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This empirically grounded study provides a critical reflection on the land question in Africa, research on which tends to be tangential, conceptually loose and generally inadequate. It argues that the most pressing research concern must be to understand the precise nature of the African land question, its land reforms and their effects on development. To unravel the roots of land conflicts in Africa requires thorough understanding of the complex social and political contradictions which have ensued from colonial and post-colonial land policies, as well as from Africa's 'development' and capital accumulation trajectories, especially with regard to the land rights of the continent's poor. The study thus questions the capacity of emerging neo-liberal economic and political regimes in Africa to deliver land reforms which addr
This is the fourth in a series of publications on Zambian languages and grammar. The intention of the series is to boost the meagre scholarship and availability of educational materials on Zambian languages, which became particularly urgent in 1996, following the decision of the Zambian government to revert to the policy of using local languages as media of instruction. Kaonde (or more correctly Kikaonde) is spoken in the part of the North-Western Province of Zambia to the east of the Kabompo River, in adjacent parts of Mumbwa and Kaoma Districts to the south, and in the Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo to the North.
Azanian Love Song
(2007)
Donato Francesco Mattera has been celebrated as a journalist, editor, writer and poet. He is also acknowledged as one of the foremost activists in the struggle for a democratic South Africa, and helped to found both the Union of Black Journalists, the African Writer's Association and the Congress of South African Writers. Born in 1935 in Western Native Township (now Westbury) across the road from Sophiatown, Mattera can lay claim to an intriguingly diverse lineage: his paternal grandfather was Italian, and he has Tswana, Khoi-Khoi and Xhosa blood in his veins.
The Botsotso literary journal started in 1996 as a monthly 4 page insert in the New Nation, an independent anti-apartheid South African weekly and reached over 80,000 people at a time ? largely politisized black workers and youth ? with a selection of poems, short stories and short essays that reflected the deep changes taking place in the country at that time. Since the closure of the New Nation in 1999, the journal has evolved into a stand-alone compilation featuring the same mix of genres, and with the addition of photo essays and reviews. The Botsotso editorial policy remains committed to creating a mix of voices which highlight the diverse spectrum of South African identities and languages, particularly those that are dedicated to radical expression and examinations of South Africa's complex society.
Captive of Fate
(2007)
Captive of Fate is the moving story of Ann, a victim of her own need for genuine love, and her gullibility in falling head over heels into the traps of lust set up by clever men. As Ann's biographic narrative unfolds, the reader is faced again and again with the haunting question: 'Do all men want only one thing from a woman?' Hidden between the lines and yet hammering constantly at the reader's conscience are issues pertaining to gender violence and the plight of women in Africa.
This volume highlights the proceedings of the two policy dialogue conferences held by the Working Group on Finance and Education (WGFE) in 2004. Part I of the document discusses the endemic crisis that higher educationhas been beset with since the outset of the post colonial period in Africa. It highlights the critical state of higher education systems in Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal by scrutinizing the causes, manifestations and consequences of the crisis to posit useful recommendations and possible solutions. Part II is a comprehensive review of the challenges facing the financing and planning of all levels and types ofeducation - from kindergarten to graduate school - in selected African countries. The papers reveal the sources and mechanisms of funding education in Africa, drawing attention to the experiences of communities confronted with new funding sources. A new trend, which consists of designing decade long educational development plans, has emerged and is rapidly expanding in numerous African countries. This experience is examined and shared by the authors. This book has contributions in both French and English.
In the context of AIDS and a declining economy, one strategy for children to ensure their own livelihood is to engage in domestic employment. Here, Michael Bourdillon presents the findings of research based on interviews and discussions with child domestic workers in Zimbabwe. It looks at the circumstances that pushed them into employment, the hardships and humiliations they face therein, as well as the benefits they derive, including, in some cases, education. Most children wanted improvements in their living and working conditions. They did not want to be stopped from working, perceiving that this would worsen their already harsh lives. While child domestic wok is problematic, and often lays children open to various types of abuse, it can also offer critical support and patronage to very disadvantaged children.
Art, Culture and Society Vol 1 is the first in a series of books to be published by Twaweza Communications on the relationship between art and society, with special reference to Kenya. It is part of a cultural leadership initiative being undertaken by the organization through a reexamination of the arts as they are produced and studied. This volume brings together important reflections on the arts and is a major step in encouraging dialogue on the relationship between creativity and the human condition in the region. Significantly, it creates a space for university-based academics to engage in dialogue with artists and writers based outside institutions of higher learning. The conversations will bridge the gap between the two domains for knowledge production and enrich creative enterprise in Kenya, in theory and practice. As the essays in this collection show, the present global situation demands a way to conceptualise and theorise an ever growing cultural interconnectedness, sometimes manifested in art; and interconnectedness that draws from a myriad of cultures and experiences. Through the bridges of contact and cultural exchange distant images are mediated and brought closer to us. They are reinterpreted and modified. In the final analysis, culture is shown to be an important aspect of human creativity but separateness and boundedness is contested. Instead, culture is shown to be malleable and fluid. The essays bring in a new freshness to our reading of the creative arts coming out of Kenya.
From its modest beginnings in the mid-19th century, Dar es Salaam has grown to become one of sub-Saharan Africa?s most important urban centres. A major political, economic and cultural hub, the city stood at the cutting edge of trends that transformed twentieth-century East Africa. Dar es Salaam has recently attracted the attention of a diverse, multi-disciplinary, range of scholars, making it currently one of the continent?s most studied urban centres. This collection from eleven scholars from Africa, Europe, North America and Japan, draws on some of the best of this scholarship and offers a comprehensive, and accessible, survey of the city?s development. The perspectives include history, musicology, ethnomusicology, culture including popular culture, land and urban economics. The opening chapter offers a comprehensive overview of the history of the city. Subsequent chapters examine Dar es Salaam?s twentieth century experience through the prism of social change and the administrative repercussions of rapid urbanisation; and through popular culture and shifting social relations. The book will be of interest not only to the specialist in urban studies but also to the general reader with an interest in Dar es Salaam?s environmental, social and cultural history.
The subject of human rights and its attendant these of access to justice have remained relevant areas to the legal fraternity. This relevance resonates well in the fields of teaching and learning the law, consultancy, legal practice and advocacy, law reform, and judicial decision making. In the East African region, however, the availability of research and reference material for these two areas of learning has remained low. It is against the backdrop of the foregoing that the publishing of the Digest on Human Rights and Access to Justice in East Africa is an important aspect of the development of the law in the region. Bringing together decisions of both municipal courts within the East Africa region beyond, the digest has breathed a totally new lease of life into the practice and comparative legal studies in the area of human rights and access to justice. To a large extent, the digest has robbed practitioners of law of the excuses attendant to poor advocacy in the arena of human rights. It has robbed judicial officer of the excuses attendant to shallow and poorly reasoned judgments. It has robbed students and teachers of law the excuses attendant to poorly researched theses in the area of human rights. Definitely, it has added immense value to the consumers of human rights and access to justice. This Digest is a product of the fruitful on-going collaboration between LawAfrica Publishing Ltd and East Africa Law Society. Both LawAfrica with its East Africa Law Reports, and EALS, with its ever-growing collaboration between East African lawyers, yearn for greater integration of legal practice in the three East African countries. This Digest is a contribution to that desire.
Fragmented Melodies
(2007)
This volume discusses a number of issues on the contested nature of intellectual property rights (IPR) and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) in the context of Southern Africa. The issues addressed include the protection of folklore, IKS in a digital era, the valuation and safeguard of heritage sites, the need for appropriate IKS legislation, community based control of natural resources and the role played by traditional music in the maintenance of community. It is this extensive exploration of IKS from the vantage points of communication and culture, and explored in terms of policy, cultural survival, international as well as intra-national politics, economics, philosophy and ethics that makes this empirical grounded collection of papers unique, a distinctive contribution to the literature and 'cause' of IKS. The specific IKS-related issues raised and dealt with in this volume are generic in the sense that the very same issues are being contested in different parts of the world. In this respect, this book highlights the particular as a means of comprehending the universal.
It Happened in Ghana carries a positive message. Conceived as a literary work, it demonstrates that racial prejudice based on skin colour is not a pervasive and unalterable human condition. The principal characters who are both Black and White are embroiled in various encounters, notably wars, slave trade, colonialism and post colonial reconstruction. Regardless of their skin colour and cultural differences, they make friends or fall in love secretly during these encounters. When they are forced to part company by the cessation of hostilities or whatever brought them together, they serve in various capacities in new locations outside their original places of domicile. They are accepted or integrated into existing social structures because of the warmth oftheir personalities and the manner in which they are able to adjust themselves to the pressures and challenges of new environments. Changes in the circumstances of the principal characters or their descendants enable them not only to restore broken relationships but also to identify themselves with the cause of freedom and justice or to reconnect in various ways with the development aspirations of Ghana where it all started.
The year-long celebration of Ghana's Golden Jubilee provides a fitting context for the republication of the book Kwame Nkrumah: Vision and Tragedy. In the lead-up to the celebration and over the course of the year, the life and times of Kwame Nkrumah will receive unprecedented public attention, official and unofficial. Kwame Nkrumah's very wide name-recognition is, paradoxically, accompanied by sketchy, often oversimplified knowledge about the events and processes of his life and times. For most of those born after independence in 1957, such knowledge does not extend much beyond who Kwame Nkrumah was and vague notions about he won us Independence. This book presents new material and new analysis, which helps to clarify aspects of the record, while advancing new perspectives. What comes across clearly throughout the book is the significant contribution of Nkrumah's vision and personality at a critical moment in the history of Africa and the Third World. He, perhaps more than any other, was able to identify, focus and catalyse the major factors and players driving the struggle for political independence in Ghana and liberation in other parts of Africa. In the process, he committed his life and work totally to a wide variety of activities and processes in Ghana, the continent and in the global Non-Aligned Movement.
Weaver Press's previous collections of short stories, Writing Now and Writing Still, were highly praised for the quality of their prose and the imagination of their writers. They confirmed, for one reviewer, 'the paradoxical truth that troubled societies somehow produce some of the most interesting writing available. Laughing Now goes further, and demonstrates the enduring capacity of Zimbabweans to find humour in even the most difficult of circumstances. The stories embrace funerals, dancing competitions, family tensions, rampant inflation and endless queues for scarce goods. They take a wry look at pompous politicians, foreign filmmakers and the aspirations of the so-called 'new' farmers. Those by Gappah, Chingono and Eppel won the first three prizes in the recent Mukuru.com short story competition. Zimbabwean fiction in English has become world-renowned in recent decades, but its concerns - war, trauma and the trials of independence - have chronicled the pain of those periods. Laughing Now suggests that we are finding new ways to reflect our reality; that however many zeros we add to the rate of inflation, and however hungry we may become, humour is as good a responce as any.
Paul E. Isert, a Dane, arrived in Ghana (then the Gold Coast) in 1783, taking advantage of an opening in the slave trade between Guinea and the West Indies. He was appointed as chief surgeon to the Danish establishments on the Guinea Coast. In 1786 he sailed to the West Indies with a cargo of slaves, who revolted. His experiences in Ghana and the West Indies resolved him to end the trans-Atlantic slave abuse. This book is written in the form of letters to his father. An elusive character, it is clear that he nonetheless had an unreservedly positive attitude towards Africa and its indigenous peoples, and an equally negative attitude towards the Europeans on the Guinea coast. An admirer of Rousseau?s philosophy, he was concerned about the corrupting influence of the European ?civilisation? on the ?Blacks?. His writing attempts at objectivity, seeking to find the common humanity. He claims that the ?Black? was, at least equal to that of the ?European?,which was not shared by his Danish predecessors. This is the first English language edition of his original Danish letters, previously published in German, Dutch, French, and Swedish.
Mind Searching
(2007)
In Mind Searching Nyamnjoh has attempted to do something rather clever - to expose, through the attitudes, feelings and thoughts of one man and a very simple story, the hypocrisy and corruption of Cameroon society and humanity in general, often using understatement and irony in good effect. The commentary is unremittingly cynical and returns again and again to corruption, callous squandering, exploitation, prostitution, and other fairly worn butts. The book depicts a society where basic freedoms are shackled, and thinking aloud treasonable. Hence the mental ramblings of the narrator and central character Judascious Fanda Yanda, in the form of an extended monologue full of observations, anecdotes and asides written from the point of view of an apparently insouciant naive. The basic method is to foreground the opinions and conversational elegance of the narrator, while having events going on as a background to his thoughts. We trace the narrator's progress from a disenchanted 'Damn? de la Terre' to a comfortably well off Private Secretary to a Vice Minister over a number of years. It is a clear illustration of how the system perpetuates its mediocrity and buys off any spark of initiative. Nyamnjoh has a good command of ironic tone and sound control over form and structure. He employs a very fluent style, and often has very urbane and neat turns of phrase. He captures the bored, superior, cynical and ultimately predatory tone of voice of his narrator extremely well.