Research Africa News: September 9th, 2020
The Day Malcolm X Was Killed
At the height of his powers, the Black Nationalist leader was assassinated, and the government botched the investigation of his murder.
By Les Payne August 27, 2020
At 2 p.m. on Sunday, February 21, 1965, Malcolm X arrived at the Audubon Ballroom, in Harlem, to give a speech. Malcolm was thirty-nine, tall and serious, with a dark suit and a new beard, and he was in the midst of remaking himself. He had recently left the Nation of Islam, the Black-Muslim group that had nurtured his rise to prominence.
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The Conscience of Silicon Valley
Tech oracle Jaron Lanier warned us all about the evils of social media. Too few of us listened. Now, in the most chaotic of moments, his fears—and his bighearted solutions—are more urgent than ever.
BY Zach Baron, August 24, 2020
There Jaron Lanier and I were, side by side on my computer screen, in a virtual space that looked a little like a conference room and a little like a movie theater. We could’ve been jurors, maybe. I was able to approximate rubbing his head. “As you have discovered,” Lanier said, noticing, “you can reach and interact with people a little bit. So there is this shared-space quality.” He was in Berkeley, California, in the hills above the city, in a house that looks out over the bay. I was in Los Angeles. Five minutes ago we were in our own separate video-chat windows, the ones many of us now see as we’re going to sleep, our dumb faces staring back at us. Then he had hit some buttons. Now we were together.
Read the rest of the story here.
The University of Zimbabwe’s First Pan-African History Conference
By Brooks Marmon
From 5 – 15 September 1960, an intimate, yet opulent (by academic standards) pan-African history conference convened in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (present-day Harare, Zimbabwe). Funded by the London-based Leverhulme Trust, the conference aimed to provide a forum for members of history departments across ‘tropical Africa’ to confer. In addition to several Rhodesian-based delegates, historians resident in Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, the UK, and South Africa attended.
Read the rest of the article here.
Senegal’s quiet COVID success: Test results in 24 hours, temperature checks at every store, no fights over masks
Deirdre Shesgreen USA TODAY, Sept. 6, 2020
COVID-19 test results come back within 24 hours – or even faster. Hotels have been transformed into quarantine units. Scientists are racing to develop a cutting-edge, low-cost ventilator. This isn’t the pandemic response in South Korea, New Zealand or another country held up as a model of coronavirus containment success. It’s Senegal, a west African country with a fragile health care system, a scarcity of hospital beds and about seven doctors for every 100,000 people. And yet Senegal, with a population of 16 million, has tackled COVID-19 aggressively and, so far, effectively. More than six months into the pandemic, the country has about 14,000 cases and 284 deaths.
Read the rest of the rest of the story here.
Nation Building and Legacies of Slavery: The Intersections of Being Black and Arab in the Gulf
“Populations from the Arabian Peninsula and those from the African continent have crossed, migrated, and mixed both within and outside the institution of slavery for thousands of years. In many places and communities, it would be difficult to even distinguish who is ‘African’ from who is ‘Arabian.’”
BY DALIA AWAD 03 Sep 2020 SHARE TWEET
Born to a Black Sudanese mother and Black Kuwaiti father, AlMoataz’s story is all too familiar for Black and Afro-Arab Gulf nationals. “I’ve also been rejected by people because of my skin tone. One girl told me her parents would not be okay with me because I am a Black man. Being stripped of all your qualities and saying you aren’t worth it or people don’t want you around because of the colour of your skin really hurts.”
Read the rest of the rest of the story here.
NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
Slave between Empires: A Transimperial History of North Africa
[رقيق بين الامبراطوريات: نحو تاريخ موسع لشمال أفريقيا]
Author: M’Hamed Oualdi
In light of the profound physical and mental traumas of colonization endured by North Africans, historians of recent decades have primarily concentrated their studies of North Africa on colonial violence, domination, and shock. The choice is an understandable one. But in his new monograph, A Slave between Empires: A Transimperial History of North Africa (Columbia University Press, 2020), M’hamed Oualdi asks how a history of the modern Maghreb might look if we did not perceive it solely through the prism of European colonization, and argues that widening our gaze might force us to redefine our understanding of colonialism — and its limits.
Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2020.
Afropessimism
[التطير الافريقي]
Author: Frank B. Wilderson
How should we understand the pervasiveness – and virulence – of anti-Black violence in the United State? Why and how is anti-Black racism different from other forms of racism? How does it permeate our moral and political ideals? Frank Wilderson III combines memoir and works of political theory, critical theory, literature, and film to offer a philosophy of Blackness
Publisher: Liveright, 2020
Collecting Food, Collecting People Subsistence and Society in Central Africa
[الاقتتات وتحسين أوضاع المجتمع في أفريقيا الوسطى]
Author: Kathryn M. de Luna
In two separate strands of historiography, scholars have tackled the genesis and literary construction of the chronicle on the one hand, and the history of the Caliphate on the other. The new book Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Ahmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020), brings both together. Mauro Nobili argues that the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh was a coherent and historically contingent product of the Caliphate. It was designed as a result of one Ḥamdallāhi scholar’s assessment of what it would take to legitimize claims to power and authority in the hotly contested political landscape of 19th-century Muslim West Africa.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Sports in Africa, Past and Present
[الرياضة في أفريقيا: الماضي والحاضر]
Author: (editors) Todd Cleveland, Tarminder Kaur, and Gerard Akindes
Since the late nineteenth century, modern sports in Africa have both reflected and shaped cultural, social, political, economic, generational, and gender relations on the continent. Although colonial powers originally introduced European sports as a means of “civilizing” indigenous populations and upholding then current notions of racial hierarchies and “muscular Christianity,” Africans quickly appropriated these sporting practices to fulfill their own varied interests. This collection encompasses a wide range of topics, including women footballers in Nigeria, Kenya’s world-class long-distance runners, pitches and stadiums in communities large and small, fandom and pay-to-watch kiosks, the sporting diaspora, sports pedagogy, sports as resistance and as a means to forge identity, sports heritage, the impact of politics on sports, and sporting biography.
Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2020
The State of Open Data: Histories and Horizons
[حالة المعلومات المفتوحة: دراسة حول التواريخ والآفاق]
Author: (Edited) Tim Davies, Stephen B. Walker, Mor Rubinstein & Fernando Perini
It’s been ten years since open data first broke onto the global stage. Over the past decade, thousands of programmes and projects around the world have worked to open data and use it to address a myriad of social and economic challenges. This book brings together over 60 authors from around the world to address these questions and to take stock of the real progress made to date across sectors and around the world, uncovering the issues that will shape the future of open data in the years to come.
Publisher: African Minds, South Africa, 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.
