Paket Afrikanistik
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The Cry of the Hangkaka
(2016)
The Cry of the Hangkaka is the story of young Karin and her mother Irene. Shamed by a divorce, Irene seeks to flee with her daughter from post WWII South Africa. Jack, a Scotsman who works at the tin mines in Nigeria, seems to be the answer to Irene's prayers. In the torrid heat of the Nigerian plateau, Karin is exposed to the lives of the colonisers, the colonised, and most of all to the dictatorship of Jack.
Gravitas: Poetic Consciencism for Cameroon is the poets requiem for the geographical expression code-named Cameroon. Vakunta speaks with the audacity of a daredevil and the certitude of a seer. This long poem has the twin virtues of gravity and clarity of purpose. The poet eschews the banality and sophistry characteristic of poetry for poetrys sake. Passion, sarcasm, and incisive irony are the hallmarks of this long didactic poem. The poet subscribes to Salman Rushdies pronouncement that a poets duty is to say the unutterable, name the unnamable, unmask masquerading miscreants and shame the scum of society. In this poem, music serves as a clarion call for examination of conscience, and alcohol ceases to serve as opium of the people. A bittersweet potion, this book echoes the defiant voice of a son-of-the-soil at odds with his native land gone topsy-turvy.
West African teachers and professors who are appropriating information and communication technologies (ICT) are making it part and parcel of education and everyday life. In Mali and beyond, they adapt ICT to their milieus and work as cultural agents, mediating between technology and society. They yearn to use ICT to make education more relevant to life, facilitate and enhance African participation in global debates and scholarly production, and evolve how Africa and Africans are projected and perceived. In sum, educators are harnessing ICT for its transformative possibilities. The changes apparent in student-teacher relations (more interactive) and classrooms (more dialogical) suggest that ICT can be a catalyst for pedagogical change, including in document-poor contexts and ones weighed down by legacies of colonialism. Learning from the perspectives and experiences of educators pioneering the use of ICT in education in Africa can inform educational theory, practice and policy and deepen understandings of the concept of appropriation as a process of cultural change.
This book presents a comparative history of slavery and the transition from slavery to free labour in Zanzibar and Mauritius, within the context of a wider comparative study of the subject in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Both countries are islands, with roughly the same size of area and populations, a common colonial history, and both are multicultural societies. However, despite inhabiting and using the same oceanic space, there are differences in experiences and structures which deserve to be explored. In the nineteenth century, two types of slave systems developed on the islands while Zanzibar represented a variant of an Indian Ocean slave system, Mauritius represented a variant of the Atlantic system yet both flourished when the world was already under the hegemony of the global capitalist mode of production. This comparison, therefore, has to be seen in the context of their specific historical conjunctures and the types of slave systems in the overall theoretical conception of modes of production within which they manifested themselves, a concept that has become unfashionable but which is still essential. The starting point of many such efforts to compare slave systems has naturally been the much-studied slavery in the Atlantic region which has been used to provide a paradigm with which to study any type of slavery anywhere in the world. However, while Mauritian slavery was 100 per cent colonial slavery, slavery in Zanzibar has been described as Islamic slavery. Both established plantation economies, although with different products, Zanzibar with cloves and Mauritius with sugar, and in both cases, the slaves faced a potential conflictual situation between former masters and slaves in the post-emancipation period. Another interesting focus in this book is the largely un-researched subject of female slaves. In Zanzibar, the privileged role of the suria whose status was defined by Sharia law was explored; and in Mauritius, the manumission of female slaves was explored as they formed the majority among manumitted slaves. The book will certainly prove helpful to those involved in comparing the Atlantic slave system with that of the Indian Ocean for the better understanding of both.
This is report is the most comprehensive study yet of the contribution of migrant and refugee entrepreneurs to Cape Town's local economy. The survey of over 500 entrepreneurs engaged in trade, services and manufacturing in different areas of the city dispels some of the more prevalent myths that o#en attach to the activities of migrants. The vast majority are not 'illegal foreigners', but have a legal right to be in South Africa and to run a business. Most are highly motivated individuals who enter the informal economy to earn revenue to support themselves, their families, and because they have a strong entrepreneurial motivation. Contrary to the claims of South African competitors, the vast majority are not successful because they are engaged in shadowy business practices. What emerges from the survey is that while migrant entrepreneurs undoubtedly have strong social networks, their businesses are highly individualistic in terms of organization, ownership and activity in a competitive business environment. This report demonstrates their positive economic contributions to Cape Town and examines the challenges they face in running a successful business operation in the city. It goes beyond the rhetoric of inclusion to demonstrate with hard evidence exactly why migrant and refugee entrepreneurs should be accepted as an integral and valuable part of the local economy.
Marja-Liisa Swantz has spent a lifetime conducting participatory action research in Tanzania, and In Search of Living Knowledge encapsulates her reactions. She started her career in 1952 in Tanganyika as an instructor to the first generation of women teachers at Ashira Teacher's Training College, situated on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. In the first years of Tanzania's independence from Britain, she devoted five years (1965-1970) to participant research in a coastal Zaramo village near the capital city of Dar es Salaam. The research culminated in her book, Ritual and Symbol in Transitional Tanzanian Society, and a doctorate in Anthropology of Religion, which she received from the Swedish University of Uppsala in 1970. The author further developed the Participatory Approach to research while serving as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Dar es Salaam from 1972 to 1975. After becoming a lecturer at the University of Helsinki she continued to develop Participatory Action Research with Tanzanian and Finnish doctoral candidates in a project in Bagamoyo, Tanzania, known as Jipemoyo. She continued to apply the participatory approach in research projects as Director of the Institute of Development Research at the University of Helsinki, where she taught anthropology, and as a Senior Researcher at the World Institute for Development Economics Research Institute in Helsinki in the 1980s. Since retirement, the author has continued her research, writing, and participation in development projects in Tanzania, including projects in Mtwara and Lindi from 1992 to 1998, and for 12 years while involved in a Local Government Cooperation project between Hartola in Finland and Iramba in Tanzania.
This book presents an African Christian movement full of vitality and creativity. The reader will meet believers who drink milk so that they may dream about angels, reports about funerals where the mourners dance with the coffin on their shoulders and church members who are ritually not allowed to fertilize their fields or wear neck ties. The author?s unique insight into Malawi?s Christian community addresses important issues in society. Why have ?Spirit Churches,? including Pentecostalism, been so successful in Malawi? Why do some religious groups still refuse medical help, up to the point that children die of cholera? How did the independent churches deal with the colonial trauma? In this masterful portrait, Strohbehn takes the reader from industrial mine compounds to rural colonies, where churches have set up their own spiritual and political rule. He carefully dissects the fine lines between traditional notions and Christianity?s influence. We find a spiritual portrait of the Ngoni people, a fascinating cultural analysis of dancing and an encounter with a unique style of preaching.
The most extensive urban demographic transitions ahead will take place in Africa and Asia. These transitions occur in regions where the majority of inhabitants remain trapped in vulnerable employment, which limits the capacities to plan, save, invest, and afford critical amenities, as well as limits the horizons of what is considered possible. Yet, the aspirations for mobility, security, consumption, and attainment are enormous. How can different rationalities and practices of everyday sociality be more effectively connected to the prevailing concepts informing formal political and policymaking projects? How can incommensurable facets of urban life be folded into each other as a matter of an enlarged political practice? There is no pre-existent map that tells us how to link these equally important dimensions of urban life. Thus, any effort to consider the relationship between them is by necessity an experiment.
Grace and Other Stories
(2016)
This collection of short stories explores the survival of the fittest in the hardship and poverty of a remote village in Matabeleland. Bongani Sibanda draws his characters and their situations with a sardonic eye and caustic humour. Sibanda satirises churches which enrich their leaders with the tithes of the poor, and draws our attention to self-proclaimed pastors who use the gospel of nationalism and patriotism to persuade their congregants to desist from supporting opposition politics. The church is also a source of the villagers weekly entertainment, with its cleansing ceremonies and the interrogation of witches: belief has a place, but so too does theatre. Patriarchy, family hierarchies, and the traditional position of women and children, all fall under Sibandas wry but compassionate scrutiny. We feel an intimacy with the villagers as we learn about how they cope: with no self-pity, little ambition, but a fierce determination to survive.
The Powers of the Knife
(2016)
What if you discovered that you come from an ancient family of Shadow Chasers, with a duty to protect others from an evil Army of Shadows? Nom is an outsider at school. When she and Zithembe become friends, life still seems ? well ? a little ordinary. But when an army of monsters threatens their world, it's all up to the two of them - and the start of a journey into the dreamworld on a quest that will change their lives. Powers of the Knife is the first book in the Shadow Chasers trilogy. It's an African fantasy adventure ? one part family saga, one part hero's quest.