Showing papers on "African studies published in 2019"

Intimate Interventions in Global Health : Family Planning and HIV Prevention in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract: When addressing the factors shaping HIV prevention programs in sub-Saharan Africa, it is important to consider the role of family planning programs that preceded the epidemic. In this book, Rachel Sullivan Robinson argues that both globally and locally, those working to prevent HIV borrowed and adapted resources, discourses, and strategies used for family planning. By combining statistical analysis of all sub-Saharan African countries with comparative case studies of Malawi, Nigeria, and Senegal, Robinson also shows that the nature of countries' interactions with the international community, the strength and composition of civil society, and the existence of technocratic leaders influenced variation in responses to HIV. Specifically, historical and existing relationships with outside actors, the nature of nongovernmental organizations, and perceptions of previous interventions strongly structured later health interventions through processes of path dependence and policy feedback. This book will be of great use to scholars and practitioners interested in global health, international development, African studies and political science.

Democracy in Ghana: Everyday Politics in Urban Africa

Abstract: Rapid urbanization and political liberalization is changing the nature of African politics and societies. This book develops a framework for the study of democracy and development that emphasizes informal institutions and the politics of belonging in the context of daily life, in contrast to the formal and electoral paradigms that dominate the social sciences. Based on fifteen months of field research including ethnographic observation, focus group interviews, and original quantitative survey analysis in Ghana, this book intervenes in major debates about public goods provision, civic participation, ethnic politics and democratization, and the future of urban sustainability in a rapidly changing world. By developing new understandings of democracy, as well as providing novel explanations for good governance and development in poor urban neighborhoods, the book transcends the narrative of a failing and corrupt Africa and charts a new way forward for the study of democracy and development.

#HerskovitsMustFall? A Meditation on Whiteness, African Studies, and the Unfinished Business of 1968

Abstract: Why is African Studies in North America dominated by white scholars? In this reflection piece, the 2018 president of the African Studies Association revisits the organization’s sixty-year history, exposing the processes by which white privilege was hardwired into African Studies at the organization’s founding in 1957 and then secured first by the displacement of the much older tradition of African American scholarship on Africa and second by the “recolonization American-style” of knowledge production on the continent in the postcolonial era.

Decolonizing African studies : looking into the GAPs

Abstract: Much has been written on modern Congolese music, particularly in terms of its history and sociology. However, there are no studies dedicated to the literary qualities of the song texts in stylistic, paremiological and thematic terms. In addition, when considering this body of music, the tenacious survival of oral traditions should be taken into account. Such traditions take in the vivid culture of the “eristic”, the art of dispute and energetic discussion, accompanied by satirical turns and more or less subversive circumlocutions. Finally, assert that what “purist” critics consider as “para-literature” (a rather deprecating term) is literature both in terms of its thematic and formal concerns.

African Development and the Marginalisation of Domestic Capitalists

Abstract: The revival of industrial policy discussions has operated in parallel to reports of increasing domestic wealth accumulation across Africa. Regional and continent-wide industrialisation has begun to be rhetorically linked to discussions of regional common markets and through the African Continental Free Trade Area. Yet, there is barely any mention of integrating African capital into the African industrial policy agenda. Instead, the re-imagination of industrial policy relies on foreign investors, particularly the relocation of Chinese industry to various parts of the continent. This paper has two core objectives. Firstly, to explain why the study of African capitalists – popular in the 1980s and 1990s – has remained relatively dormant since then. Dominant narratives – through neopatrimonalism and dependency-inspired arguments – have been pessimistic about the potential of African capitalists to deliver structural transformation. Gradually, these narratives, alongside intellectual trends within mainstream social science and African studies, have discouraged the study of politics of state–business relations in Africa. Yet African capitalists have become increasingly prominent in popular culture. Many of the wealthiest and most prominent capitalists have emerged through owning diversified business groups across the continent. Secondly, this paper argues that more attention should be dedicated to the study of the politics of the emergence and sustenance of African diversified business groups (DBGs). To achieve this goal, a fluid categorisation of DBGs is introduced, building on Ben Ross Schneider’s previous work. Through three country case studies – Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania – this paper highlights how a range of DBGs are emerging across three different political contexts.

#Whatwouldmagufulido? Kenya’s digital “practices” and “individuation” as a (non)political act

Abstract: The ubiquity of new media technologies in many parts of Africa today and the celebratory narratives with which their adoption is routinely discussed in the continent often firmly silence some impor

North-South collaborations as a way of ‘not knowing Africa’: researching digital technologies in Kenya

Abstract: In the study of Africa and African studies in particular, debates abound on the nature, patterns and the direction of knowledge produced about and on Africans. For much of these debates, the main q...

The End of the West and the Future of Us All

Abstract: This paper asserts that we are currently experiencing an epochal shift equal to that which inaugurated modernity. If the Caribbean was central to the production of modernity and the subsequent dominance of the West, it is also central to the current epochal shift. By exploring two dimensions of this shift as experienced in Jamaica – the growing influence of China globally, and the challenge contemporary feminist and sexual activism are posing to gendered notions of racial respectability that had previously served as the backbone of nationalism – the paper reflects on how we are being required to imagine sovereignty in new terms. If we are, in fact, witnessing the death of the West, or at least the destabilisation of the dominant parameters of Western liberal governance, what can the space of the Caribbean, and particularly Jamaica, tell us about what sovereignty might mean now and into the future?

The Fourth Pentecostal Wave in South Africa: A Critical Engagement

Abstract: This book critically examines contemporary Pentecostalism in South Africa and its influence on some of the countries that surround it. Pentecostalism plays a significant role in the religious life of this region and so evaluating its impact is key to understanding how religion functions in Twenty-First Century Africa. Beginning with an overview of the roots of Pentecostalism in Southern Africa, the book moves on to identify a current "fourth" wave of this form of Christianity. It sets out the factors that have given rise to this movement and then offers the first academic evaluation of its theology and practice. Positive aspects as well as extreme or negative practices are all identified in order to give a balanced and nuanced assessment of this religious group and allow the reader to gain valuable insight into how it interacts with wider African society. This book is cutting-edge look at an emerging form of one of the fastest-growing religions in the world. It will, therefore, be of great use to scholars working in Pentecostalism, Theology, Religious Studies and African Religion as well as African Studies more generally.

Ghana-Korea Relations Research: A-State-of-the-Art Review

Abstract: Even though scholars have written on Ghana-Korea relations over the past forty years, there is a lacuna in the literature because there is no “one-stop shop” from which one could easily access the literature. The problem is that scholarly works on Ghana-Korea relations are scattered in books and journals which has made undertaking research on the relations between the two countries a bit Herculean. The purpose of this article is therefore to fill the lacuna and provide a state-of-the-art on some key themes in Ghana-Korea relations which have emerged and yet scattered in scholarly works. They include culture and society; governance and leadership; economy; bilateral relations (including political, economic and technical cooperation); and science and education. The methodology employed is desktop research through the consultation of government publications, books and articles.

Exiled from History: Africa in Hegel's Academic Practice

Abstract: Many scholars, African and otherwise, have excoriated G.W.F. Hegel for his dismissal of Africa from history and progress in his lectures on the philosophies of history and religion. This has been done by quoting his texts and setting his words in the context of his influence on nineteenth-century European imperialism and racism. A different approach informs this paper. I treat Hegel, a complicated person, as a working university academic with a career to make and an overriding desire to publicize his own thought. I provide biographical insights relevant to these matters, and go on to examine specific texts about Africa that Hegel either sought out or chanced upon, read, misread, excerpted, used, and misused in support of his theorizing and apriorism. Attention is paid throughout to the construction, recording, and dissemination of Hegel’s lectures, and to aspects of their reception and authority in the educational formation of selected modern African intellectuals. I argue that such persons and African studies more widely are still trying to come to grips with the long and enduring shadow cast by Hegel over both the past and present of the continent.

African Intellectuals in the Post-colonial World

Abstract: This book examines the role of African intellectuals in the years since the end of colonialism, studying the contribution that has been made by such individuals, both to political causes and to development within Africa. Studying the concept of the "intellectual" within an African context, this book explores the responses of such individuals to crucial issues, such as cultural identity and knowledge production. The author argues that since the end of colonialism in Africa, various, often intertwining, factors, such as nationalism and co-option, have been used by black politicians or the political elites to muddle the roles and functions of black African intellectuals. Focusing on these confused roles and functions, the book posits that, over the years, most intellectuals in Africa have found the practice of "cheerleading" for a political cause more productive than making valuable contributions towards dynamic and progressive leadership in their countries. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African studies, politics, and development studies.

Islamic Polarisation and the Politics of Exclusion in Ghana: Tijaniyya and Salafist Struggles over Muslim Orthodoxy

Abstract: This article explores how the revival of the Tijaniyya and the Salafi movement shaped public discourse about Islam in Ghana. Examining the debates which characterised the religious sphere in the 1990s re-democratisation, the article highlights the power struggle which shaped the relations between the contending Muslim groups. It argues that the recognition of the Tijaniyya movement as a representative for all Muslims during Ghana’s re-democratisation in the 1990s emboldened its sympathisers to adopt repressive measures against the Salafi minority. While the local success of Salafism was often linked to locally specific forms of ethnic, political or generational self-assertion, the shared experience of political disadvantage during this period led to a consolidation of Salafi activities at the national level. Thus, as the Tijaniyya influence was politicised by Government, the ensuing conflicts between Sufi and Salafi groups also led to a politicisation of Salafism from below. Illustrating that intra-Muslim debates and disagreements cannot be divorced from their political context, this study demonstrates that learning to be Muslim in Ghana is deeply embedded in political, ethnic, and intergenerational dynamics.

The future of African Studies: what we can do to keep Africa at the heart of our research

Abstract: Over the past two decades, Africa has returned to academic agendas outside of the continent. At the same time, the field of African Studies has come under increasing criticism for its margi...

The World by Religion

Abstract: This chapter presents tables that represent the results of analysis of data on religion appearing in the World Religion Database . These data are collected from a number of sources including censuses, surveys, polls, religious communities, scholars, and others. After data collection and analysis, discrepancies are worked out and best estimates are made for each religion across a number of years. Results are presented for religionists and nonreligionists as a whole as well as for each religious and non-religious category. One of the tables lists the world's population in 1970, 2000, 2013, and 2030 with two separate 30-year growth rates (1970-2000 and 2000-2030) for comparison with data presented in the religion and nonreligion tables. Keywords: religion; World Religion Database; world's population

Positive tourism in Africa

Abstract: Positive Tourism in Africa provides a crucial counter-narrative to the prevailing colonial and reductionist perspective on Africa's tourism trajectory and future. It offers a uniquely optimistic outlook for tourism in Africa whilst acknowledging the many challenges that African countries continue to grapple with. By examining broad and localized empirical studies, conceptual frameworks, culturally centered paradigms, and innovative methodological approaches for African contexts, this book showcases the many facets of tourism in Africa that illustrate hope, resilience, growth, and survival. This volume explores themes such as community-based tourism, wildlife tourism, tourism governance and leadership, crisis recovery, regional integration, the role of indigenous knowledge, event tourism and the impact of smart technologies. It acknowledges the challenges and opportunities for growth that exist in these various contexts and explores how tourism creates value for the spectrum of its participants. Including a wide selection of contributions from diverse authors, many of them African, this book offers an Afro-centric interpretation of tourism phenomena. It will be of great interest to students, researchers and academics in the field of Tourism and African Studies, as well as Development Studies and Geography.

Tempered Tempos: The Politics of Waiting for Public Services in Contemporary Cape Town

Abstract: This dissertation recognises that waiting for public services in South Africa is becoming an increasingly important point of contestation between the state and its citizens. Rather than exploring the spectacular expressions of this tension seen in ongoing service delivery protests, it foregrounds the everyday experiences of waiting for public services at three key sites in Cape Town: the dispersed everyday waiting for public transport at train stations; the queues at the Department of Home Affairs regional office for South African Identity Document applications; and the waiting room of the Chapel Street Community Health Clinic. In relation to each of these sites, it engages the ethnographic method to investigate who waits for what and for how long, what this waiting entails, and the meanings that those who wait draw from these lengthy and repeated experiences. The dissertation consists of three chapters which put into conversation the connections between postcolonial infrastructural crises, socially fractured temporal experiences, and the everyday culture of interaction with the state. By tracing the history of how infrastructures and systems of delivery were designed to support first the project of colonial modernity, and later the project of apartheid, it explains why the experience of waiting is so prominent in accessing public services in this particular context. It then moves away from the contextual to focus on how these broad frameworks manifest in individuated everyday experiences of waiting. It finds that despite the fact that the modes of waiting vary significantly between sites, in all three, waiting is socially fractured and decidedly uneven, in both obvious and unseen ways. Lastly, it considers the diverse effects of waiting to conclude that although waiting can impel people to patiently endure, there are also moments when waiting is challenged, resisted, and redeployed in the popular domain to take on new and empowering meanings.

Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa

Abstract: Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa demonstrates how instead of empowering the communities they work with, the jargon of development ownership often actually serves to perpetuate the centrality of multilateral organizations and international donors in African development, awarding a fairly minimal role to local partners. In the context of today’s development scheme for Africa, ownership is often considered to be the panacea for all of the aid-dependent continent’s development woes. Reinforced through the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the Accra Agenda for Action, ownership is now the preeminent procedure for achieving aid effectiveness and a range of development outcomes. Throughout this book, the author illustrates how the ownership paradigm dictates who can produce development knowledge and who is responsible for carrying it out, with a specific focus on the health sectors in Burkina Faso and Kenya. Under this paradigm, despite the ownership narrative, national stakeholders in both countries are not producers of development knowledge; they are merely responsible for its implementation. This book challenges the preponderance of conventional international development policies that call for more ownership from African stakeholders without questioning the implications of donor demands and historical legacies of colonialism in Africa. Ultimately, the findings from this book make an important contribution to critical development debates that question international development as an enterprise capable of empowering developing nations. This lively and engaging book challenges readers to think differently about the ownership, and as such will be of interest to researchers of development studies and African studies, as well as for development practitioners within Africa.

Music, Health, and Power: Singing the Unsayable in The Gambia

Abstract: Music, Health, and Power offers an original, on-the-ground analysis of the role that music plays in promoting healthy communities. The book brings the reader inside the world of kanyeleng fertility societies and HIV/AIDS support groups, where women use music to leverage stigma and marginality into new forms of power. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over a period of 13 years (2006–2019), the author articulates a strengths-based framework for research on music and health that pushes beyond deficit narratives to emphasize the creativity and resilience of Gambian performers in responding to health disparities. Examples from Ebola prevention programs, the former President’s AIDS “cure,” and a legendary underwear theft demonstrate the high stakes of women’s performances as they are caught up in broader contestations over political and medical authority. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of ethnomusicology, medical anthropology, and African studies. The accompanying audio examples provide access to the women’s performances discussed in the text.

Conviviality as Diasporic Knowledge

Abstract: Based on my time with im/mobile West Africans in Senegal and Spain since 2007, I propose conviviality to conceptualise the complexity of my interlocutors’ local and diasporic tactics and views of living with difference. Simple everyday encounters such as greeting and dwelling in urban spaces serve to disentangle their various levels of reflection, habitual expectations and tactical action. They had local to global reference frameworks at their disposal. Not pretending to represent their knowledge, I discuss the inspirations I received from trying to understand what they shared with me non/verbally regarding living with difference. To start from this decentred set of premises challenges established Western/Northern politics of living with difference. Through conviviality, I show a distinct way of engaging multiple and overlapping ways of differentiating and homogenising practices and raise awareness for the importance and feasibility of minimal socialities in diasporic configurations, transnational migrations and the respective local urban contexts.

“When Knowledge is there, Other Things Follow”: The Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria and the Making of Yoruba Muslim Youths

Abstract: Among the religiously mixed Yoruba people of southwest Nigeria, the knowledge and values involved with being a Muslim are taught by both Muslim clerics in Qurʾanic schools and modern madrasas and by non-scholarly Muslims in different contexts. While some research has focussed on Yoruba clerics, little is known about the teaching initiatives of other Muslims. An important movement led by ordinary Muslims is the Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria (mssn), formed in 1954 to provide guidance to Muslim students in a predominantly non-Muslim educational environment. Since the 1950s, the mssn has engaged young Muslims in a series of socio-cultural, educational and religious activities aimed at encouraging young Muslims to engage with Islam, but which also equips them with the socio-economic skills necessary to operate in a modern, mixed religious world.

Development Failures in Ghana, Development Miracles in Asia: Whither the Africa Rising?

Abstract: In the 1960s, the economic development of African countries such as Ghana was on par with Asian countries like South Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia. Fast forward to the 2000s and a totally different picture emerges: Ghana lagged far behind its Asian counterparts in most development indicators, something that exemplifies the broader case of postcolonial African states unpropitious of development. Paradoxically, a new intellectual fad has emerged in the 2000s claiming ‘Africa is rising’, potentially, to replicate the development model of the Asian tigers. This discourse is based mostly on spurts of economic growth of African countries rich in natural resources like oil and gold, a growth driven by a spike in world market prices of these commodities in the second decade of the 21st century. When the world prices of these commodities plummeted precipitously a few years later, countries like Ghana, cited as signal examples of the ‘Africa rising’ mantra, went into deep economic crises. The IMF had to bail them out. Meanwhile, despite the global economic downturn, Ghana’s Asian counterparts managed to muddle through, still far ahead of it in most indicators of development. In contrast to the Africa Rising discourses, this paper draws on the insights of critical international political economy to leverage our understanding of the contrasting development paths African states and their Asian counterparts have taken in the immediate postcolonial period; and more recently, the period following immediately after the global economic downtown. Despite its weaknesses, indeed, despite the refutation of its cruder claims, we argue that dependency theory is still rich with useful analytical insights that can unravel the African development paradox in the 21st century vis-à-vis the development miracle of the Asian tigers.