Research Africa News: July 26th, 2020
Voices from Kenya and Nigeria: Working With Religious Actors to Prevent Extremism
By multiple authors, July 8th, 2020
Over the past five years, the Supporting Leaders programme at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has partnered with local organisations to empower religious actors to counter extremist narratives and build social cohesion. It trained 172 trainers and facilitators, empowered 361 religious leaders and reached more than 29,000 local community members.
In 2019, the Institute and the Alliance for Peacebuilding, with the generous support of the GHR Foundation, convened an Insights Forum in Nairobi. Our aim was to showcase to practitioners and policymakers the impact of working with religious actors to build peaceful and stable societies.
Get the full report here
Viewpoint from Sudan – where black people are called slaves
BBC, July 26. 2000
As anti-racism protests swept through various parts of the world following African-American George Floyd’s death in police custody in the US, Sudan seemed to be in a completely different world. There was little take-up in Sudan of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.
Instead many Sudanese social media users hurled racial abuse at a famous black Sudanese footballer, Issam Abdulraheem, and a light-skinned Arab make-up artist, Reem Khougli, following their marriage. “Seriously girl, this is haram [Arabic for forbidden]… a queen marries her slave,” one man commented on Facebook after seeing a photo of the couple.
Read the rest of the story here.
Translating Black Lives Matter into Yiddish
By Anthony Russell June 5, 2020
ON THE EVENING OF MAY 31st—a week after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer and amid an eruption of protests nationwide—I was tagged in a query on Twitter asking how to translate the phrase “Black Lives Matter” into Yiddish. Working for the past eight years primarily as a performer and composer of Yiddish kunstlider (art song), I am frequently asked to make spontaneous translations into the language in which I work, in spite of my decidedly intermediate level of fluency.
Read the rest of the story here.
Will the South embrace Senegalese cooking? One young chef has a plan
By Todd A. Price The American South/ July 17, 2020
Senegal’s flavors and one-pot cooking gave us gumbo, jambalaya and Hoppin’ John, but we aren’t savoring the originals, says Serigne Mbaye, a young chef born in Harlem but raised in Senegal. Why isn’t Senegalese food as revered as the cooking of France and Italy? At the moment, Mbaye borrows kitchens in New Orleans, popping-up a few times a week to cook black-eyed pea fritters, Senegalese egg rolls and jollof, a deeply flavored rice dish with seafood. But he has bigger plans.
Read the rest of the story here.
King of Sudanese jazz Sharhabil Ahmed honoured with compilation
By Lucy Ilado 8 July 2020
Sudanese jazz musician Sharhabil Ahmed has been honoured in a new compilation of his music and archives titled The King of Sudanese Jazz, which will be out on 10 July. Released by German record label Habibi Funk, the seven-track compilation features music spanning Ahmed’s career, alongside interviews and archival photographs.
Born in 1935 and launching into music in the 1960s, Ahmed set out to modernise Sudanese music with Western instrumentation and influences. The label, which is headed by Jannis Stürtz, describes Ahmed’s music as “a unique combination of surf rock, funk, Congolese music and East African harmonies.”.
Read the rest of the story here.
When John Lewis met Malcolm X in Kenya,
By A. Peter Bailey 7/23/2020, 6 p.m.
In his book, “Malcolm X: The FBI File,” Dr. Clayborne Carson wrote about a first-time meeting between Brother Malcolm X and a young John Lewis while both were traveling in Africa in October 1964.
The goal of Mr. Lewis and his fellow civil rights warrior Donald Harris was to make African students more aware of what the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, was doing in the ongoing war against white supremacy in the United States.
Read the rest of the story here.
NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
Conspicuous Consumption in Africa
[الاستهلاك غير المخفي في أفريقيا]
Author: (Editors): Deborah Posel, Ilana van Wyk
From early department stores in Cape Town to gendered histories of sartorial success in urban Togo, contestations over expense accounts at an apartheid state enterprise, elite wealth and political corruption in Angola and Zambia, the role of popular religion in the political intransigence of Jacob Zuma, funerals of big men in Cameroon, youth cultures of consumption in Niger and South Africa, queer consumption in Cape Town, middle-class food consumption in Durban and the consumption of luxury handcrafted beads, this collection of essays explores the ways in which conspicuous consumption is foregrounded in various African contexts and historical moments. In 1899, Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase ‘conspicuous consumption’ to describe status-seeking in the obscenely unequal world of late-nineteenth century America. Many of the aspects he described in The Theory of the Leisure Class are still evident in our world today. While Veblen’s crude denunciation of material extravagance finds echoes in media exposés about the lifestyles of the rich worldwide, it is particularly recognisable in reporting on Africa. Here, images of conspicuous consumption have long circulated in local and global media as indictments of political corruption and signs of moral depravity.
Publisher: Wits University Press, 2019.
Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion
[الأدب الكوبي في عصر انتفاضة السود: مانزانو ، بلاسيدو ، ودين الأفرو-لاتيني]
Author: Matthew Pettway
Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era. Both nineteenth-century authors used Catholicism as a symbolic language for African-inspired spirituality. Likewise, Plácido and Manzano subverted the popular imagery of neoclassicism and Romanticism in order to envision black freedom in the tradition of the Haitian Revolution. Plácido and Manzano envisioned emancipation through the lens of African spirituality, a transformative moment in the history of Cuban letters. The portrayal of African-Atlantic religious ideas spurned the elite rationale that literature ought to be a barometer of highbrow cultural progress. Cuban debates about freedom and selfhood were never the exclusive domain of the white Creole elite.
Pettway’s emphasis on African-inspired spirituality as a source of knowledge and a means to sacred authority for black Cuban writers deepens our understanding of Manzano and Plácido not as mere imitators but as aesthetic and political pioneers. As Pettway suggests, black Latin American authors did not abandon their African religious heritage to assimilate wholesale to the Catholic Church. By recognizing the wisdom of African ancestors, they procured power in the struggle for black liberation.
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi, 2020.
Motorbike People: Power and Politics on Rwandan Streets
[قوم الدراجة النارية: جدليات السلطة والسياسة في شوارع رواندا]
Author: Will Rollason
Will’s book is an ethnography of taxi-moto drivers in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city. Not only is his book a rich account of the everyday lives of motorcylists’ (motari) everyday lives, Will’s research challenge anthropological understanding of the concept of power and its relationship to culture. He argues that the concept of power is too expansive, too all-encompassing to provide explanations of how “power” operates in a given culture. Will finds that there is dearth of understanding in the social sciences, leading to a conceptual inability to engage in questions of justice and make common cause with the oppressed.
Publisher: Lexington Books, 2020.
Visionary Animal: Rock Art from Southern Africa
[بصيرة الحيوانات: فن نحت الصخور في جنوب إفريقيا]
Author: Renaud Ego
Why were depictions of animals a crucial trigger for the birth of art? And why did animals dominate that art for so long? In order to answer these questions, Renaud Ego examined some of the world’s finest rock art, that of the San of southern Africa. For thousands of years, these nomadic hunter-gatherers assigned a fundamental role to the visualization of the animals who shared their lives. Some, such as the Cape eland, the largest of antelopes, were the object of a fascinated gaze, as though the graceful markings and shapes of their bodies were the key to secret knowledge safeguarded by the animals’ unsettling silence. The artists sought to steal the animals’ secret through an act of rendering visible a vitality that remained hidden beneath appearances. In this process, the San themselves became the visionary animal who, possessing the gift of making pictures, would acquire far-seeing powers. Thanks to the singular effectiveness of their visual art, they could make intellectual contact with the world in order better to think and, ultimately, to act. They gained access to the full dimension of their human condition through painting scenes that functioned like visual contracts with spiritual and ancestral powers.
Publisher: Wits University Press, 2019.
Le Sénégal Entre Illusions et Illuminations
[السنغال بين الحقائق والأوهام]
Author: Ngor Dieng
This book examines the Senegalese society without a sense of complacency. The author discusses real issues that are turning this country away from economic development. The central themes of the study include education, politics, citizenship within a historical framework. From the highest authorities to ordinary citizens, this author describes the behaviors of a people who express a love for change while in practice they are not acting abiding by the law of change.
Publisher: Harmattan Sénégal, 2020.
The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain, and the United Nations during the Congo Crisis, 1960-1964
[ دبلوماسية التحرر من الاستعمار: أمريكا وبريطانيا والأمم المتحدة خلال أزمة الكونغو ، 1960-1964]
Author: Alanna O’malley
The Diplomacy of Decolonisation examines the global contours of the Congo crisis, which fragmented the newly independent Republic of the Congo and rocked the international order in the early 1960s. It even led the United Nations, for the first time ever, to dispatch peacekeepers to protect the sovereignty of one of its member states against secessionists. O’Malley guides readers through this complicated story. She charts the sprawling geography of the crisis, pulling readers through foreign capitals, the United Nations, and the Congo itself. And she shows how the crisis transformed the Cold War and the politics of decolonization.
Publication: Manchester University Press, 2020.
My Life in Crime
[حياتي في ارتكاب الجرائم]
Author: John Kiriamiti
The late 1690 and early 70s may be remembered as the years of the great bank and other armed robberies in Kenya. This is the true story of one of the participants in some of those robberies, John Kiriamiti. In raw and candid language, Kiriamiti tells the story of how he dropped out of secondary school when he was only fifteen years old, and for a time became a novice pickpocket, before graduating into crimes like car-breaking and ultimately into violent robbery. This spell-binding story takes the reader into the underworld of crime, and it depicts graphically the criminal’s struggle for survival against the forces of law.
John Kiriamiti was imprisoned on 6 January 1971, after being convicted on a charge of committing robbery at Naivasha on 4 November 1970. Kiriamiti left Naivasha Maximum Security Prison in August 1984, just five months after the publication of this novel and those following which were a sensation with Kenyan youth in the late 1980s and ’90s.
Publisher: East African Educational Publishers, Kenya, 2020.
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