Research Africa News: October 15th, 2019
We write what we like about Steve Biko
By Dan Magaziner
What does it mean for a dead man to live through us, as we chant his name and claim him?
Had he not died, Steve Biko would have amongst us, speaking for himself. But since the Apartheid South African police murdered him two months shy of his 31st birthday, we the living are left once more to think, through Biko, about what could have been.
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If Germany atoned for the Holocaust, the US can pay reparations for slavery By Bernd Reiter
The idea of paying reparations for slavery is gaining momentum in the United States, despite being long derided as an unrealistic plan, to compensate for state violence committed by and against people long dead. The topic saw substantive debate in the July 30 Democratic primary debate, with candidate Marianne Williamson calling slavery “a debt that is owed.” Some Democratic congressional representatives are also pushing for financial recompense for the descendants of enslaved people.
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From Sudan to Mali, how climate wars are breaking out across the Sahel
By Kaamil Ahmed, 19 September 2019
The bus to Khartoum delivered Maryam, and those of her neighbours who had survived with her, an escape from siege. For months they had been hounded by horse-mounted gunmen roaming their village in central Darfur, forcing them inside and away from their farmlands until some of them could bear their imprisonment no longer and left their homes to confront their tormentors. Maryam’s brother, Adam, was shot and his ear cut off. Her parents were killed.
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Bold Women. Scandalized Viewers. It’s ‘Sex and the City,’ Senegal Style.
DAKAR, Senegal — In the most controversial scene of “Mistress of a Married Man,” a hugely popular new television series in Senegal, the show’s protagonist, Marème, dons a daring magenta pantsuit and heads out for a date with a married man — but not before pointing below her belt.
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In a Sudan Where Literature is Often Smuggled, the Short Story is a Perfect Form
By Marcia Lynx Qualey September 27, 2019
It was June 2, 1934, when a group of young men published the first issue of al-Fajr. This twice-monthly magazine followed the short-lived Nahda, which closed after its founder’s death in 1933. Al-Fajr’s core was formed out of study groups and friendships at Khartoum’s Gordon Memorial College in the late 1920s and early 1930s. At the time, possession of Egyptian literary magazines was an “incriminating act,” according to Sudanese scholar Yousif Omer Babiker, who wrote that the young men smuggled Arabic periodicals into the English school under their clothes.
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Refuting that precolonial Africa lacked written traditions
By Daivi Rodima-Taylor, Mustapha H. Kurfi and Fallou Ngom,
Ajami, the centuries-old practice of writing other languages using the modified Arabic script, is deeply embedded in local histories and socio-cultural practices in West Africa. Grassroots Ajami literacy has been historically high in the communities and across countries in the region.
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NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
Breweries, Politics and Identity: The History Behind Namibia’s Beer
[علاقة التخمير بالسياسة والهوية: تاريخ تخمير الجعة في ناميبيا]
Author: Tycho van der Hoog
Namibian beer is celebrated as an inextricable part of Namibian nationalism, both within domestic borders and across global markets. But for decades on end, the same brew was not available to the black population as a consequence of colonial politics. This book aims to explain how a European style beer has been transformed from an icon of white settlers into a symbol of the independent Namibian nation. The unusual focus on beer offers valuable insight into the role of companies in identity formation and thus highlights an understudied aspect of Namibian history, namely business–state relations.
Publisher: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Namibia, 2019
The Lived Nile Environment Disease and Material Colonial Economy In Egypt
[الأمراض البيئية المتواجدة في النيل وأدوات الاقتصاد الاستعماري في مصر]
Author: Jennifer l. Derr
In October 1902, the reservoir of the first Aswan Dam filled, and Egypt’s relationship with the Nile River forever changed. Flooding villages of historical northern Nubia and filling the irrigation canals that flowed from the river, the perennial Nile not only reshaped agriculture and the environment, but also Egypt’s colonial economy and forms of subjectivity. Jennifer L. Derr follows the engineers, capitalists, political authorities, and laborers who built a new Nile River through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The river helped to shape the future of technocratic knowledge, and the bodies of those who inhabited rural communities were transformed through the environmental intimacies of their daily lives. At the root of this investigation lies the notion that the Nile is not a singular entity, but a realm of practice and a set of temporally, spatially, and materially specific relations that structured experiences of colonial economy. From the microscopic to the regional, the local to the imperial, The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2019) recounts the history and centrality of the environment to questions of politics, knowledge, and the lived experience of the human body itself.
Publisher: Stanford University Press 2019
Languages and Culture in Nigeria: A Festschrift for Okon Essien
[اللغة والثقافة في نيجريا]
Author: (edited) by Ozo-mekuri Ndimele
Language and Culture in Nigeria contains 97 papers from a wide range of areas in Language and Linguistics written by colleagues, friends and former students of Professor Okon Essien. The collection fulfills a gap in the quest for a documented piece of work on the general pattern and structure of Nigerian names and is an invaluable material for comparative purposes. There are 19 papers in section A focusing mainly on various aspects of sociolinguistics and the role of language in society. Section B comprises 24 papers which fall in the area of stylistics, literature and gender studies. Section C contains 21 papers focusing on applied areas of linguistics. Section D comprises 11 papers on information science and communication studies. Section E contains papers that focus on the formal areas of linguistics, i.e. phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax & semantics. Section F is on Okon Essien as a celebrity. It comprises papers which not only x-ray the contributions of the celebrity to the study of languages and linguistics in Nigeria, but also situate him in the context of other linguistic celebrities globally. Section F is rapped up with a collection of brilliant poems dedicated to Professor Okon Essien by the ‘Ode Grandmaster’, Dr. Obed Ojukwu. There is also an appendix at the end of the work which is Professor Okon Essien’s intimidating curriculum vitae.
Publisher: M & J Grand Orbit Communications, Nigeria, 2019
Necropolitics
[سياسة الموتى الأحياء]
Author: Achille Mbembe
In Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side—what he calls its “nocturnal body”—which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon’s notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.
Publisher: Duke University Press, 2019
In Pursuit of Peace in Africa: An Autobiography
[نحو تحقيق السلم في أفريقيا: سيرة ذاتية]
Author: Daniel Opande
Lieutenant General Daniel Opande, in his autobiography In Pursuit of Peace in Africa, shares his experiences in childhood, education, family and military career until his retirement. He wore many hats: soldier, military leader, peacemaker, humanitarian, peace ambassador and mediator. Notable highlights include his role in Kenya’s Shifta Campaign of the 1960s and engaging with rebels during peace operations he led in Namibia, Mozambique, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. In retirement, General Opande has occasionally mediated conflicts; among them the 2007, 2008, 2013 and 2017 election crises in Kenya and the aftermath of the 2015 upheavals in South Sudan. This book is a rich inspirational resource for aspiring leaders.
Publisher: East African Educational Publishers, Kenya, 2019.
Les Pleurs du Mal
[نحيب الشر]
Author: Nsah Mala
Que faire face à la stagnation de l’Afrique ? Comment l’écrivain peut-il affronter les multiples maux qui gangrènent le monde d’aujourd’hui ? Dans ce recueil de poèmes, Nsah Mala adopte le genre poétique pour illustrer son engagement social et politique en évoquant des thématiques actuelles de son pays natal le Cameroun, de l’Afrique, et du monde entier. Ces thèmes sont, entre autres, la corruption, la déchéance de l’État et du pouvoir, la dérive de la démocratie, la protection de la nature, la promotion de la jeunesse, la marginalisation socio-politique, les ténèbres, et la liberté. Malgré l’ampleur des maux affrontés, Nsah Mala garde son optimisme et démontre que la poésie peut servir de moyen pour corriger et améliorer la société humaine et non-humaine. Faisant preuve de l’expérimentation et de l’innovation poétique, ce recueil trace une cartographie intéressante suivant son auteur à travers ses voyages infinis en Afrique, en Europe, et ailleurs. C’est aussi un moyen d’entrer en conversation avec les auteurs et les cultures de l’Afrique et du monde. Cette poésie organique et vitale, qui prend sa source dans l’humanité et la nature, donne la voix à tous les sans-voix et devra ainsi occuper une place importante dans toutes les bibliothèques du monde.
Publisher: Spears Media Press, Cameroon, 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.
