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Knowledge for justice : critical perspectives from southern african-nordic research partnerships
(2017)
With the adoption of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement, the purpose of development is being redefined in both social and environmental terms. Despite pushback from conservative forces, change is accelerating in many sectors. To drive this transformation in ways that bring about social, environmental and economic justice at a local, national, regional and global levels, new knowledge and strong cross-regional networks capable of foregrounding different realities, needs and agendas will be essential. In fact, the power of knowledge matters today in ways that humanity has probably never experienced before, placing an emphasis on the roles of research, academics and universities. In this collection, an international diverse collection of scholars from the southern African and Nordic regions critically review the SDGs in relation to their own areas of expertise, while placing the process of knowledge production in the spotlight. In Part I, the contributors provide a sober assessment of the obstacles that neo-liberal hegemony presents to substantive transformation. In Part Two, lessons learned from NorthSouth research collaborations and academic exchanges are assessed in terms of their potential to offer real alternatives. In Part III, a set of case studies supply clear and nuanced analyses of the scale of the challenges faced in ensuring that no one is left behind. This accessible and absorbing collection will be of interest to anyone interested in NorthSouth research networks and in the contemporary debates on the role of knowledge production. The Southern AfricanNordic Centre (SANORD) is a network of higher education institutions that stretches across Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Universities in the southern African and Nordic regions that are not yet members are encouraged to join.
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 book questions colonial and apartheid ideologies on being human and being African, ideologies that continue to shape how research is conceptualised, taught and practiced in universities across Africa. Africans immersed in popular traditions of meaning-making are denied the right, by those who police the borders of knowledge, to think and represent their realities in accordance with the civilisations and universes they know best. Often, the ways of life they cherish are labelled and dismissed too eagerly as traditional knowledge by some of the very African intellectual elite they look to for protection. The book makes a case for sidestepped traditions of knowledge. It draws attention to Africa's possibilities, prospects and emergent capacities for being and becoming in tune with its creativity and imagination. It speaks to the nimble-footed flexible-minded 'frontier African' at the crossroads and junctions of encounters, facilitating creative conversations and challenging regressive logics of exclusionary identities. The book uses Amos Tutuola's stories to question dualistic assumptions about reality and scholarship, and to call for conviviality, interconnections and interdependence between competing knowledge traditions in Africa.
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.
The African conundrum... is rooted out of the historical, philosophical and cultural bastardisation, imbalances and inequalities which many post-colonial African governments have always sought to address, though with varying degrees of success, since the 1960s. Lamentably, this African conundrum is rarely examined in a systematic manner that takes into account the geopolitical milieu of the continent, past and present. This volume seeks to interrogate and examine the extent of the impact of the geopolitical seesaw which seems poised to tip in favour of the Global North. The book grapples with the question on how Africa can wake up from its cavernous intellectual slumber to break away from both material and psychological dependency and achieve a transformative political and socio-economic self-reinvention and self-assertion. While the African conundrum is largely a result of historic oppression and a resilient colonial legacy, this book urges Africans to rethink their condition in a manner that makes Africa responsible and accountable for its own destiny. The book argues that it is through this rethinking that Africa can successfully transcend the logic of post-imperial dependency.
There are milliards of off beam assumptions that Africa will always remain immobile in development of whatever type. This pseudo take has mainly been propounded by Western thinkers in order to dubiously make Africans internalise and reinforce this flimsy and flimflam dependency. Africa needs to embark on paradigm shift; and tweak and turn things around. Africa has what it take to do so quickly, especially now that new economic powers such as China and India are evolving as counterweight to the West. Shall Africa use these new economic forces to its advantage based on fair and win-win cooperation? To do so, Africa must make sure that it does not slink back into business as usual vis-a-vis beggarliness, dependence, frailty, gullibility, made-up backwardness, monkey business, and pipedreams, not to mention the nasty and narcissistic behaviours of its venal and navel-gazing rulers. Verily, Africa needs, inter alia, to use its God-given gifts, namely, immense resources, young population, abundance of vast and unexploited amounts of land. Equally, Africa must, without equivocation, invest copiously and earnestly in its people, the youth in the main. Most of all, Africa needs to shy away from all colonial carryovers and encumbrances. This volume shows many ways through and by which Africa can inverse the current imbroglio-cum-no-go it faces for the better; and thereby actualise the dream of being truly independent and prosperous.
This book comprises 19 creative non-fiction pieces and essays centred around the topics of language, thought, art and existence seen through the prism of practising artist in contemporary Africa. The collection continues with Zimbabwe's Tendai Mwanaka's creative non-fiction ideology of presenting non-fiction in a creative, fresh, easy reading, simple language. With most of the essays driven by personal stories, the author ably renders them accessible to a wide spectrum of readers from the scholarly to the journalistic and the general. The pieces are grouped according to the topics, with the language essays starting the book, followed by thought, existential, and art essays. In tune with the adage the personal is political, Mwanaka lets the personal drive these essays as he tries to investigate and conversationally navigate his thoughts, beliefs, feelings and experience on language, existence and art. This is an invaluable contribution to the academic establishment, social theorists, linguists, literary theorists, journalists, activists and the general readership.
Migration from Malawi to South Africa : A Historical and Cultural Novel ; Real-life Experiences
(2017)
Since the discovery and exploitation of minerals like gold, diamond and copper in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Malawi has played the role of a labour supplier. Malawians were attracted by the relatively higher wages obtaining in the South African mines up to the period of the decline in mine migrancy at the end of the 1980s. Following this decline, a cross-section of Malawians continued to emigrate to South Africa to seek various jobs in the burgeoning informal sector and also for trade purposes. Migration from Malawi to South Africa sheds light on the problems that labour migrants and traders encounter as they are 'toing' and 'froing' between Malawi and South Africa in pursuit of their respective goals. It shows that migration, which initially was exclusively done for wage employment, is becoming more complex by the day. This is a result of the infusion of elements of commercial migration, smuggling and human trafficking. The book advances the argument that the numbers of migrants to South Africa increased in the post-1994 period partly as a result of mal-administration by the successive democratically-elected governments in Malawi. This development weakened Malawi's otherwise promising economy and impoverished the rural masses. The book 'sees' forlorn hope in the future of labour migrants and traders, unless the Malawi Government starts to genuinely have the welfare of the populace at heart! The book is relevant and accessible to policy-makers, university and college students interested in migration studies, general readers and migrants, themselves.
Through multiple points of resistance, The Repressed Expressed underscores how hard it is to build a community in any nation with no beneficial qualities of hope and transparency. This informative collection of essays highlights that wherever stability and order are lacking, the universal appeal is to express that which is suppressed. Also, like a map or guidebook, The Repressed Expressed indicates how people in such geographical prisons strive to transform their agitation into spiritual and political pathways, free of pain and hurt from, and anger towards a dirty and corrupted world. It thus, underpins discord and brings to the fore the authority's penchant for heaping abuse upon those caused to live in fear. In short, The Repressed Expressed is an impressive compilation of literary evidence informing scholarship on opinions and beliefs relating to repression, its expression, and the immeasurable associated cost.
Poetry is fragments of music thrown into the air. The primary job and aim of a poet is to create these musical notes, to play these musical notes, and the wind will take these fragment notes, sounds, musics into the ears of listeners. Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology, Volume 2 is one of those winds among many others. As we all are aware of, when the wind travels it has no boundaries, it collects, it deposits, it mixes things up; you never know where that leaf you see the wind carrying will eventually be deposited, is there another wind, another element that is going to move that leaf to another place... We firmly believe it is a good wind. It will be able to push our poetry making in Zimbabwe into other frontiers. Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology, Volume 2 continues from where we left off with the first Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology we created in 2016. In this Volume 2, we have 77 poems from 30 poets and translators, which include among others; experienced poets, academic poets, street poets, emergent poets, beginning poets, all telling stories associated with what all these poets refer to as home, that is, Zimbabwe. It is an ongoing debate on what is Zimbabwe, what we want our Zimbabwe to be socially, culturally, politically, thus we allowed every opinion space in this anthology, whether us editors agree with them or not. We have poets tackling issues to do with poetry, writing in general, art, place, identity, tradition, struggle, culture, gender, collective understanding, religion, individual, human rights and love, among others.
African societies have rich histories, cultural heritages, knowledge systems, philosophies, and institutions that they have shaped and reshaped through history. However, the continent has been repeatedly portrayed negatively as plagued by multitudinous troubles: famine, conflict, coup, massacres, corruption, disease, illiteracy, refugees, failed state, etc. Even worse, Africans are often viewed as incapable of addressing their problems on their own. Based on such erroneous perspectives and paternalism, exogenous solutions are prescribed, out of context, for African problems. This book sheds light on the positive aspects of African reality under the key concept of 'African potentials'. It is the product of sustained consultation over a five-year period between seasoned African and Japanese anthropologists, sociologists and scholars in other areas of African studies.
This poetry anthology offers a feast and face of poetry as it currently is in Uganda. It is all encompassing and presents a variety of writers ranging from seasoned voices to new ones of great promise. The voices are adventurous, reflective, provocative and even sassy. The poets explore with passion diverse themes from the private to the public realm reassuring the reader that poetry is about everything and is perhaps everything. The pages of this anthology pulsate with rhythmic variations that give unexpected pleasure and provoke the reader to be exceptionally alert. This is a welcome and priceless addition to Uganda Poetry Anthology 2000.
A New History of Tanzania
(2017)
Tanzania, the land and the people have been subject of a great deal of historical research, but there remains no readily accessible and concise history of the country. The aim of this volume is to fill that void. A New History of Tanzania takes its name from a lecture series introduced at the University of Dar es Salaam by Professor Isaria Kimambo in 2002. Prior to that, a book titled, A History of Tanzania, had been published in 1969 by East African Publishing House in Nairobi for the Tanzania Historical Association. That book is currently out of print and this is not a reprint. In this book, Prof. Kimambo has been joined by two other colleagues; Prof. Gregory H. Maddox of Texas Southern University, Houston (USA) and Salvatory S. Nyanto, a Tanzanian, Lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam, and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Iowa (USA); together they have produced an outline history of Tanzania that covers all important aspects from antiquity to the present that is different from and richer than its predecessor. Sources from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, biology, genetics and oral tradition have been used to produce this excellent book.
One of the fundamental challenges in deconstructing, rethinking and remaking the world from a Pan African vantage point is that some captives have tended to delight in the warmth of the [imperial] predator's mouth. In other words, some captives forget that the imperial predator's mouth gets warm because empire is eating and heating up from prey on the continent. (De-)Militarisation, Transnational Land Grabs and Restitution in an Age of the New Scramble for Africa: A Pan African Socio-Legal Perspective is a book that knocks on key aspects relating to land, militarisation, a PostAfrican World Order and a chaotic Post-God World Order, which require critical scholarly and policy attention in the quest to free Africa from centuries-old imperial depredations. The book carefully navigates the imperial entrapments which are designed to focus African attention only on decolonising African minds without also engaging in the [imperially more unsettling] decolonisation of African materialities.
African Studies in the Academy : The Cornucopia of Theory, Praxis and Transformation in Africa?
(2017)
For a long time, African Studies as a discipline has been spearheaded by academics and institutions in the Global North. This puts African Studies on the continent at a crossroads of making choices on whether such a discipline can be legitimately accepted as an epistemological discipline seeking objectivity and truth about Africa and the African peoples or a discipline meant to perpetuate the North's hegemonic socio-economic, political and epistemic control over Africa. The compound question that immediately arises is: Who should produce what and which space should African Studies occupy in the academy both of the North and of the South? Confronted by such a question, one wonders whether the existence of African Studies Centres in the Global North academies open opportunities for critical thinking on Africa or it opens possibilities for the emergence of the same discipline in Africa as a fertile space for trans-disciplinary debate. While approaches critical for the development of African Studies are pervasive in African universities through fields such as cultural studies, social anthropology, history, sociology, indigenous knowledge studies and African philosophy, the discipline of African Studies though critical to Africa is rarely practised as such in the African academy and its future on the continent remains bleak. African Studies in the Academy.is a testimony that if honestly and objectively practised, the crossroads position of African Studies as a discipline makes it a fertile ground for generating and testing new approaches critical for researching and understanding Africa. It also challenges Africa to seriously consider assuming its legitimate position to champion African Studies from within. These issues are at the heart of the present volume.
Yves R. Simon (1903-1961), one of the greatest contemporary philosophers, gives a modern formulation for many classical philosophical concepts such as authority, the common good, and natural law. These topics have received extensive attention from scholars. Simon also discusses the nature of human virtue, moral and intellectual, but this topic has been less studied until now. The idea of virtue, and in our case virtue in political life, runs through Simon's works. Through a close study of Simon's works and the relevant secondary literature, this book explores Simon's definition of virtue in order to highlight its originality, and show how he weaves the need for it into the fabric of three facets of political life, namely, the common good, the virtue of the ruler and the ruled, and the law. These ideas are important for the ruler-ship of any country and especially of developing nations which are populated by sit-tight dictators. Philosophy can be dry and abstract, yet in this case we deal with one of its more practical manifestations.
The Ways We Stretch Toward One Another is a collection of essays on the work of Pamela Reynolds. The essays take cues from Reynolds decades-long contributions to the field of anthropology in different ways. The authors weave Reynolds groundbreaking scholarship on the anthropology of childhoodof labour, of family, of resistance, justice, war and sufferingthrough the terms of their own work, in places and contexts that may at first appear quite distant from the villages of Zimbabwe and townships of South Africa that feature in Reynolds ethnographies. The Ways We Stretch Toward One Another is about anthropologists stretching in thought and practice toward one another, between generations, toward the people encountered in the field, through worlds entered and past, and how, in turn, these worlds lean into our own. At the core of each essay is a question about how we learn, how we pass lessons on, how we assume the mantle of anthropology for understanding the contemporary worldsomething that often requires folding intellectual friendships into the tools of our practice. The Ways We Stretch Toward One Another demonstrates how a master anthropologist has come to shape the priorities of others, in terms that are both creative and aware. Contributors: Thomas Cousins, Stefanos Geroulanos, Todd Meyers, Pamela Reynolds, Fiona Ross, and Vaibhav Saria; and a Foreword by Francis B. Nyamnjoh
This is a book on the state of social anthropology as an academic discipline in contemporary Zimbabwe. The authors are frustrated and disheartened by a problematic visibility and sluggish growth of the discipline in the country. The book makes an important claim that the future and vibrancy of anthropology in Zimbabwe, lies in how well anthropologists in the country and in the diaspora are able to join efforts in articulating, debating and enhancing its relevance and vitality. The book provides critical overview and nuanced analyses of the role and continued relevance of the discipline in reading and interpreting the social unfolding of everyday life and dynamism. It is a vital text for understanding and contextualising histories and trends in the development of social anthropology in Zimbabwe and how anthropologists in the country navigate the tumultuous waters and struggles that have engrossed the discipline since colonial times. The book has the capacity to generate added insights and influence national, continental, and global debates and trends in the field.