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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.
Customary Law Ascertained Volume 3 is the third of a three-volume series in which traditional authorities in Namibia present the customary laws of their communities. It contains the laws of the Nama, Ovaherero, Ovambanderu, and San communities. Volume 2 contained the customary laws of the Bakgalagari, the Batswana ba Namibia and the Damara communities. Recognised traditional authorities in Namibia are expected to ascertain the customary law applicable in their respective communities after consultation with the members of that community, and to note the most important aspect of such law in written form. This series is the result of that process, It has been facilitated but the Human Rights and Documentation Centre of the University of Namibia, through the former Dean of the Law Faculty, Professor Manfred Hinz.
Proceedings of the 7th World Congress of African Linguistics, Buea, 17-21 August 2012 : Volume One
(2016)
Proceedings of the 7th World Congress of African Linguistics, Buea, 17-21 August 2012 : Volume 2
(2016)
Despite all the talk about African Renaissance, much of the continent is plagued by poverty and instability. To break out of that cycle, the guardians of African heritage (the old independence freedom fighters turned political leaders and their successors) and much of Afrocentric literature rightly promotes African ideas and solutions for African problems. While the idea in itself is noble, the danger is for Africa to close itself off and ignore 'outside' technical and intellectual innovations that it desperately needs to advance further. Africa through Structuration Theory - ntu-joins the discourse by attempting to restore intellectual freedom and convincingly defends structuration theory not only as the way forward for Africa but also as a legitimately African concept. It is innovative, refreshing and deserves to be heard across the world and appreciated especially by African graduates,'current and future'leaders of various African institutions or businesses, non-Africans who might hesitate to refer to such a theory when trying to understand and deal with African problems and the wider public who constitute the audience for this book. New in this edition: All chapters have been tightened up to make a clearer and more robust case. Chapter three, in particular, has been developed further in an attempt to demonstrate how Ubuntu is an African version of structuration theory. Overall, having both approached the subject from a rational perspective and presented Ubuntu in its preferred version, it became imperative to discuss the status/role of the African body in the expression of human agency and characterise different leadership practices in Africa that do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Ubuntu. Hence, Chapter 6: Body sociology and Africa and Chapter 7: The FS (fear and self-scrutiny) methodology of Ubuntu: a mapping of the field.
This is a comprehensive text on the function of thought in the history and political sociology of Cameroon. The book brings out how the 'hidden hand of history' fashions a political thought which, in turn, creates its own history. Instead of Cameroonians making history, history makes Cameroonians. The book shows how political ideas are fashioned in a post-colonial context in which Europeans impose a superordinate arrangement on a people together with its philosophers. 'Thinking the nation' in Cameroon on behalf of Europeans, especially after the leaders of the national liberation struggle were all eliminated, European philosophers put in place a 'repressive machine' under which Cameroonians were subjected between 1958 and 1990. Repression gave way to a refined form of enslavement - a modernised version of slavery. Cameroonians joined the bandwagon and have been producing and reproducing Western industrial economies while day-dreaming of what they will never become. The whole idea of nation-building in post-colonial Africa is put in question. This book offers students of political studies, sociology, anthropology and history compelling evidence to grapple with questions as to whether Cameroon is a state or a nation and questions of sovereignty and citizenship.
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.
Shadows of Footsteps
(2016)
As memorable for the beauty of his descriptions as for his poetic vision, in these poems Mwangwegho captures the tenderness of Malawi and the fragility of it, as well as exploring the depths of our universal lives. In three sections, Shadows of Footsteps, takes us to corners of the past, to a view of shared African experience and to a space where internal freedoms speak. The journey is wild in parts, but graceful in completion.
Using expibasketical theory and findings, this book attempts to understand and explain some of the wonders of love and the impacts these have on the other human institutions (such as marriage and family) that are supposed to be erected on love and understanding. Love is a phenomenon that is hard to correctly master, most probably because it is loaded with a lot of uncertainties. This simple fact must be the reason behind the commonplace saying that love is blind; a statement that can have several interpretations, one of which being that it is hard to read or know exactly what is on the other party's mind. Love thus becomes not only an intriguing feeling but also potentially full of intrigues. Can love be so blind to realities and still be love? The book answers many of such queries by expanding and delineating the frontiers of love, and thence marriage and family.
Dangerous Pastime
(2016)
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.
The once acrimonious debate on the existence of African philosophy has come of age, yet the need to cultivate a culture of belonging is more demanding now than ever before in many African societies. The gargantuan indelible energised chicanery waves of neo-colonialism and globalisation and their sweeping effect on Africa demand more concerted action and solutions than cul-de-sac discourses and magical realism. It is in view of this realisation that this book was born. This is a vital text for understanding contextual historical trends in the development of African philosophic ideas on the continent and how Africans could possibly navigate the turbulent catadromous waters, tangled webs and chasms of destruction, and chagrin of struggles that have engrossed Africa since the dawn of slavery and colonial projects on the continent. The book aims to generate more insights and influence national, continental, and global debates in the field of philosophy. It is accessible and handy to a wider range of readers, ranging from educators and students of African philosophy, anthropology, African studies, cultural studies, and all those concerned with the further development of African philosophy and thought systems on the African continent.
#RhodesMustFall. Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa by Francis Nyamnjoh was awarded the 2018 Fage & Oliver Prize. This book on rights, entitlements and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa shows how the playing field has not been as levelled as presumed by some and how racism and its benefits persist. Through everyday interactions and experiences of university students and professors, it explores the question of race in a context still plagued by remnants of apartheid, inequality and perceptions of inferiority and inadequacy among the majority black population. In education, black voices and concerns go largely unheard, as circles of privilege are continually regenerated and added onto a layered and deep history of cultivation of black pain. These issues are examined against the backdrop of organised student protests sweeping through the country's universities with a renewed clamour for transformation around a rallying cry of 'Black Lives Matter'. The nuanced complexity of this insightful analysis of the Rhodes Must Fall movement elicits compelling questions about the attractions and dangers of exclusionary articulations of belonging. What could a grand imperialist like the stripling Uitlander or foreigner of yesteryear, Sir Cecil John Rhodes, possibly have in common with the present-day nimble-footed makwerekwere from Africa north of the Limpopo? The answer, Nyamnjoh suggests, is to be found in how human mobility relentlessly tests the boundaries of citizenship.
The major objective of the research is to produce evidence-based knowledge on the social and economic impacts of labour migration by looking at the challenges and opportunities of Ethiopian labour migration to the Gulf and South Africa. On the one hand, international migration from Ethiopia could be considered as an aspect of development problem. The major push factors that forces Ethiopian migrants to the Gulf and South Africa are economic/developmental problems ranging from lack of employment opportunities to wage differentials. On the other hand, international migration could be considered as an important resource that could be tapped for accelerating socio-economic development. At the general level, this research aims to examine the successes and failures of policies and institutions in realising the potentials of international migration for socio-economic development of the country and minimizing its adverse impacts. At the same time, the growing problem of illegal migration will be examined.
Dictated by overall (economic, social, political, technological, etc) realities that unfold at different times, the growth and development dictums have been reshaped and reframed continually, in an effort to accommodate and respond to emerging issues. Within the overarching theme of sustainable development, human development and inclusive growth and development are, for example, among the recent focuses of the global and national development agenda. The backdrop to this is that as individuals, communities, and societies get richer, the worrying levels of inequalities, exclusion and disparities are becoming an area of concern, drawing the attention of governments, planners, civil societies, researchers and academia. An overarching current issue has been an appreciation of high economic growth in the last 10 years, but which is marred by pervasive levels of poverty and inequality. Indeed, Africa, through Agenda 2063, has acknowledged the need for inclusive and sustainable development, as is also the commitment of the Sustainable Development Goals (Agenda 2030) of the United Nations.Edited by Prof. Herman Musahara, this anthology entitled Inclusive Growth and Development Issues in Eastern and Southern Africa presents issues, challenges and progress in Rwanda, Mauritius, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Uganda. The issues covered include: trade; rural-urban linkages; the dynamics of poverty, vulnerability, and welfare; social policies for inclusive and sustainable development; productivity and informality; and financial direct support systems to the poor. The chapters are based on first-hand data, secondary data from different databases and systematic reviews of academic literature. Drawing on the findings and conclusions of the individual chapters, the book distills together the key lessons and also puts forth recommendations for policy and practice. As such, it is a good reading for researchers, policy and decision makers, academia and graduate students.
The early missionaries brought Christianity from the monogamous West to the polygamous societies of Africa. Were the missionaries right in demanding that converts dismiss all but one wife? Was this the demand of the Christian faith or of Western civilization? And were the converts right to dismiss their wives though they had married them according to the laws of the land? And who asked the children if they wanted their mothers to be dismissed and may or may not be married to another man? The book argues that while polygamy is an African reality, it is below Christian moral standards. However is stopping converted polygamous men and women from baptism best practice if we believe that sin can be forgiven for the one who repents? Can the shedding of responsibility for wives and children be made a precondition for such forgiveness?
Over a century much of Africa south of the Sahara embraced the Christian religion. Malawi, where 80% of the population identify as Christian is no exception, nor are the Ngonde at its northern border with Tanzania. While it is difficult to find someone who does not claim to be a Christian, African traditional religion is by no means dead and often practiced by many. While the two religions are not 'mixed', but they are both realities in many a Christians life, though realities of a different kind. The author explores the intricate and often varied relationship between the two and considers factors which increase or decrease dual religiosity.
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.
Innovations in Achieving Sustainable Food Security in Eastern and Southern Africa addresses roles and issues related to social and institutional innovations and approaches in food security in Southern and Eastern Africa. They include implementation of food security policy, rural livelihood and agricultural innovation, land consolidation for food security, interdisciplinary school-based health for food security, harnessing indigenous and modern knowledge for food security, household food resource handling for food security, institutions for technological innovation, role of land tax in food security, trade protectionism and food security, and gender-power relations in food security.
Science and Spirituality
(2016)
Science and Spirituality is an attempt to highlight the spiritual potential within the recent and on-going discoveries in both the science of the quantum world and the science of the larger cosmos. Science is now confirming what the mystics of former ages taught us. Somehow, these mystics, through silence and meditation, were able to discern and touch deep truths about what existence means. Abstract Algebra, which was once perceived as purely abstract with no practical application, is now at the heart of explaining existence within the quantum world. Thus mathematics, science and spirituality are just different faces of the same reality. This small booklet 'Science and Spirituality' merely introduces different aspects of this one reality which the author hopes to develop in more detail in further booklets.
In this book Klaus Fiedler offers a candid critique of religious faith healing claims - a critique that extents to the Voluntary Male Medical Circumcision Campaign (VMMCC). The book reveals the lack of substantive evidence to back such healing claims and the contradiction between the VMMCC claims and the consequences of those claims in sexual health and practice.
Taming My Elephant
(2016)
In Oshiwambo, the elephant is likened to the most challenging situation that people can face. If an elephant appears in the morning, all planned activities are put on hold and the villagers join forces to deal with it. For Tshiwa Trudie Amulungu, the elephant showed up on many mornings and she had no choice but to tame it. Growing up in a traditional household in northern Namibia, and moving to a Catholic school, Amulungus life started within a very ordered framework. Then one night in 1977 she crossed the border into Angola with her schoolmates and joined the liberation movement. Four months later she was studying at the UN Institute for Namibia in Lusaka Zambia, later going on to study in France. Amulungu recounts the cultural shocks and huge discoveries she made along her journey with honesty, emotion and humour. She draws the reader into her experiences through a close portrayal of life, friends and community in the different places where she lived and studied in exile. This is a compelling story of survival, longing for home, fear of the return, and overcoming adversity in strange environments. It is also a love story that brought two families and cultures together.
Malawi Assemblies of God church embarked on a feasible journey of Vision 2020 that included every established church to plant one church and send one student to Bible school each year. From the time this vision was adopted, some churches have responded positively and some are still struggling on where and how to get involved. This booklet is a church planting and growth manual that will assist those that feel it is too difficult to plant and raise a church and those who would like to add knowledge in their task.
It is common knowledge that HIV is widespread in Malawi as it is in many other countries of Southern Africa. It is also a well-known fact that women suffer most and frequently are blamed the most. Many attempts are being made to address the pandemic and reduce the suffering, and often women are the focus. This book differs in that it looks at the other side, men. It contends that men have to play a major role in the fight, not only by changing behaviour but also by understanding concepts of masculinity and that women may also profit from that.
Soyinka's Language
(2016)
Combined together in three volumes are the author's writings on labour and employments relations in Nigeria spanning over three and a half decades. Volume one covers the Nigerian industrial relations industrial relations institutional and legal framework, trade unions and trade unionism, wage bargains and conflict relations.
As there are different races and people in the world, so there are different cultures - meaning that cultural diversity is inevitable. Through human contact and association cultures meet. In such meetings every individual and culture projects itself as worthy, and should be held in high esteem. In today's world it is not encouraging to be ethnocentric - always taking action or inactions that crystallize and project a feeling of one's own culture or racial superiority. Such attitude obstructs meaningful interaction, human relations, tolerance and co-operation. Conversely, the skill and ability to tolerate and communicate effectively with people from diverse cultures is a social activity which begins from thought to behaviour, in both spoken and non-spoken versions. The book contains 19 essays, structured into five parts.
The legal protection of intellectual property in Nigeria is the focus of this book. Its nine chapters dwell on copyright trademarks, patents, industrial designs and the legal protection of intellectual property in Nigeria. An overview is given of the law relating to the subject in order to facilitate a solid grounding in the law as a starting point from which various political, theoretical or other perspectives can be developed. There is substantial reliance on the relevant Nigerian statutes on copyright, trademarks, patents and industrial designs as contained in the Laws of the Federation 2004, and also on the reported cases decided in this area by Nigerian courts over the years. References are also given to the case and statutory laws in some other jurisdictions, especially where Nigerian legislative enactments need a reform. It is straightforward and comprehensive, intended as a basis both for undergraduates and for postgraduate courses, in addition to being useful to teachers, lawyers, judges, magistrates and accessible for general readership.
This is a book of reading on religion and culture in Africa comprising ten papers by experts in religion and cultural matters and an introductory note by the editor himself. Covered in the volume are papers covering: the impact of secularisation and urbanisation on a most cherished socio-cultural practice of the extended family system of the Isoko people in Nigeria; the traditional medical practices in Urhobo with particular focus on the use of local herbs to treat ailments; the socioreligious as well as the political significance of Obiri (family hall) in Ikwerreland; the rationale behind the use of the concept 'Dunamis' in the Gospel According to Staint Mark. Although his paper does not focus on African (traditional) religion, its inclusion here is based purely on the theological significance of the concept of 'Dunamis'; the extent to which evil spirits and mysterious forces have influenced the religion and culture of the Urhobo people of Nigeria; the significance of festivals in the traditional African society; John Wesley's innovations in Christendom and their implications for Africa; the recent unprecedented upsurge in the assumed use of religious powers to cast out evil spirits as well as for prayer healing among Muslims in Nigeria; the culture of alienation, anxiety and violence, drawing inspiration from the Fall Story of Genesis 3; and the widowhood practices of some areas in Nigeria.
This book contains papers which focus on the twin subjects of globalisation and information/communication technologies (ICTs). They express either fear or optimism regarding their effects on the survival of indigenous cultures, languages and literature. This book is a must read for anyone who is interested to learn more about the role of globalisation in the erosion of cultural as well as linguistic diversity, and the impact of ICTs in the development of indigenous languages in Africa.
A Grammar of Igala
(2016)
The book establishes 28 phonemic consonants and 7 vowels, as well as lexical and grammatical tones in Igala. It shows the canonical syllable types as V and CV with no complexity, and relates resyllabification to the retiming of segments as tone bearing units and the duration of their mora. The work discusses nine word classes, as well as ideophones and clitics in Igala. There are splitting verbs of various structures and fully-fledged pronouns with morphologically toneless clitic counterparts that are toned in their syntactic context, among other elements of the Igala morphology. The work establishes clitics as generally bearing the grammatical tones of various categories as a result of their morphological tonelessness and their availability for post-lexical tone assignment. It also accounts for the generally complex interaction of clitics and tones in the organisation of the morphosyntax and the tone-syntax interface. Igala has both verbal and nominal extensional affixes with various semantic features. Some interesting discussions in the Igala syntax include the structural and functional types of serial verb constructions, the detransitivizing process of verb movement in object demoting structures, coreferentiality in relativised constituents and the future/non-future temporal distinction. Complementary binominals are conjoined with a specified binominal morpheme, and their rigidly irreversible structures have implications in the Igala semantics. The binominals demonstrate a grammatically specified pattern defined over a conceptual space, showing the network among conceptual categories, such as kinship, marital, social, hunter-hunted, more-less and cause-effect relationships as reflected in the Igala grammar.
The book is an introduction to the study of culture, with emphasis on the dynamism factor intrinsic and susceptible to generating growth, development initiatives and change, especially in religion and other aspects of Nigerian society. The collection of 19 papers is organised into five parts: Concepts and Theoretical Alignments, Social Institutions in Culture Change and Development, Religious Traditions and Change Experience, Votaries and Sectarian Reaction to Culture and Religious Change, and Pastoral Objective and the Management of Cultural Diversity and Change in Christianity.
The papers in this volume were selected from the Silver Jubilee edition of the Annual Conference of the Linguistic Association of Nigerian (LAN) which was held at the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC), Abuja, Nigeria. The Silver Jubilee edition is dedicated to the father of Nigerian Linguistics, Professor Emeritus Ayo Bamgbose. Professor Emeritus Bamgbose was the first indigenous Professor of Linguistics in Nigeria, and the first black African to teach linguistics in any known university south of the Sahara. He was there from the very beginning, and together with co-operation of people such as the late Professor Kay Williamson, he nurtured Nigerian linguistics. He is not just a foremost Nigerian linguist, but also a most famous, respected, celebrated, distinguished, and cherished African linguist of all times. To be candid, Nigerian linguistics is synonymous with Professor Emeritus Bamgbose. In 58 well-written chapters by experts in their fields, the book covers aspects of Nigerian languages, linguistics, literatures and culture. The papers have not been categorized into sections; rather they flow, hence there is some overlapping in the arrangement. The book is an essential resource for all who are interested to learn about current trends in the study of languages, linguistics and related subject-matters in Nigeria.
The present volume, which is the 5th in the Nigerian Linguists Festschrift Series, is devoted to Professor Munzali A. Jibril, a celebrated icon in university administration, and an erudite Professor of English Linguistics. The title of this special edition was specifically chosen to crown Professor Jibril?s academic prowess in both English and indigenous Nigerian languages, and to mark and laud his official departure from active university lectureship. 72 assessed papers are included from the many submitted. Papers cover the main theme of the volume, i.e. the interaction between English and indigenous Nigerian languages, and there are a number of papers on other secular areas of linguistics such as: language and history, language planning and policy, language documentation, language engineering, lexicography, translation, gender studies, language acquisition, language teaching and learning, pragmatics, discourse and conversational analysis, and literature in English and African languages. There is also a rich section devoted to the majwor ?traditional? fields of linguistics - phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.
The Landmarks Series is a research and publications outfit funded by the Landmarks Research Foundation to publish recent outstanding doctoral dissertations on any aspect of Nigerian linguistics, languages, literatures and cultures. This study is a departer from most previous work on Yoruba Grammar in the sense that rather than being purely a descriptive grammar; it attempts to provide a theoretical analysis of the internal and external syntax of Yoruba nominal expressions using the Chomskyan Principles and Parameters approach to syntax. This Generative theory attempts to characterize the grammar of all natural languages in terms of a set of universal principles that all languages share, and a set of parameters along which languages may vary. The book emphasizes the empirical motivation behind major theoretical proposals in that framework, and shows how views on the nature of universal grammar and cross-linguistic variation have developed over the years as a consequence of a massive increase in cross-linguistic syntactic research.
The papers in this collection present the numeral systems of more than twenty Nigerian languages. The papers mainly emanate from a workshop on the numeral systems of Nigerian languages organised by the Linguistic Association of Nigeria during its 23rd Annual Conference which was held at the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The workshop arose from awareness created by Dr. Eugene S.L. Chan on the need for Nigerian linguists to document this severely endangered but very important aspect of natural languages. The quantum of mathematical computations - addition, multiplication, subtraction, or a combination of two or all of these - involved in the numeral systems of Nigerian languages is remarkable. The papers reveal that a variety of numeral systems do exist, such as: binary, decimal, incomplete decimal, duodecimal, quinary, quaternary, ternary, mixed, body-part tally systems, and much more. The book is a resource about how different languages manipulate their numeral systems.
This book describes the Nyae Nyae Village Schools, an innovative and unique mother-tongue education initiative set in north-eastern Namibia. Inspired by the optimism of Independence, the project was designed in close consultation with the Ju|?hoansi community in the early 1990s. Drawing upon their traditional knowledge transmission strategies, and initiated in a supportive political environment, the project exemplified ?best practice.? During the following two decades, the Village Schools have transitioned from a donor-supported ?project? to government schools, and have received much attention and support from donors, civil society organisations, researchers, and others. However, the students still do not seem to succeed in the mainstream schools. Why is this? Based on long-term field-work in the region, including interviews with Nyae Nyae residents over several years and work with involved organisations, the book addresses this question. Contextualising the Village Schools within post-Independence Namibia, southern African history and the global indigenous rights movement, it examines the enormous paradoxes that schooling presents for the Nyae Nyae community. ?Owners of Learning? is the English translation of the Ju|?hoansi word for ?teacher? and it serves to highlight a fundamental question ? to whom does education belong?
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.
This book brings together recent and ongoing empirical studies to examine two relational kinds of politics, namely, the politics of nature, i.e. how nature conservation projects are sites on which power relations play out, and the politics of the scientific study of nature. These are discussed in their historical and present contexts, and at specific sites on which particular human-environment relations are forged or contested. This spatio-temporal juxtaposition is lacking in current research on political ecology while the politics of science appears marginal to critical scholarship on social nature. Specifically, the book examines power relations in nature-related activities, demonstrates conditions under which nature and science are politicised, and also accounts for political interests and struggles over nature in its various forms. The ecological, socio-political and economic dimensions of nature cannot be ignored when dealing with present-day environmental issues. Nature conservation regulations are concerned with the management of flora and fauna as much as with humans. Various chapters in the book pay attention to the ways in which nature, science and politics are interrelated and also co-constitutive of each other. They highlight that power relations are naturalised through science and science-related institutions and projects such as museums, botanical gardens, wetlands, parks and nature reserves.
Achieving a new integration of Africa into the world economy in the neoliberal era prompts discussion of the success and failure of economic policies undertaken so far in African countries; And how to address the factors that currently hamper Africa's development in a globalized economy. What does globalization mean for Africa? What changes does it imply? Which models of development impose, and under what conditions? A comprehension essay is presented in this book.
What are the issues discussed today by African philosophers? Four important topics are identified here as important objects of philosophical reflection on the African continent. One is the question of ontology in relation to African religions and aesthetics. Another is the question of time and, in particular, of prospective thinking and development. A third issue is the task of reconstructing the intellectual history of the continent through the examination of the question of orality but also by taking into account the often neglected tradition of written erudition in Islamic centres of learning. Timbuktu is certainly the most important and most famous of such intellectual centres. The fourth question concerns political philosophy: the concept of 'African socialisms' is revisited and the march that led to the adoption of the 'African Charter of Human and Peoples' Rights' is examined. All these important issues are also fundamental to understanding the question of African languages and translation.
Scholars, especially those interested in understanding how leadership has inhibited academic freedom and hindered effectiveness of institutions of higher learning have for long been engaged by the very important manner in which governance and leadership of higher education institutions in Africa is constituted and managed. The fact that there has been a dearth of work based on the experiences of those who have served as university leaders has created a major gap. Questions remain on how leaders of higher education institutions are identified, how they are prepared, the personal predispositions that individuals bring to the exercise of such positions and their personal experiences regarding what energizes or inhibits the performance of their work. Until recently, presidents in most African countries served as chancellors of public universities, identification of those who served as university leaders was largely a political process. But much has changed, with most countries establishing oversight bodies and the overall governance of higher education institutions divorced from the day-to-day political processes. Trails in Academic and Administrative Leadership in Kenya provides a personal account of the experiences in higher education leadership from an individual whose tenure in leadership straddled the two eras. In this book, Prof. Michieka provides an account of how his early education prepared him for roles in academic and institutional leadership in Kenya. The author shares his experiences on the trails he had to navigate as an academic, a vice-chancellor and a chairperson of university council at a time when universities in Kenya were transiting from extreme government administrative control to a greater degree of operational autonomy. Readers will find in this work thought-provoking insights on how leaders of higher education institutions in Kenya have had to balance between demands of the political system and the need to safeguard academic traditions in the everyday management of the institutions.
Elections and Governance in Nigerias Fourth Republic is a book about Nigerian politics, governance and democracy. It at once encompasses Nigerias post-colonial character, its political economy, party formation since independence, the role of Electoral Commissions, as well as, indepth analyses of the 1999, 2003 and 2007 general elections that involved extensive fieldwork. It also presents aspects of the 2011 and 2015 general elections, while discussing the state of democratic consolidation, and lessons learned for achieving good governance in the country. It is indeed, a must read for students of politics, academics, politicians, statesmen and policy makers, and in fact, stakeholders in the Nigerian democracy project. The book stands out as a well-researched and rich documentary material about elections in Nigeria, and the efforts so far made in growing democracy.
This multidisciplinary work shows the movement today of academic research in social sciences in Senegal.
The National Council for Higher Education (NCHE) and the Growth of the University Sub-sector in Uganda, 2002-2012, narrates the experience of the Ugandan NCHE in the establishment, development and regulation of higher education institutions in Uganda from 2002 to 2012. In this period, student numbers in higher education institutions increased from about 65,000 to some 200,000 and university institutions from about ten to more than triple the number. The book discusses the role of a regulatory agency in the delivery of higher education, the relations of universities and colleges with such an agency, its impact on developing university capacities, and leadership in creating and refining higher education ideas. The experience of Ugandas regulatory agency, the NCHE, in those ten years should help both the Ugandan and other African countries higher education stakeholders in sharing lessons learned from this one case study. The author sees the roles of regulatory agencies as vital in the initial stages of building a higher education sub-sector and in periods of system transitions such as the current journey from elite to mass systems but is of the view that the university remains the home of knowledge creation, dissemination, and its application in society.
Ghana attained independence in 1957. From 1992, when a new constitution came into force and established a new democratic framework for governing the country, elections have been organized every four years to choose the governing elites. The essays in this volume are about those elections because elections give meaning to the role of citizens in democratic governance. The chapters depart from the study of formal structures by which the electorate choose their representatives. They evaluate the institutional forms that representation take in the Ghanaian context, and study elections outside the specific institutional forms that according to democratic theory are necessary for arriving at the nature of the relationships that are formed between the voters and their representatives and the nature and quality of their contribution to the democratic process.
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.