Research Africa: December 9th, 2019
News and Issues
1. Berlin 1884: Remembering the conference that divided Africa
By Patrick Gathara, Nov 15, 2019
On the afternoon of Saturday, November 15, 1884, an international conference was opened by the chancellor of the newly-created German Empire at his official residence on Wilhelmstrasse, in Berlin. Sat around a horseshoe-shaped table in a room overlooking the garden with representatives from every European country, apart from Switzerland, as well as those from the United States and the Ottoman Empire. The only clue as to the purpose of the November gathering of white men was hung on the wall – a large map of Africa “drooping down like a question mark” as Nigerian historian, Professor Godfrey Uzoigwe, would comment.
Read the details here.
2. Fanon’s Mission
By Greg Thomas, Nov 19, 2019
In a story from Toni Cade Bambara’s The Seabirds Are Still Alive, a character named Jason says to another: “We need a lesson on architectural design.” He starts to clarify by saying, “the politics of …” but his co-teacher and comrade, Lacey, completes his thought in automatic, absolute agreement. Together they operate a community school for black children whom they are trying to walk home, one at a time, across a landscape made more bleak and white by a strangely brutal climate change—Arctic snow in the ’hood (highly symbolic, needless to say).
Read the details in this link.
3. Sudan Militia Leader Grew Rich by Selling Gold
From Reuters, Nov 26, 2019
Late last year, as President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s hold on power weakened, one of Sudan’s most feared militia leaders lashed out against the government of his long-time ally and benefactor. In a speech to cheering troops, militia chief Mohamed “Hemedti” Hamdan Dagalo sympathised with the thousands of protesters who had poured onto the streets in December demanding food, fuel and an end to corruption. He hit out at officials “who take what isn’t theirs.” “There are some people who are doing great harm, and they are the officials, not the poor,” he raged.
Read the details in this link here.
4. From Zanzibar to Oman: A bittersweet exile
By Sebastian Castelier and Quentin Müller, Dec 2, 2019
Forced out by African revolutionaries in 1964, Zanzibar-born Omanis are still coming to terms with the loss of their former homehomeland in East Africa for the hard, desert landscape of Oman, a country which at that time had only one hospital and three primary schools. Since then, Oman has transformed out of recognition, but for the Omanis of Zanzibar the memories and traumas of that time are difficult to process. At the Coconut House, traditional food from Zanzibar – including a famous octopus dish – is served up to the people of Muscat, Oman’s capital. A man in his fifties walks in and whispers a greeting in Swahili. Across the city, a wide range of cuisine from Zanzibar can be found, all of it popular with Omani families. Specialities like mohogo, kisamvu, maharagi, mandazi, sambusa, chicken and fish curries subtly blend East African, Arab and Indian flavours, ingredients and spices.
Read the details in this link here.
NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
African Visionaries
[منظرون من أفريقيا]
Author (Editor): Agnes Ofosua Vandyck
In over forty portraits, African writers present extraordinary people from their continent: portraits of the women and men whom they admire, people who have changed and enriched life in Africa. The portraits include inventors, founders of universities, resistance fighters, musicians, environmental activists or writers. African Visionaries is a multi-faceted book, seen through African eyes, on the most impactful people of Africa.
Publisher: Sub-Saharan Publishers, Ghana, 2019.
Adventure Capital: Migration and the Making of an African Hub in Paris
[ عاصمة المغامرات: الهجرة وبروز التجمعات الأفريقية في باريس]
Author: Julie Kleinman
Paris’s Gare du Nord is one of the busiest international transit centers in the world. In the past three decades, it has become an important hub for West African migrants—self-fashioned adventurers—navigating life in the city. In this groundbreaking work, Julie Kleinman chronicles how West Africans use the Gare du Nord to create economic opportunities, confront police harassment, and forge connections to people outside of their communities. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research, including an internship at the French national railway company, Kleinman reveals how racial inequality is ingrained in the order of Parisian public space. She vividly describes the extraordinary ways that African migrants retool French transit infrastructure to build alternative pathways toward social and economic integration where state institutions have failed. In doing so, these adventurers defy boundaries—between migrant and citizen, center and periphery, neighbor and stranger—that have shaped urban planning and immigration policy. Adventure Capital offers a new understanding of contemporary migration and belonging, capturing the central role that West African migrants play in revitalizing French urban life.
Publisher:The University of California Press, 2019
Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback
[العدالة العاطفية: المحكمة الجنائية الدولية في مواجهة الرفض الإفريقي]
Author: Kamari Maxine Clarke
Since its inception in 2001, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been met with resistance by various African states and their leaders, who see the court as a new iteration of colonial violence and control. In Affective Justice, Kamari Maxine Clarke explores the African Union’s pushback against the ICC in order to theorize affect’s role in shaping forms of justice in the contemporary period. Drawing on fieldwork in The Hague, the African Union in Addis Ababa, sites of postelection violence in Kenya, and Boko Haram’s circuits in Northern Nigeria, Clarke formulates the concept of affective justice—an emotional response to competing interpretations of justice—to trace how affect becomes manifest in judicial practices. By detailing the effects of the ICC’s all-African indictments, she outlines how affective responses to these call into question the “objectivity” of the ICC’s mission to protect those victimized by violence and prosecute perpetrators of those crimes. In analyzing the effects of such cases, Clarke provides a fuller theorization of how people articulate what justice is and the mechanisms through which they do so.
Publisher: Duke University Press, 2019
LE TCHAD DES LACS : Les zones humides sahéliennes au défi du changement global
[دولة تشاد ذات الوديان: الأراضي الرطبة لمنطقة الساحل في مواجهة التغييرات المناخية]
Author (Editors): Raimond, Florence Sylvestre, Dangbet Zakinet and Abderamane Moussa
Reconnues comme hauts lieux de biodiversité (hot spots), les zones humides africaines sont sources de nombreux services écosystémiques. Les sociétés y mènent des activités de subsistance (pêche, agriculture, élevage, chasse, cueillette) intégrées au fonctionnement des écosystèmes. De plus en plus sollicités tout en restant très vulnérables, ces territoires jouent désormais un rôle moteur dans les économies locales et régionales, en exportant une large diversité de produits vers les villes. Or en ce début du XXIe siècle, ils cumulent les défis de l’Anthropocène – changement climatique, croissance démographique, urbanisation, mondialisation des échanges – et ceux d’une crise profonde de gouvernance. Leur étude est donc devenue un enjeu scientifique et sociétal important. En proposant plusieurs angles de lecture, cet ouvrage collectif contribue à une meilleure connaissance des zones humides sahéliennes à partir de l’étude des lacs du Tchad. Il articule les résultats des recherches à différents pas de temps : le temps long (géologie, archéologie), le temps moyen des dernières décennies (hydrologie, histoire, écologie, géographie) et le temps court de l’année et des saisons (géographie, anthropologie).
Publisher: IRD Éditions, 2019 (Open edition).
African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa
[خصوصية أفريقية: نحو تاريخ جديد لفهم الامبراطورية في غرب إفريقيا فيما قبل وأثناء العصور الوسطى]
Author: Michael A. Gomez
This pioneering book tells a unique story of West Africa. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, Michael Gomez unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history. Focusing on the Savannah and Sahel region, Gomez traces how Islam’s growth in West Africa, along with intensifying commerce that included slaves, resulted in a series of political experiments unique to the region, culminating in the rise of empire. A radically new account of the importance of early Africa in global history, African Dominion will be the standard work on the subject for years to come.
Publisher:Princeton University Press, 2019
Mugabeism after Mugabe? Rethinking Legacies and the New Dispensation in Zimbabwe’s ‘Second Republic’
[الموغابية بعد موغابي: تأملات في الموروثات الفكرية لجمهورية زيمبابوي الثانية]
Author (Editors): Fidelis Peter Thomas Duri, Ngonidzashe Marongwe, Munyaradzi Mawere
This volume interrogates the impact of the introduction of the Mnangagwa administration from November 2017. The book seeks to broadly dissect and troubleshoot issues of continuity and change from Mugabe’s reign into Mnangagwa’s Second Republic. In doing so the book attempts to respond to the grand question: “To what extent has Mugabeism that was the hallmark of Mugabe’s reign, continued or discontinued into the Second Republic?” The volume, which comes as a sequel to The end of an era? Robert Mugabe and a Conflicting Legacy, is sure to generate interest and responses from students and academics in the fields of history, international studies, and social anthropology, as well as from practitioners in the human rights, transitional justice, conflict resolution, and diplomatic fields.
Publisher: Africa Talent Publishers, Zimbabwe, 2019
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Research Africa (research_africa-editor@duke.edu) welcomes submissions of books, events, funding opportunities, and more to be included in the next edition.
