans and praise poems in this book were collected from Ovaherero communities living in Namibia. The author uses the term Ovaherero to include the various groups which speak the common language Otjiherero and which include the Ovahimba, Ovaherero, Ovatjimba and Ovambanderu. This book has the potential to promote unity within the Ovaherero community by showing how families are connected in lineages which trace back centuries.