Author: Program Director

Research Africa News: January 24th, 2021

Rethinking African Studies: Four Challenges and the Case for Comparative African Studies

By Matthias BasedauFirst Published November 17, 2020 (Research Article)

This article takes stock of the state of African Studies and argues that (1) research on Africa is strongly dominated by outside, non-African, mostly Western views; (2) there is a tendency towards undifferentiated views on “Africa,” which usually concentrate on negative aspects, overlooking progress in many areas; (3) methodologies that focus on causal identification are rarely used; and (4) the field focuses on micro-perspectives while few works examine the big picture and the longue durée. The article then argues that Comparative African Studies, which builds upon the concept of Comparative Area Studies, can address some of these challenges.

Read the research article here.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: “Europe and the West must also be decolonised”

We talk with one of the leading voices of contemporary African literature about linguistic imperialism and the importance of decolonising minds and the imagination.

By Tania Adam 10 SEPTEMBER 2019

Writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has always questioned the literary tradition written in colonial languages, analysing the dynamics and the functioning off colonised societies and their relationship with the colonisers. Thiong’o defends the mother tongue as a weapon against linguistic imperialism, and recommends decolonising minds and the imagination, in Africa and Europe alike. We talk with him on the occasion of the publication in Catalan of his book La revolució vertical (Raig Verd, 2019).

Read the rest of the story here.

Performing Modernity

By Rafia Zakaria, December 11

THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES has worked long and hard at looking like the West—even better than the best. The world’s tallest building, with its glistening spire, looms over the shoreline of the gleaming city of Dubai, proof of the Emiratis’ technocratic zeal. The streets are clean; a brown or black person is always nearby to pick up any errant piece of litter. For entertainment, there are bars and clubs where liquor flows much like it does in New York or London or any place that draws the young and the affluent. Blazing lights shine from malls full of wares from around the world: perfumes that cost hundreds of dollars, couture houses that make their own statement by refusing to pin prices, cars that cost more than a small suburban home in the American Midwest.

Read the rest of the story here.

Becoming Kwame Ture

By Roape -December 15, 2020

In Guinea, doors fly open at the mere mention of Kwame Ture’s name. A senior government minister met me within a few hours’ notice. And when I arrived at Villa Syli to meet a member of Sékou Touré’s old party, the PDG (Parti démocratique de Guinée), I was unexpectedly ushered into a luxurious salon, where I was instead met by Hadja Touré, the former president’s wife. Now in her eighties, she sat on a red and gold wooden carved chair, at the centre of a discussion with three men dressed in expensive fabrics cut in traditional styles. I recognised one of the men as the brother of the Senegalese radical Omar Blondin Diop. Hadja Touré acknowledged me with a deft nod of the head, as I tried to find the most appropriate French expression for the occasion..

Read the rest of the story here.

Eager to Appropriate On the Supreme Court decisions that created “Indian Country.”

By Mahmood Mamdani, November 30, 2020

In the early period of American colonization, there was no reference to a place called Indian country. That is because every place was Indian country. Settlers in Maine rented land from Indians. In the Dutch and English colonies, settlers purchased land from Indians, either wholesale or piecemeal.

Read the rest of the story here.

Studying Religion in and from Africa

By Birgit Meyer, December 11, 2020

Featured as the continent of religion par excellence, Africa is often situated in contrast to Europe, where religion – especially Christianity – is in decline. There certainly is some truth to such a view. Over and over again, when I touched ground again in Ghana in the course of my longstanding research since the late 1980s, I have been amazed by the strong public presence of preachers and prophets, loud religious soundscapes and colorful proliferation of visual signs, including posters, stickers, advertisements, motto’s on shops and mini-buses, and so on. Gradually getting used to this situation during my stay, upon returning home in turn I would be rather surprised about the relative invisibility of religion over here.

Read the rest of the story here.

‘Africapitalism’ and the limits of any variant of capitalism

By Roape, July 16, 2020

In a contribution to ROAPE’s debate on capitalism in Africa, Stefan Ouma provides a critical account of Africapitalism as well as an assessment of the future/s it imagines, what it silences and its potential to transform African economies. Ouma concludes that the ecologically destructive and dehumanizing architecture of our global economic system provides further evidence to condemn any variant of capitalism.

Read the rest of the story here.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

The Social and Political Thought of Archie Mafeje: A Pan-African Social Scientist Ahead of His Time.

[الفكر الاجتماعي والسياسي لدى أرتشي مافيجي: العالم الاجتماعي البانأفرقاني الذي جاء قبل عصره.]

Author: Bongani Nyoka

Social scientist Archie Mafeje, who was born in the Eastern Cape but lived most of his scholarly life in exile, was one of Africa’s most prominent intellectuals. This groundbreaking book is the first to consider the entire body of Mafeje’s oeuvre and offers much needed engagement with his ideas. The most inclusive and critical treatment to date of Mafeje as a thinker and researcher, it does not aim to be a biography, but rather offers an analysis of his overall scholarship and his role as a theoretician of liberation and revolution in Africa. Bongani Nyoka argues that Mafeje’s superb scholarship developed out of both his experience as an oppressed black person and his early political education. These, merged with his university training, turned him into a formidable cutting-edge intellectual force. Nyoka begins with an evaluation of Mafeje’s critique of the social sciences; his focus then shifts to Mafeje’s work on land and agrarian issues in sub-Saharan Africa, before finally dealing with his work on revolutionary theory and politics. By bringing Mafeje’s work to the fore, Nyoka engages in an act of knowledge decolonisation, thus making a unique contribution to South studies in sociology, history and politics.

Publisher: Wits University Press, 2020.

Sea Level: A Portrait of Zanzibar

[مناظر حول البحر: صورة من زنجبار]

Author: Sarah Markes

Sea Level is a creative celebration of Zanzibar’s rich and fascinating heritage as seen today. Captured in drawings by artist and designer Sarah Markes, this is a unique and personal portrait of Stone Town’s colourful streets, and a portrayal of the island’s natural beauty and culture. It is also a plea for recognition of the threats posed to Zanzibar’s heritage and the inestimable value of conserving it.

Publisher: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, Tanzania, 2020.

Decolonization and Afro-Feminism

[قراءات حول التحرر من الاستعمار وفكرة النسوية الافريقية]

Author: Sylvia Tamale

Why do so many Africans believe they cannot break the “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” cycle? Six decades after colonial flags were lowered and African countries gained formal independence, the continent struggles to free itself from the deep legacies of colonialism, imperialism and patriarchy. Many intellectuals, politicians, feminists and other activists, eager to contribute to Africa’s liberation, have frustratingly felt like they took the wrong path. Analyzed through the eyes of Afro-Feminism, this book revisits some of the fundamental preconditions needed for radical transformation. It challenges the traditional human rights paradigm and its concomitant idea of “gender equality,” flagging instead, the African philosophy of Ubuntu as a serious alternative for reinvigorating African notions of social justice. If you are a student of Africa or in a space where you wish to recalibrate your compass and reboot your consciousness in the struggle for Africa’s liberation, this book is for you.

Publisher: Daraja Press, Canada, 2020.

Nigeria’s Soldiers of Fortune: The Abacha and Obasanjo Years

[جنود نيجيريا الأثرياء: سنوات أباتشا وأوباسانجو]

Author: Max Siollun.

In the cataclysmic decade that is the focus of this book, Nigeria was subject to several near-death experiences. These began when the country nearly tore itself apart after the northern-led military government annulled the results of a 1993 presidential election won by the southerner Moshood Abiola, and ended with former military ruler General Olusegun Obasanjo being the unlikely conduit of democracy. This mini-history of a nation’s life also reflects on three mesmerizing protagonists who personified that era. First up is Abiola: the multi-billionaire businessman who had his election victory voided by the generals who made him rich, and who was later assassinated. General Sani Abacha was the mysterious, reclusive ruler under whose watch Abiola was arrested and pro-democracy activists (including Abiola’s wife) were murdered. He also oversaw a terrifying Orwellian state security operation. Although Abacha is today reviled as a tyrant, the author eschews selective amnesia, reminding Nigerians that they goaded him into seizing power. The third protagonist is Obasanjo, who emerged from prison to return to power as an elected civilian leader.

Publisher: Hurst, 2019.

Village Gone Viral: Understanding the Spread of Policy Models in a Digital Age

[حين تصبح القرية حديث الانترنت: انتشار أنماط السياسات العامة في العصر الرقمي]

Author: Marit Tolo Østebø

In 2001, Ethiopian Television aired a documentary about a small, rural village called Awra Amba, where women ploughed, men worked in the kitchen, and so-called harmful traditional practices did not exist. The documentary radically challenged prevailing images of Ethiopia as a gender-conservative and aid-dependent place, and Awra Amba became a symbol of gender equality and sustainable development in Ethiopia and beyond. Village Gone Viral uses the example of Awra Amba to consider the widespread circulation and use of modeling practices in an increasingly transnational and digital policy world. With a particular focus on traveling models—policy models that become “viral” through various vectors, ranging from NGOs and multilateral organizations to the Internet—Marit Tolo Østebø critically examines the hidden dimensions of models and model making. While a policy model may be presented as a “best practice,” one that can be scaled up and successfully applied to other places, the local impacts of the model paradigm are far more ambivalent—potentially increasing social inequalities, reinforcing social stratification, and concealing injustice. With this book, Østebø ultimately calls for a reflexive critical anthropology of the production, circulation, and use of models as instruments for social change.

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2021.

The Implicated Subject Beyond Victims and Perpetrators

[الرعايا المتورطون: حوارمابعد محوري الضحايا والجناة]

Author: Michael Rothberg

When it comes to historical violence and contemporary inequality, none of us are completely innocent. We may not be direct agents of harm, but we may still contribute to, inhabit, or benefit from regimes of domination that we neither set up nor control. Arguing that the familiar categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander do not adequately account for our connection to injustices past and present, Michael Rothberg offers a new theory of political responsibility through the figure of the implicated subject. The Implicated Subject builds on the comparative, transnational framework of Rothberg’s influential work on memory to engage in reflection and analysis of cultural texts, archives, and activist movements from such contested zones as transitional South Africa, contemporary Israel/Palestine, post-Holocaust Europe, and a transatlantic realm marked by the afterlives of slavery. As these diverse sites of inquiry indicate, the processes and histories illuminated by implicated subjectivity are legion in our interconnected world.

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 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.

Research Africa News: February 28th , 2021

Duke-UNICEF Innovation Accelerator.

Building on a 70-year history of innovating for children, UNICEF has partnered with Duke University to identify the world’s most pressing challenges for youth today—and to find the bold minds who can come up with the solutions. By pairing UNICEF’s commitment to children and global reach with Duke’s expertise in social innovation, the Innovation Accelerator will make a real and lasting difference in the lives of children around the world. Teams accepted into the Duke-UNICEF Innovation Accelerator will receive funding, mentorship, and other capacity building support from Duke University staff, faculty, students and our global networks.

For more details, visit this site: https://dukeunicef.org

From An Egyptian African Story

By Helmi Sharawy

An Important Meeting Muhammad Fayiq and his colleagues always visited the African Association unannounced, and all we knew then was that he was a senior figure in the world of the presidency and intelligence, personally close to the president of the republic. On one such visit, he noticed me carrying the newspapers that I had just collected from Professor Ishaq. He was kind and warm and voiced his surprise that I read such publications. Wondering how he could benefit from this, he asked Professor Ishaq whether I could present him with a good summary of the information they contained. His request was a boon for several reasons: these papers began to be delivered more regularly, I was benefitting from details about the world of the colonies (the British ones at least) that nobody in Egypt knew, and I was presenting an important source of information to a senior figure in the presidency. And, more important than all that, I was earning five pounds every month for my valuable work!

Read the research article here.

Lost for Decades, These Stunning Color Photos of Africa in the 1950s Have Finally Been Published

The United Nations sent photographer Todd Webb to capture eight African countries during a period of rapid industrialization—but the pictures he came back with included beauty, fashion, jubilation, and much more.

By Bill Shapiro January 28,2021

In 1955, two photographers, Guggenheim Fellowships in their back pockets, set off across America. One was Robert Frank, who returned from his epic road trip with the 27,000-plus images he would draw from to make his soon-to-be-iconic book, The Americans. The other was Todd Webb.

Read the rest of the story here.

The tortured, touching love saga of Cicely Tyson and Miles Davis

By Randall Roberts, staff writer, Feb. 1, 2021

Starting in the mid-1960s, Cicely Tyson had a decades-long, on-again, off-again romance with trumpeter Miles Davis that peaked with their 1981 marriage and ended in a 1989 divorce. Behind the scenes it was a turbulent relationship, according to both, but during their time in the spotlight, they were one of the most striking, stylish couples in America: she an Oscar-nominated, barrier-breaking dramatic actress and movie star known for an unwavering dedication to her craft; he a revered, charismatic jazz musician and innovator with an addictive personality and a bad reputation.

Read the rest of the story here.

Muslims in America: A forgotten history

For more than 300 years, Muslims have influenced the story of the US – from the ‘founding fathers’ to blues music today.

By Sylviane A Diouf, 10 Feb 2021

In the summer of 1863, newspapers in North Carolina announced the death of “a venerable African”, referred to, in a paternalistic manner, as “Uncle Moreau”. Omar ibn Said, a Muslim, was born in 1770 in Senegal and by the time of his death, he had been enslaved for 56 years. In 2021, Omar, an opera about his life, will premiere at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina.

Read the rest of the story here.

Free Article s from Miṣriqiyā, an international peer-reviewed African Studies Journal

Recently established by Faculty of Women, Ain Shams University (Egypt)

Welcome to Miṣriqiyā, an international peer-reviewed academic journal published quarterly by the Faculty of Women, Ain Shams University. Miṣriqiyā aims to publish high-quality research papers relevant to Africa. The journal publishes articles in the fields of anthropology, history, sociology, politics, geography, linguistics, and literary and cultural studies. Miṣriqiyā is published in both print and online versions. With an active editorial board that encompasses scholars from a variety of disciplines based at both Egyptian and international universities, the journal seeks to foster an interdisciplinary and global conversation from, with and about Africa. The journal is open to Arab and international scholars and guarantees a fair and accurate reviewing process. Submissions are accepted throughout the year.

Read the rest of the story here.

Mali fails to face up to the persistence of slavery

The Conversation, February 15, 2021

The internal African slave trade was officially abolished in colonial Mali in 1905. But a form of slavery – called “descent-based slavery” – continues today. This is when “slave status” is ascribed to a person, based on their ancestors having allegedly been enslaved by elite slave-owning families.

Read the rest of the story here.

‘Africapitalism’ and the limits of any variant of capitalism

By Roape, July 16, 2020

In a contribution to ROAPE’s debate on capitalism in Africa, Stefan Ouma provides a critical account of Africapitalism as well as an assessment of the future/s it imagines, what it silences and its potential to transform African economies. Ouma concludes that the ecologically destructive and dehumanizing architecture of our global economic system provides further evidence to condemn any variant of capitalism.

Read the rest of the story here.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Buried in the Debris of Independence: The Life and Death of Rev Alexander Kutchona

[مدفون تحت أنقاض الاستقلال: حياة وموت القس ألكسندر كوتشونا]

Author: T.S.E. Katsulukuta

As a boy I heard my mother warn my father never to walk alone and never to come home late lest he be killed like Kutchona. But why could people kill an innocent pastor? For Alexander Kutchona God stood above politics and God came first in all areas of life. The Party leaders believed differently. Politics to them could not be separated from Church life and that the church should be used as a platform for the political agenda. They labeled him traitor and removed him out of their path and memory.

Publisher: Luviri Press, Malawi, 2021.

Writing the Black Decade: Conflict and Criticism in Francophone Algerian Literature

[عقد الشؤم: الصراع والنقد في الأدب الجزائري الفرنكوفوني]

Author: Joseph Ford

Writing the Black Decade examines how literature—and the way we read, classify, and critique literature—impacts our understanding of the world at a time of conflict. Using the bitterly-contested Algerian Civil War as a case study, Joseph Ford argues that, while literature is frequently understood as an illuminating and emancipatory tool, it can, in fact, restrain our understanding of the world during a time of crisis and further entrench the polarized discourses that lead to conflict in the first place. Ford demonstrates how Francophone Algerian literature, along with the cultural and academic criticism that has surrounded it, has mobilized visions of Algeria over the past thirty years that often belie the complex and multi-layered realities of power, resistance, and conflict in the region. Scholars of literature, history, Francophone studies, and international relations will find this book particularly useful.

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.

Growing Wild: The Correspondence of a Pioneering Woman Naturalist from the Cape

[عن منابت القفار مراسلات سيدة رائدة في دراسة حياة الطبيعة في مدينة كيب]

Author/ (editor): Jasmin Rindlisbacher, Alan Cohen

Mary Elizabeth Barber (1818-1899), born in Britain, arrived in the Cape Colony in 1820 where she spent the rest of her life as a rolling stone, as she lived in and near Grahamstown, the diamond and gold fields, Pietermaritzburg, Malvern near Durban and on various farms in the eastern part of the Cape Colony. She has been perceived as ‘the most advanced woman of her time’, yet her legacy has attracted relatively little attention. She was the first woman ornithologist in South Africa, one of the first who propagated Darwin’s theory of evolution, an early archaeologist, keen botanist and interested lepidopterist. In her scientific writing, she propagated a new gender order; positioned herself as a feminist avant la lettre without relying on difference models and at the same time made use of genuinely racist argumentation. This is the first publication of her edited scientific correspondence. The letters – transcribed by Alan Cohen, who has written a number of biographical articles on Barber and her brothers – are primarily addressed to the entomologist Roland Trimen, the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, London. Today, the letters are housed at the Royal Entomological Society in St Albans. This book also includes a critical introduction by historian Tanja Hammel who has published a number of articles and is about to publish a monograph on Mary Elizabeth Barber.

Publisher: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Namibia, 2020.

Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds

[ يوتوبيا السود: الحياة التأملية وموسيقى العوالم الأخرى]

Author: Jayna Brown

In Black Utopias Jayna Brown takes up the concept of utopia as a way of exploring alternative states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture. Musical, literary, and mystic practices become utopian enclaves in which Black people engage in modes of creative worldmaking. Brown explores the lives and work of Black women mystics Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson, musicians Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, and the work of speculative fiction writers Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler as they decenter and destabilize the human, radically refusing liberal humanist ideas of subjectivity and species. Brown demonstrates that engaging in utopian practices Black subjects imagine and manifest new genres of existence and forms of collectivity. For Brown, utopia consists of those moments in the here and now when those excluded from the category human jump into other onto-epistemological realms. Black people—untethered from the hope of rights, recognition, or redress—celebrate themselves as elements in a cosmic effluvium.

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2021.

Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement

[نحو تعبئة الألمان السود]

Author: Tiffany N. Florvil

Tiffany N. Florvil examines the role of queer and straight women in shaping the contours of the modern Black German movement as part of the Black internationalist opposition to racial and gender oppression. Florvil shows the multifaceted contributions of women to movement making, including Audre Lorde’s role in influencing their activism; the activists who inspired Afro-German women to curate their own identities and histories; and the evolution of the activist groups Initiative of Black Germans and Afro-German Women. These practices and strategies became a rallying point for isolated and marginalized women (and men) and shaped the roots of contemporary Black German activism. Richly researched and multidimensional in scope, Mobilizing Black Germany offers a rare in-depth look at the emergence of the modern Black German movement and Black feminists’ politics, intellectualism, and internationalism..

Publisher: University of Illinois Press 2020.

Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being

[كينونة السود أو شاعرية الوجود]

Author: Kevin Quashie

In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study. Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics of poetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary texts by Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical and creative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This worldmaking conceptualizes Blackness as capacious, relational beyond the normative terms of recognition—Blackness as a condition of oneness. Reading for poetic aliveness, then, becomes a means of exploring Black being rather than nonbeing and animates the ethical question “how to be.” In this way, Quashie offers a Black feminist philosophy of being, which is nothing less than a philosophy of the becoming of the Black world.

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2021.

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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 Research Africa News edition. To share with the general mailing list, please send your contents directly to (research_africa@duke.edu).

Research Africa News: March 19th , 2021

A Chapter in U.S. History Often Ignored: The Flight of Runaway Slaves to Mexico

February 28, 2021

In a forgotten cemetery on the edge of Texas in the Rio Grande delta, Olga Webber-Vasques says she’s proud of her family’s legacy — even if she only just learned the full story. Turns out her great-great-grandparents, who are buried there, were agents in the little-known underground railroad that led through South Texas to Mexico during the 1800s. Thousands of enslaved people fled plantations to make their way to the Rio Grande, which became a river of deliverance.

Read the rest of the article here.

All futurism is Afrofuturism: Can Africa industrialize? I think it can.

Noah Smith, 3/ 1/ 2021

Every so often I get the urge to blog about something really important, so today I think I’ll write about Africa. Afrofuturism is a fun and interesting subgenre of science fiction and philosophy, but I kind of chuckle every time I see the word, because all futurism is actually Afrofuturism. Africa is literally the future of the entire world. Here is one of the two or three most important charts you will ever see:

Read the research article here.

Covid-19 drove hundreds of Africans out of Guangzhou. A generation of mixed-race children is their legacy

By Jenni Marsh, CNN, March 18, 2021

(CNN)When the coronavirus pandemic ground China to a near-halt in early February last year, Youssouf Dieng jetted back to Dakar for, he thought, a brief sojourn. In reality, it was a year before Dieng — who had worked as a goods trader in the manufacturing hub of Guangzhou in southern China for two decades — could return, on an air ticket three times the usual cost, and a complicated business visa. By then, the pandemic had driven hundreds of Africans out of Guangzhou, sparked the most severe anti-Black racial clashes in China in decades, and remade business operations, with Chinese factories connecting with African customers directly over e-commerce platforms.

Read the rest of the story here.

Nourin Mohamed Siddig: The African art of reciting the Koran

Isma’il Kushkush, 9 February

When Nourin Mohamed Siddig recited the Koran, people around the world described his tone as sad, soulful and bluesy. His unique sound made him one of the Muslim world’s most popular reciters. As a consequence, his death at the age of 38 in a car accident in Sudan in November was mourned from Pakistan to the United States. “The world has lost one of the most beautiful [voices] of our time,” tweeted Imam Omar Suleiman of Texas.

Read the rest of the story here.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Africa and the Disruptions of the Twenty-first Century

[أفريقيا واضطرابات القرن الواحد والعشرين]

Author: Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

This collection of essays interrogates the repositioning of Africa and its diasporas in the unfolding disruptive transformations of the early twenty-first century. It is divided into five parts focusing on America’s racial dysfunctions, navigating global turbulence, Africa’s political dramas, the continent’s persistent mythologisation and disruptions in higher education. It closes with tributes to two towering African public intellectuals, Ali Mazrui and Thandika Mkandawire, who have since joined the ancestors.

Publisher: CODESRIA, Senegal, 2021.

From Handmaiden of Colonialism to Esteemed Discipline: Professor Paul Nchoji Nkwi on the Reinvention of Anthropology in Africa

[ من حياة في خدمة الاستعمار إلى حياة الانضباط والاحترام: أفكار البروفيسور بول نشوجي نكوي عن إعادة اختراع الأنثروبولوجيا في إفريقيا]

Author: Paul Nchoji Nkwi

This book documents key features in the life of the father of anthropology in Cameroon, Professor Paul Nchoji Nkwi. The conversations within these pages chronicle, in his own words, how he came to anthropology and how the discipline shaped and still shapes his trajectory. One work does not suffice to elucidate all that Nkwi has contributed to the discipline of Anthropology in Cameroon and beyond; nevertheless, this book is a starting point. As the founding president of the Pan-African Association of Anthropologists (PAAA), Nkwi has been a trail blazer, sowing the seeds, nurturing the shoots, and grooming budding African anthropologists in their investigation of that great anthropological question: what it means to be human. In discussing the transformation of anthropology from the handmaiden of colonialism to the advocate of identity, voice, and a means for Africa to engage with and interact within contemporary society, Nkwi reveals insights regarding, among others, the birth and growth of the discipline in Cameroon, the founding of the PAAA, and the applicability of the subject to the changing and challenging landscape that characterizes today’s globalized world. Likewise, blending theory and practice, he weaves a formidable tale of anthropological thought from an Africanist perspective through his notion of an African Pragmatic Socialism as a way of delving into, making sense of, and addressing the reality of the 21st century on the African continent and possibly beyond.

Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2021.

The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans

[قضية الحرية: تاريخ موجز للأمريكيين الأفريقيين]

Author: Jonathan Scott Holloway

This book considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called “the cause of freedom.” It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement. It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery, the eventual dismantling of that system in the national bloodletting of the Civil War, and the ways that civil rights disputes have continued to erupt in the more than 150 years since Emancipation. The Cause of Freedom carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement, a grass-roots activist convulsion that declared that African Americans’ present and past have value and meaning. At a moment when political debates grapple with the nation’s obligation to acknowledge and perhaps even repair its original sin of racialized slavery, The Cause of Freedom tells a story about our capacity and willingness to realize the ideal articulated in the country’s founding document, namely, that all people were created equal..

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Turkey in Africa. Turkey’s Strategic Involvement in Sub-Saharan Africa

[ تركيا في إفريقيا: التورط الاستراتيجي التركي في أفريقيا جنوب الصحراء]

Author: Federico Donelli

Africa is increasingly becoming an arena for geopolitical competition over its resources and, in the last two decades, has seen many emerging powers such as China, India, Russia, Japan & Brazil attempting to strengthen their ties with the continent. Turkey’s involvement has been much less discussed, despite the fact that Turkey’s strategic involvement with several sub-Saharan African states has been deepening since its active engagement in the Somali crisis of 2011. Federico Donelli brings to light the extent of Turkey’s involvement in Africa and analyses the unique characteristics, benefits, challenges and limits of Turkish policy in the region. The book examines the Turkish diplomatic programme as well as its domestic reception, which includes humanitarian aid, religious links such as the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation), as well as private business links. Crucially, Donelli examines what makes Turkish involvement different from that of other international actors in the region – its historic ties with North Africa under the Ottoman Empire.

Publisher: Bloomsbury, London, 2021.

Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature

[التحرر من الاستعمار في أدب المهجر: نحو نهج جوهري في الأدب الأفرو-أطلسي]

Author: Yomaira C Figueroa-Vásquez

Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Decolonizing Diasporas argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists from Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba offer new worldviews that unsettle and dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. With women of color feminisms and decolonial theory as frameworks, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez juxtaposes Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic diasporic artists, analyzing work by Nelly Rosario, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Trifonia Melibea Obono, Donato Ndongo, Junot Díaz, Aracelis Girmay, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ernesto Quiñonez, Christina Olivares, Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, Ibeyi, Daniel José Older, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Figueroa-Vásquez’s study reveals the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another. Decolonizing Diasporas examines how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in these works by tracing interlocking structures of oppression, including public and intimate forms of domination, sexual and structural violence, sociopolitical and racial exclusion, and the haunting remnants of colonial intervention.

Publisher: Northwestern University Pres, 2020.

Blackness in Morocco: Gnawa Identity through Music and Visual Culture

[السواد في المغرب: دراسة هوية كناوة من خلال الموسيقى والثقافة المرئية]

Author: Cynthia J. Becker

For more than thirteen centuries, caravans transported millions of enslaved people from Africa south of the Sahara into what is now the Kingdom of Morocco. Today there are no museums, plaques, or monuments that recognize this history of enslavement, but enslaved people and their descendants created the Gnawa identity that preserves this largely suppressed heritage. This pioneering book describes how Gnawa emerged as a practice associated with Blackness and enslavement by reviewing visual representation and musical traditions from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, 2020

——– ———— ———–
Research Africa (research_africa-editor@duke.edu) welcomes submissions of books, events, funding opportunities, and more to be included in the next Research Africa News edition. To share with the general mailing list, please send your contents directly to (research_africa@duke.edu).

Research Africa News: March 19th , 2021

A Chapter in U.S. History Often Ignored: The Flight of Runaway Slaves to Mexico

February 28, 2021

In a forgotten cemetery on the edge of Texas in the Rio Grande delta, Olga Webber-Vasques says she’s proud of her family’s legacy — even if she only just learned the full story. Turns out her great-great-grandparents, who are buried there, were agents in the little-known underground railroad that led through South Texas to Mexico during the 1800s. Thousands of enslaved people fled plantations to make their way to the Rio Grande, which became a river of deliverance.

Read the rest of the article here.

All futurism is Afrofuturism: Can Africa industrialize? I think it can.

Noah Smith, 3/ 1/ 2021

Every so often I get the urge to blog about something really important, so today I think I’ll write about Africa. Afrofuturism is a fun and interesting subgenre of science fiction and philosophy, but I kind of chuckle every time I see the word, because all futurism is actually Afrofuturism. Africa is literally the future of the entire world. Here is one of the two or three most important charts you will ever see:

Read the research article here.

Covid-19 drove hundreds of Africans out of Guangzhou. A generation of mixed-race children is their legacy

By Jenni Marsh, CNN, March 18, 2021

(CNN)When the coronavirus pandemic ground China to a near-halt in early February last year, Youssouf Dieng jetted back to Dakar for, he thought, a brief sojourn. In reality, it was a year before Dieng — who had worked as a goods trader in the manufacturing hub of Guangzhou in southern China for two decades — could return, on an air ticket three times the usual cost, and a complicated business visa. By then, the pandemic had driven hundreds of Africans out of Guangzhou, sparked the most severe anti-Black racial clashes in China in decades, and remade business operations, with Chinese factories connecting with African customers directly over e-commerce platforms.

Read the rest of the story here.

Nourin Mohamed Siddig: The African art of reciting the Koran

Isma’il Kushkush, 9 February

When Nourin Mohamed Siddig recited the Koran, people around the world described his tone as sad, soulful and bluesy. His unique sound made him one of the Muslim world’s most popular reciters. As a consequence, his death at the age of 38 in a car accident in Sudan in November was mourned from Pakistan to the United States. “The world has lost one of the most beautiful [voices] of our time,” tweeted Imam Omar Suleiman of Texas.

Read the rest of the story here.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Africa and the Disruptions of the Twenty-first Century

[أفريقيا واضطرابات القرن الواحد والعشرين]

Author: Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

This collection of essays interrogates the repositioning of Africa and its diasporas in the unfolding disruptive transformations of the early twenty-first century. It is divided into five parts focusing on America’s racial dysfunctions, navigating global turbulence, Africa’s political dramas, the continent’s persistent mythologisation and disruptions in higher education. It closes with tributes to two towering African public intellectuals, Ali Mazrui and Thandika Mkandawire, who have since joined the ancestors.

Publisher: CODESRIA, Senegal, 2021.

From Handmaiden of Colonialism to Esteemed Discipline: Professor Paul Nchoji Nkwi on the Reinvention of Anthropology in Africa

[ من حياة في خدمة الاستعمار إلى حياة الانضباط والاحترام: أفكار البروفيسور بول نشوجي نكوي عن إعادة اختراع الأنثروبولوجيا في إفريقيا]

Author: Paul Nchoji Nkwi

This book documents key features in the life of the father of anthropology in Cameroon, Professor Paul Nchoji Nkwi. The conversations within these pages chronicle, in his own words, how he came to anthropology and how the discipline shaped and still shapes his trajectory. One work does not suffice to elucidate all that Nkwi has contributed to the discipline of Anthropology in Cameroon and beyond; nevertheless, this book is a starting point. As the founding president of the Pan-African Association of Anthropologists (PAAA), Nkwi has been a trail blazer, sowing the seeds, nurturing the shoots, and grooming budding African anthropologists in their investigation of that great anthropological question: what it means to be human. In discussing the transformation of anthropology from the handmaiden of colonialism to the advocate of identity, voice, and a means for Africa to engage with and interact within contemporary society, Nkwi reveals insights regarding, among others, the birth and growth of the discipline in Cameroon, the founding of the PAAA, and the applicability of the subject to the changing and challenging landscape that characterizes today’s globalized world. Likewise, blending theory and practice, he weaves a formidable tale of anthropological thought from an Africanist perspective through his notion of an African Pragmatic Socialism as a way of delving into, making sense of, and addressing the reality of the 21st century on the African continent and possibly beyond.

Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2021.

The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans

[قضية الحرية: تاريخ موجز للأمريكيين الأفريقيين]

Author: Jonathan Scott Holloway

This book considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called “the cause of freedom.” It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement. It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery, the eventual dismantling of that system in the national bloodletting of the Civil War, and the ways that civil rights disputes have continued to erupt in the more than 150 years since Emancipation. The Cause of Freedom carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement, a grass-roots activist convulsion that declared that African Americans’ present and past have value and meaning. At a moment when political debates grapple with the nation’s obligation to acknowledge and perhaps even repair its original sin of racialized slavery, The Cause of Freedom tells a story about our capacity and willingness to realize the ideal articulated in the country’s founding document, namely, that all people were created equal..

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Turkey in Africa. Turkey’s Strategic Involvement in Sub-Saharan Africa

[ تركيا في إفريقيا: التورط الاستراتيجي التركي في أفريقيا جنوب الصحراء]

Author: Federico Donelli

Africa is increasingly becoming an arena for geopolitical competition over its resources and, in the last two decades, has seen many emerging powers such as China, India, Russia, Japan & Brazil attempting to strengthen their ties with the continent. Turkey’s involvement has been much less discussed, despite the fact that Turkey’s strategic involvement with several sub-Saharan African states has been deepening since its active engagement in the Somali crisis of 2011. Federico Donelli brings to light the extent of Turkey’s involvement in Africa and analyses the unique characteristics, benefits, challenges and limits of Turkish policy in the region. The book examines the Turkish diplomatic programme as well as its domestic reception, which includes humanitarian aid, religious links such as the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation), as well as private business links. Crucially, Donelli examines what makes Turkish involvement different from that of other international actors in the region – its historic ties with North Africa under the Ottoman Empire.

Publisher: Bloomsbury, London, 2021.

Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature

[التحرر من الاستعمار في أدب المهجر: نحو نهج جوهري في الأدب الأفرو-أطلسي]

Author: Yomaira C Figueroa-Vásquez

Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Decolonizing Diasporas argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists from Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba offer new worldviews that unsettle and dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. With women of color feminisms and decolonial theory as frameworks, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez juxtaposes Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic diasporic artists, analyzing work by Nelly Rosario, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Trifonia Melibea Obono, Donato Ndongo, Junot Díaz, Aracelis Girmay, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ernesto Quiñonez, Christina Olivares, Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, Ibeyi, Daniel José Older, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Figueroa-Vásquez’s study reveals the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another. Decolonizing Diasporas examines how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in these works by tracing interlocking structures of oppression, including public and intimate forms of domination, sexual and structural violence, sociopolitical and racial exclusion, and the haunting remnants of colonial intervention.

Publisher: Northwestern University Pres, 2020.

Blackness in Morocco: Gnawa Identity through Music and Visual Culture

[السواد في المغرب: دراسة هوية كناوة من خلال الموسيقى والثقافة المرئية]

Author: Cynthia J. Becker

For more than thirteen centuries, caravans transported millions of enslaved people from Africa south of the Sahara into what is now the Kingdom of Morocco. Today there are no museums, plaques, or monuments that recognize this history of enslavement, but enslaved people and their descendants created the Gnawa identity that preserves this largely suppressed heritage. This pioneering book describes how Gnawa emerged as a practice associated with Blackness and enslavement by reviewing visual representation and musical traditions from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, 2020

——– ———— ———–
Research Africa (research_africa-editor@duke.edu) welcomes submissions of books, events, funding opportunities, and more to be included in the next Research Africa News edition. To share with the general mailing list, please send your contents directly to (research_africa@duke.edu).

Research Africa News: April 1, 2020

A Place for Indigenous Languages in African Fiction
By Adipo Sidang, March 7th 2020
African mother tongue languages are increasingly being abandoned, with sub-Saharan. Africa being one of the regions with the most endangered languages. But the solution will not come from simply promulgating policy. The “African society” must hold conversations with itself and overhaul its value system, because language is culture, and culture is empty without its set of values and truths.
Read the details in this link here.

Introducing ‘African Arguments- Debating Ideas’
By Alex Dewaal on MARCH 16, 2020
Alex de Waal (Director at the World Peace Foundation and editor at African Arguments) introduces the ethos of Debating Ideas – the latest addition to the African Arguments website. Welcome to African Arguments—Debating Ideas. Our vision to publish writing that is engaged – and when needed, enraged – from the African continent, and by those in intellectual and moral solidarity with Africans. We aim to provide a forum for debate and controversy. We will pick up on the issues of the day; we will use the titles in the African Arguments book series as the basis for discussion; and we will seek to set an agenda for the debates of tomorrow.
Read the rest of the story here.

The desperate final days of a domestic worker in Lebanon
By Timour Azhari 24 Mar 2020
Beirut, Lebanon – On the morning of March 13, Faustina Tay sent a final desperate message to an activist group she had contacted about the abuse she was suffering at the hands of her Lebanese employers. “God please help me,” the 23-year-old Ghanaian domestic worker wrote. About 18 hours later, she was found dead.
Read the details in this link.

Colonial-era treaties are to blame for the unresolved dispute over Ethiopia’s dam
The Conversation: March 25, 2020
Disputes over the filling and operation of Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam have, once again, threatened security in North-East Africa. The dam – a huge project on one of the River Nile’s main tributaries, the Blue Nile in Ethiopia – is designed to generate 6,000 megawatts of electricity. Its reservoir can hold more than 70 billion cubic metres of water. That’s nearly equal to half of the Nile’s annual flow. Filling the immense reservoir will diminish the flow of the Nile.
Read the details in this link.

Why black Americans are moving to Africa
By Princess Jones, March 28, 2020
Monique John wasn’t sure what to expect when she stepped off the plane in her new home: the West African nation of Liberia. “It was very rundown looking,” the Brooklyn-born 28-year-old recalled of her first glimpse of the capital, Monrovia, nearly three years ago. “But my feeling as I was walking along the city’s main streets was a sense of excitement . . . it felt almost like an out-of-body experience to finally be in Africa.” John is one of a number of African Americans moving to the Motherland, some inspired by the recent “Year of Return” movement initiated by Ghana, 400 years after the first Africans were brought in chains to Jamestown, Va. Last year, Ghana gave citizenship to 126 people of African descent, many of them Americans.
Read the details in this link.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Shaping the African Savannah: From Capitalist Frontier to Arid Eden in Namibia
[صناعة السافانا الأفريقية: من تخومات الرأسمالية إلى أقطام عدن في ناميبيا]
Author: Michael Bollig

The southern African savannah landscape has been framed as an ‘Arid Eden’ in recent literature, as one of Africa’s most sought after exotic tourism destinations by twenty-first century travellers, as a ‘last frontier’ by early twentieth-century travellers and as an ancient ancestral land by Namibia’s Herero communities. In this 150-year history of the region, Michael Bollig looks at how this ‘Arid Eden’ came into being, how this ‘last frontier’ was construed, and how local pastoralists relate to the landscape. Putting the intricate and changing relations between humans, arid savannah grasslands and its co-evolving animal inhabitants at the centre of his analysis, this history of material relations, of power struggles between commercial hunters and wildlife, between wealthy cattle patrons and foraging clients, between established homesteads and recent migrants, conservationists and pastoralists. Finally, Bollig highlights how futures are being aspired to and planned for between the increasing challenges of climate change, global demands for cheap ores and quests for biodiversity conservation.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

The Challenge of African Potentials: Conviviality, Informality and Futurity
[تحديات إفريقيا: العيش المشترك ، المجالات غير الرسمية والمسقبل]
Author (Editor): Yaw Ofosu-Kusi, Motoji Matsuda

This collection of articles is based on presentations and discussions at the 2018 African Potentials Forum, held in Accra, Ghana. This forum was a part of the African Potentials Project, which aims to clarify the latent problem-solving abilities, ways of thinking, and institutions that have been created, accumulated, unified, and deployed in the everyday experiences of Africans. The notion of Africa’s latent power/potential is not related to romanticisation of the traditional knowledge of African society and its institutions as fixed, essentialised ‘magic wands’. This notion also raises objections against political dogmas that seek to smoke out and eliminate thought and values originating in Western modernity. The keyword of the Accra Forum was futurity. Africa’s future is laden with possibilities, latent power, and potential. It is bright and hopeful but, simultaneously, bleak and thought-provoking. For nascent democracies and economically challenged communities, the value of this potential lies not in its static qualities but in how these qualities can be harnessed and translated into beneficial practical outcomes. As a concept, ‘potential’ connotes a time to come; a futurity that is full of known and unknown possibilities, challenges, and opportunities.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2020.

Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention
[قطاع موبيوس ملك الإمبراطورية: أصداء التاريخ في أزمتي الهجرة و الاعتقال في إيطاليا]
Author: Stephanie Malia Hom

Italy’s current crisis of Mediterranean migration and detention has its roots in early twentieth century imperial ambitions. Stephanie Malia Hom‘s new book Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention investigates how mobile populations were perceived to be major threats to Italian colonization, and how the state’s historical mechanisms of control have resurfaced, with greater force, in today’s refugee crisis. What is at stake in Empire’s Mobius Strip is a deeper understanding of the forces driving those who move by choice and those who are moved. Hom focuses on Libya, considered Italy’s most valuable colony, both politically and economically. Often perceived as the least of the great powers, Italian imperialism has been framed as something of “colonialism lite.” But Italian colonizers carried out genocide between 1929–33, targeting nomadic Bedouin and marching almost 100,000 of them across the desert, incarcerating them in camps where more than half who entered died, simply because the Italians considered their way of life suspect. There are uncanny echoes with the situation of the Roma and migrants today. Hom explores three sites, in novella-like essays, where Italy’s colonial past touches down in the present: the island, the camp, and the village.
Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2019.

Hollywood and Africa: Recycling the ‘Dark Continent’ Myth, 1908-2020
[هوليوود وأفريقيا: إعادة صناعة أسطورة “القارة المظلمة” ، 1908-2020]
Author: Okaka Opio Dokotum

This book is a study of over a century of stereotypical Hollywood film productions about Africa. It argues that the myth of the Dark Continent continues to influence Western cultural productions about Africa as a cognitive-based system of knowledge, especially in history, literature and film. Hollywood and Africa identifies the ‘colonial mastertext’ of the Dark Continent mythos by providing a historiographic genealogy and context for the term’s development and consolidation. An array of literary and paraliterary film adaptation theories are employed to analyse the deep genetic strands of Hollywood–Africa film adaptations. The mutations of the Dark Continent mythos across time and space are then tracked through the classical, neoclassical and new wave Hollywood–Africa phases in order to illustrate how Hollywood productions about Africa recycle, revise, reframe, reinforce, transpose, interrogate — and even critique — these tropes of Darkest Africa while sustaining the colonial mastertext and rising cyberactivism against Hollywood’s whitewashing of African history.
Publisher: NISC (Pty) Ltd, South Africa, 2020.

Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performance of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain
[في رفقة مسرحية السود: الحركة الابداعية في المهجر الافريقي في باكورة اسبانيا الحديثة]
Author: Nicholas R. Jones
This book analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, when performing habla de negros—how Africanized Castilian was commonly referred to—was in fashion. Jones problematizes long-held beliefs among literary critics and linguists that habla de negros as represented in dominant Spanish literature was exclusively racist stereotypes, and instead seeks to theorize habla de negros as a radical performance that “allow[s] black expression and black sensibilities to emerge whether there are black bodies present or not.” This elegant book demonstrates that black voices, speakers, bodies, subjects, were visible, present, and constitutive parts of the early modern Castilian soundscape and society and succeeds in drawing modern readers’ attention to their importance. By centering black historical and literary figures, Jones shows how black populations of early modern Spain participated in the formation of Black experience beyond Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States.
Publisher: Penn State University Press, 2019.

Crossroads of Dreams: A Poetry Anthology
[مفترق طرق الأحلام: مختارات شعرية]
Auther (s):Franklin Agogho, Jude A. Fonchenalla, MD Mbutoh

Crossroads of Dreams is a steamy potpourri of poetry by Franklin Agogho, Jude A. Fonchenalla and M.D. Mbutoh which redefine representations of African youth through the prisms of politics, emigration and the enduring threat of underdevelopment. How would one explain the persistence of poverty and oppression in Africa amidst the superabundance of natural and human resources? In their search for answers, the poets not only chastise but also to point to a verdant and promising future – free of corruption, greed, violence and neo-colonialism. Other themes covered in the anthology include gender, identity and family ties. Animated by three distinctive styles, the eighty-eight poems in this volume will surely enrage, provoke laughter, sorrow, disgust but also hope, courage and visions of a promising Africa in all its splendour and tribulations.
Publisher: Spears Media Press, Cameroon, 2020.

——– ———— ———–
Research Africa (research_africa-editor@duke.edu) welcomes submissions of books, events, funding opportunities, and more to be included in the next edition.

Research Africa News: March 5th, 2020

US ambassador blasts Trump, Mnuchin on Ethiopia-Egypt dispute
Teshome Borago
March 1, 2020
Former United States Ambassador David H. Shinn accused the Trump administration of “putting its thumb on the scale in favor of Egypt,” in the dispute with Ethiopia and Sudan over a new hydro-dam.
The latest crisis began after the U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin sent a letter warning Ethiopia not to operate its hydropower dam, using inflammatory rhetoric similar to the former Egyptian government of Morsi that threatened military action.
You can read the rest of the story here.

The battle of Adwa: an Ethiopian victory that ran against the current of colonialism February 29, 2020 2.28am EST
On the first day of March 124 years ago, traditional warriors, farmers and pastoralists as well as women defeated a well-armed Italian army in the northern town of Adwa in Ethiopia. The outcome of this battle ensured Ethiopia’s independence, making it the only African country never to be colonised. Adwa turned Ethiopia into a symbol of freedom for black people globally. It also led to a change of government in Italy.
Read the details of the scholarship in this link

Indigenous languages matter – but all is not lost when they change or even disappear
January 27, 2020 1.53pm EST
UNESCO’s International Year of Indigenous Languages recently came to an end after a year of celebration of linguistic diversity. And with a “decade of Indigenous languages” now under consideration, it’s a good time to review what these celebrations mean.
Read the rest of the story in this link.

Meet the Iowa Architect Documenting Every Slave House Still Standing
BY SABRINA IMBLER FEBRUARY 26, 2020

Jobie Hill has visited 700 former residences. Many have been abandoned. Some have become storage space. Others are B&Bs.
THE CURRENT RESIDENTS OF THE historic Mount Zion home in Warren County, Virginia, were rifling through the attic of their garage when they found a yellowed fragment of paper. It was the corner of a larger document, soiled by mold, water, and time. But the snaking cursive writing on it was still legible. It was the bill of sale for an enslaved girl named Chalotte (more likely Charlotte, with the letter “r” long faded away).
Read the details in this link.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

White Ferocity: From Non-Whites to Non-Aryans Concealed Genocides from 1492 to Date [همجية العلوج ضد غيرهم: خفايا الإبادة الجماعية من 1492 إلى اليوم]
Author: Rosa Amelia Plumelle-Uribe

Rosa Amelia Plumelle-Uribe’s book La Férocité blanche: Des non-blancs aux non-aryens, génocides occultés de 1492 à nos jours was first published in March 2001. A German translation was published soon after. CODESRIA is honoured to release the first publication of the book in English, which includes a detailed preface and recommendation from the late Samir Amin, CODESRIA’s first Executive Secretary. This book deserves attention today, perhaps more than two decades ago when it was first published. We are witnessing a reincarnation in the shameless celebration of ‘empire’ in all its manifestations and the resurgence of academics regurgitating already discredited notions of a “balance sheet” approach to imperialism; the reawakening of fascist tendencies and the minimization of fascism to one “exceptional” case of Nazi German and limited to the time of Hitler. There is revisionism in the air and a reading of Rosa Amelia Plumelle-Uribe’s book draws us to the reality of how perverse Nazism and Fascism have been as part of a Western project to dominate the rest of the world. The book reminds us that these tendencies have a long history and the task ahead is how to handle the question of memory and how the production of knowledge will help set records straight and frame the right questions for a proper understanding of the biggest calamities ever to confront humanity. The publication of the original edition in French was momentous; this English edition coming from an African knowledge producing institution is more momentous and relevant. The 135th anniversary of the Berlin conference that prefaced Africa’s colonial conquest was marked in November 2019. On the other hand, the year 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the ending of the Second World War, and the ending of the Holocaust. The silences which mark the genocide resulting from colonial conquest and the ‘ noisy’ proclamations of Auschwitz and the holocaust as an exceptional case of genocide in human history, are the contradictions that Rosa Amelia examines in this publication.
Publisher: Dakar: CODESRIA, 2020.

Africa and the World: Navigating Shifting Geopolitics
[أفريقيا والعالم: تأملات في المتغيرات الجيوبوليتيكية]
Author (editor): Francis A. Kornegay

Africa and the World: Navigating Shifting Geopolitics is one of the first books to analyse the global geopolitical landscape from an African perspective, with a view to the opportunities and challenges facing the African continent. Authors in this edited volume argue for the need to re-imagine Africa’s role in the world. As a cradle of humanity, a historical fountain of profound scientific knowledge, an object of colonial conquest and, today, a collective of countries seeking to pool their sovereignties in order to improve the human condition, Africa has a unique opportunity to advance its own interests. Authors reflect on all these issues; they outline how developments in the global political economy impact on the continent and, inversely, how Africa can develop a strategic perspective that takes into account the dynamics playing out in a fraught global terrain.
Publisher: Mapungubwe Institute (MISTRA), South Africa, 2020.

Seeking Urban Transformation: Alternative Urban Futures in Zimbabwe
[نحو التغيير الحضري: قراءات في مستقبل البديل الحضري في زمبابوي]
Author: Davison Muchadenyika

Seeking Urban Transformation. Alternative Urban Futures in Zimbabwe tells the stories of ordinary people’s struggles to remake urban centres. It interrogates and highlights the principle conditions in which urban transformation takes place. The main catalysts of the transformation are social movements and planning institutions. Social movements pool resources and skills, acquire land, install infrastructure and build houses. Planning institutions change policies, regulations and traditions to embrace and support a new form of urban development driven by grassroots movements. Besides providing a comprehensive analysis of planning and housing in Zimbabwe, there is a specific focus on three urban centres of Harare, Chitungwiza and Epworth. In metropolitan Harare, the books examines new housing and infrastructure series to the predominantly urban poor population; vital roles played by the urban poor in urban development and the adoption by planning institutions of grassroots-centered, urban-planning approaches.
Publisher: Weaver Press, Zimbabwe, 2020.

Age of Concrete: Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique
[عصر الخرسانة: البيوت وأشكال الطموحات السكنية في عاصمة موزمبيق]
Author: David Morton

Age of Concrete is a history of the making of houses and homes in the subúrbios of Maputo (Lourenço Marques), Mozambique, from the late 1940s to the present. Often dismissed as undifferentiated, ahistorical “slums,” these neighborhoods are in fact an open-air archive that reveals some of people’s highest aspirations. At first people built in reeds. Then they built in wood and zinc panels. And finally, even when it was illegal, they risked building in concrete block, making permanent homes in a place where their presence was often excruciatingly precarious. Unlike many histories of the built environment in African cities, Age of Concrete focuses on ordinary homebuilders and dwellers. David Morton thus models a different way of thinking about urban politics during the era of decolonization, when one of the central dramas was the construction of the urban stage itself. It shaped how people related not only to each other but also to the colonial state and later to the independent state as it stumbled into being. Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2019.

African Personhood and Applied Ethics
[انسانية الأفارقة وعلم الأخلاق التطبيقي]
Author: Motsamai Molefe

Recently, the salient idea of personhood in the tradition of African philosophy has been objected to on various grounds. Two such objections stand out – the book deals with a lot more. The first criticism is that the idea of personhood is patriarchal insofar as it elevates the status of men and marginalises women in society. The second criticism observes that the idea of personhood is characterised by speciesism. The essence of these concerns is that personhood fails to embody a robust moral-political view. African Personhood and Applied Ethics offers a philosophical explication of the ethics of personhood to give reasons why we should take it seriously as an African moral perspective that can contribute to global moral-political issues. The book points to the two facets that constitute the ethics of personhood – an account of (1) moral perfection and (2) dignity. It then draws on the under-explored view of dignity qua the capacity for sympathy inherent in the moral idea of personhood to offer a unified account of selected themes in applied ethics, specifically women, animal and development.
Publisher: NISC (Pty) Ltd, South Africa, 2020.

Are You Entertained? Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century
[هل تسليت؟ الثقافة الشعبية لدى السود في القرن الحادي والعشرين]
Author: Simone C. Drake, Dwan K. Henderson

The advent of the internet and the availability of social media and digital downloads have expanded the creation, distribution, and consumption of Black cultural production as never before. At the same time, a new generation of Black public intellectuals who speak to the relationship between race, politics, and popular culture has come into national prominence. The contributors to Are You Entertained? address these trends to consider what culture and blackness mean in the twenty-first century’s digital consumer economy. In this collection of essays, interviews, visual art, and an artist statement the contributors examine a range of topics and issues, from music, white consumerism, cartoons, and the rise of Black Twitter to the NBA’s dress code, dance, and Moonlight.
Publisher: Duke University Press, 2020.
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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.

Research Africa News: February 21, 2020

Google PhD Fellowship Program Google
PhD Fellowships directly support graduate students as they pursue their PhD, as well as connect them to a Google Research Mentor. Nurturing and maintaining strong relations with the academic community is a top priority at Google. The Google PhD Fellowship Program was created to recognize outstanding graduate students doing exceptional and innovative research in areas relevant to computer science and related fields. Fellowships support promising PhD candidates of all backgrounds who seek to influence the future of technology. Google’s mission is to foster inclusive research communities and encourages people of diverse backgrounds to apply. We currently offer Fellowships in Africa, Australia and New Zealand, East Asia, Europe, India, the United States and Canada.
Read the details of the fellowship in this link

African Guest Researchers’ Scholarship Programme
An opportunity for postdoctoral researchers in Africa to pursue their own research projects, thereby indirectly strenghtening the academic milieux in African countries. The scholarship offers access to the Institute’s library and other resources that provide for a stimulating research environment.
Read the details of the scholarship in this link

Oil giant BP accused of racism in Mauritania after overlooking black students
By Amandla Thomas-Johnson, 18 February 2020

At least nine out of ten BP-sponsored scholarships went to Arab-Berber students in the majority black nation.
BP has been accused of contributing to “state racism” in Mauritania after awarding at least nine out of ten study abroad scholarships to students drawn from the country’s minority Arab-Berber group, with none appearing to go to the majority black population. The London-based oil giant, which has stepped up its investments in the West African country in recent years, also came under fire for the few women awarded the scholarship. However, it insists the students were chosen on merit.
Read the rest of the story in this ME link.

The Last Poets: the hip-hop forefathers who gave black America its voice
By Rebecca Bengal Fri 18 May 2018
It is half a century since the Last Poets stood in Harlem, uttered their first words in public, and created the blueprint for hip-hop. At an intimate open house session, they explain why their revolutionary words are still needed. You can trace the birth of hip-hop to the summer of 1973 when Kool Herc DJ’d the first extended breakbeat, much to the thrill of the dancers at a South Bronx block party. You can trace its conception, however, to five years earlier – 19 May 1968, 50 years ago this weekend – when the founding members of the Last Poets stood together in Mount Morris park – now Marcus Garvey park – in Harlem and uttered their first poems in public. They commemorated what would have been the 43rd birthday of Malcolm X, who had been slain three years earlier. Not two months had passed since the assassination of Martin Luther King. “Growing up, I was scheduled to be a nice little coloured guy. I was liked by everybody,” says the Last Poets’ Abiodun Oyewole. He was 18 and in college when he heard the news. “But when they killed Dr King, all bets were off.”
Read the details in this link.

The Georgetown Student Who Became Justice Minister of Sudan He was preparing for life as an academic. A new government in his homeland had bigger plans for him.
By Rebecca Hamilton FEBRUARY 5, 2020

Late last summer, Nasredeen Abdulbari, 41, was in the Georgetown University Library, editing the fifth chapter of his dissertation on constitutional law and human rights, when he received a text message from a Sudanese civil society leader asking him to call urgently. Seismic changes were underway in Abdulbari’s home country of Sudan, where protesters had succeeded in ousting President Omar Hassan al-Bashir after 30 years of dictatorship. Abdulbari closed his laptop and stepped outside to make the call. “Civil society is nominating you to be the minister of justice,” the man on the other end of the line told him.
Read the details in this link.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Financing Africa
[تدبير الموارد المالية في أفريقيا]
Author: Attiya Waris

Financing Africa’s development requires ingenuity, discipline, and an understanding of fiscal systems – the entirety of government revenues and expenditures, including taxation and debt. This book makes fascinating what might seem at first glance complex. It describes diverse approaches that have been adjusted to local circumstances across the continent and reflects on the push to unite and harmonise toward African union. Africa is rich, yet resources are lost through loopholes in fiscal systems. Financial resources come from the people, are not unlimited, and do not come easily or without cost. Africans must therefore cherish these resources and use them in nation-building and national and regional development. Efficient, effective, transparent and accountable fiscal systems that are fair and just will go a long way toward financing Africa’s development. Using examples from all of Africa’s 54 countries, the book makes fiscal matters real and understandable for people, no matter their field. It demonstrates the importance of fiscal law and policy for development and the impact it has on individuals, communities, nations, regional groupings, and the continent.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2019.

Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger
[فادا: نقاشات حول الملل وهوية الانتماء في النيجر]
Author: Adeline Masquelier

Niger most often comes into the public eye as an example of deprivation and insecurity. Urban centers have become concentrated areas of unemployment filled with young men trying, against all odds, to find jobs and fill their time with meaningful occupations. At the heart of Adeline Masquelier’s groundbreaking book is the fada—a space where men gather to escape boredom by talking, playing cards, listening to music, and drinking tea. As a place in which new forms of sociability and belonging are forged outside the unattainable arena of work, the fada has become an integral part of Niger’s urban landscape. By considering the fada as a site of experimentation, Masquelier offers a nuanced depiction of how young men in urban Niger engage in the quest for recognition and reinvent their own masculinity in the absence of conventional avenues to self-realization. In an era when fledgling and advanced economies alike are struggling to support meaningful forms of employment, this book offers a timely glimpse into how to create spaces of stability, respect, and creativity in the face of diminished opportunities and precarity
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2019

Religion and Development in Southern and Central Africa: Vol. 2
[الدين والتنمية في جنوب ووسط أفريقيا: المجلد 2]
Author (Editor): James N. Amanze, Maake Masango, Chitando Ezra, Lilian Siwila

This book is a result of a joint conference, which was held from 18th-22nd July 2017 under the theme Religion, Citizenship and Development – Southern African Perspectives.” The theme of the conference was adopted in order to underline the importance and significance of religion in the socio-economic development of people in the world generally and in Southern and Central Africa in particular. The papers in the book are divided into two volumes. Volume one consists of papers which directly discuss religion and development in one form or another. The second volume contains papers that discuss religion and other pertinent issues related to development. The papers are grouped into sub-themes for ease of reference. These include Citizenship and Development, Migration and Development, Disability and Development, Pentecostal Churches and Development and Religion and Society. All in all, despite a divergence of sub-themes in volume two, all point to issues to do with the role of religion in development in Southern and Central Africa today..
Publisher: Mzuni Press, Malawi, 2019.

Histories of Dirt Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos
[تاريخ الأوساخ: وسائل الإعلام والحياة الحضرية في مدينة لاغوس في عهد الاستعمار وما بعده]
Author: Stephanie Newell

In Histories of Dirt Stephanie Newell traces the ways in which urban spaces and urban dwellers come to be regarded as dirty, as exemplified in colonial and postcolonial Lagos. Newell conceives dirt as an interpretive category that facilitates moral, sanitary, economic, and aesthetic evaluations of other cultures under the rubric of uncleanliness. She examines a number of texts ranging from newspaper articles by elite Lagosians to colonial travel writing, public health films, and urban planning to show how understandings of dirt came to structure colonial governance.
Publisher: Duke University Press, 2019.

Caravans of Gold: Fragments in Time Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa
[قوافل من الذهب: الفن والثقافة والمقايضات عبر إفريقيا جنوب الصحراء في القرون الوسطى]
Author: Kathleen Bickford Berzock

Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time draws on the latest archaeological discoveries and art historical research to construct a compelling look at medieval trans-Saharan exchange and its legacy. Contributors from diverse disciplines present case studies that form a rich portrayal of a distant time. Topics include descriptions of key medieval cities around the Sahara; networks of exchange that contributed to the circulation of gold, copper, and ivory and their associated art forms; and medieval glass bead production in West Africa’s forest region. The volume also reflects on Morocco’s Gnawa material culture, associated with descendants of West African slaves, and movements of people across the Sahara today. Featuring a wealth of color images, this fascinating book demonstrates how the rootedness of place, culture, and tradition is closely tied to the circulation of people, objects, and ideas. These “fragments in time” offer irrefutable evidence of the key role that Africa played in medieval history and promote a new understanding of the past and the present. Published in association with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University.
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Things Left Unsaid
[المسكوت عنه]
Author: Rosabelle Boswell

In South Africa issues of identity remain a pressing concern and preoccupation. For some, the experience of feeling that one does not belong in South Africa, especially among Africans and African descendants, appears to be intensifying. In this first collection of poems, Rosabelle Boswell speaks of the many places in which ordinary Africans born outside of South Africa try to achieve belonging. They do so in the family context, the backyard, language, the meeting, familiar landscapes and dreams. The poems also foreground the tumult of emotions that rise from the experience of exclusion and the results of pressure when one must conform. There is panic and dislocation, desperation, fear and sense of marginality when one’s work and achievements are reduced to whether one is born in South Africa or not. According to the poet, in such a context, one can only achieve true freedom from the tyranny of belonging by psychologically walking away from the expectations of those in power and putting oneself in a ‘clearing’ where flexibility, openness and newness reside. The forest of expectations remains, but we can achieve temporary respite from it by walking away now and again. The collection spans two years of writing identity in a different form, poetry.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, 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.

Research Africa News: February 9th, 2020

Who was Omar ibn Said? New research reconsiders Muslim slave’s writings
By Yonat Shimron, February 7, 2020 (Religion News Services)

(RNS) — He was a slave from Senegal who wrote in Arabic. Or was he an Arab prince? He was a scholar who memorized vast passages of the Quran and mastered numerous Islamic texts. Or were his writings unintelligible? He was a devout Muslim. Or did he convert to Christianity? These are just some of the conflicting narratives about Omar ibn Said (or more correctly Sayyid), a black Muslim scholar captured in Senegal in 1807 and transported by boat to Charleston, South Carolina. He eventually fled to North Carolina and lived out his days as a house slave to James Owen and Owen’s brother, onetime North Carolina Governor John Owen.

Read the rest of the story in RNS link.

Buried in Sand For A Millennium: Africa’s Gus Roman City
By Messynessy, Jan. 15, 2020

Got your archeologist’s cap on? Today we invite you to touch down in Algeria and explore Timgad, a lost Roman city on the edge of the Sahara desert that remained hidden beneath the sand for nearly a thousand years. Positively obscure compared to the international notoriety of Pompeii, this ancient city is nonetheless one of the best surviving examples of Roman town planning anywhere in the historical Empire. No one believed the first 18th century European explorer who claimed to have found a Roman city poking out of the sand in the North African desert, and the full extent of the 50-hectare site wouldn’t be realised and excavated in its entirety until the 1950s. Rome is still well worth the visit, but it’s in Algeria that some of the most impressive Roman remains in the whole world are to be found…Read the details in this link here.

African Union: Implementation of #Agenda2063

The First Continental Report on the implementation of #Agenda2063 has been launched!
The report is an assessment of 31 African Union Member States & 6 Regional Economic Communities towards achieving Africa’s blueprint and master plan for sustainable development and economic growth.
The report is available here

Africa has 1.2 billion people and only six labs that can test for coronavirus. How quickly can they ramp up?
DAKAR, Senegal — After Africa’s first suspected case of the Wuhan coronavirus emerged last month in the Ivory Coast, doctors sent a sample from the coughing college student to the closest equipped lab — 4,500 miles north, in Paris.
Officials said the wait for the results, which came back negative, highlighted the need to rapidly expand testing capacity on the continent, where health authorities are scrambling to prepare for a potential outbreak.

Read the rest of the story here

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Perspectives of Youth Language Practices in Africa: Codes and Identity Writings
[المنظو اللغوي والاجتماعي للممارسات اللغوية بين الشباب في أفريقيا: حالة دراسية
للرموزوالهوية الانتمائية في الكتابة]
Author (Editor): Gratien G. Atindogbé, Augustin Emmanuel Ebongue

With the demographic explosion of young people in major African cities, we are witnessing the emergence of youth languages and new speech forms. In search of well-being, these young people, plagued by poverty, social injustice, unemployment and idleness, invent linguistic codes that allow them to find themselves. The linguistic and sociolinguistic description of these youth languages is the object of this volume. The contributions inform on the statutes and functions of the youth languages of Africa, their forms and structures, their representations, and envisage perspectives and prospective didactics. Avec l’explosion démographique des jeunes dans les grandes villes africaines, on assiste, à une émergence de langues et de parlers jeunes. En quête de bien-être, ces jeunes, en proie à la pauvreté, aux injustices sociales, au chômage et à l’oisiveté, inventent des codes linguistiques leur permettant de se retrouver. C’est la description linguistique et sociolinguistique de ces parlers, qui fait l’objet de ce collectif. Les contributions informent à cet effet sur les statuts et fonctions des parlers et langues jeunes d’Afrique, leurs formes et structures, les représentations entretenues à leur égard, et envisage des perspectives et prospectives didactiques.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2019.

Democratic Engineering in Rwanda and Burundi
[هندسة الديمقراطية في رواندا وبوروندي]
Author: Jean-Marie Kagabo

In Democratic Engineering in Rwanda and Burundi the author argues that a democratic model which is suitable for single-cultural societies may not be applicable in multicultural societies; he illustrates that the liberal and socialist theories have not addressed the issue of national minorities which threatens peace and stability in most African countries. The author investigates the form of democratic engineering that would harmonise ethnic relations and guard against ethnic discrimination and violence. He explores the consociational and integrative theories to identify a suitable democratic system that would stabilise Rwanda and Burundi. He analyses the pros and the cons of the present options adopted by Rwanda and Burundi to address the question of ethnicity and also assesses the potential of a number of other solutions.
Publisher: Fountain Publishers, Uganda, 2018.

Wanted Dead and Alive the Case for South Africa’s Cattle
[مطلوب حيا أم ميتا: دراسة حالة المواشي في جنوب أفريقيا]
Author: Gregory Mthembu-Salter

Given what we know about climate change, should we still be raising and eating cattle? And how do we weigh the cultural and economic value of cattle against their environmental impact? This engaging book brings history, science, economics and popular culture together in a timely discussion about whether current practices can be justified in a period of rapid climate change. Journalist Gregory Mthembu-Salter first encountered South Africa’s love of cattle during his own lobola negotiations. The book traces his personal journey through kraals, rangelands and feedlots across South Africa to find out more about the national hunger for cattle. He takes a broad sweep – drawing on such diverse sources as politicians involved in land reform, history, braai-side interviews with cattle farmers and abattoir owners, conversations with his mother-in-law, and analysis of cutting-edge science.
Publisher: Cover2Cover Books, South Africa,2019.

Letter from America Memoir of an Adopted Child
[رسالة من أمريكا: مذكرة طفل متبنى]
Author: Gil Ndi-Shang

Inspired by Alistair Cooke’s masterpiece “Letter from America” (1934-2004) that depicted the transformation of British culture in the United States of America, Ndi-Shang’s text redefines ‘America’, focusing on the melting pot engendered by African, indigenous, European and Asian cultures in Latin America through the case of Peru, the erstwhile epicentre of Spanish empire in Latin America. It is a reflection on the triangular relationship between Africa, Europe and America against the backdrop of slavery and (neo-)colonialism which continue to define intimate experiences, daily interactions, personal trajectories and human relations in a ‘globalized world’. Ndi-Shang probes into the legacies of racial inequalities but also the possibilities of a new ethic of encounter amongst human beings/cultures. The text is based on an intricate interweaving of the humorous with the tragic, the personal with the global, the historical with the current and the real with the creative.
Publisher: Spears Media Press, Cameroon, 2019

Black Feminism Reimagined After Intersectionality
[الحركة النسوية بين السود: اعادة تصور نظرية تداخل الهويات]
Author: Jennifer C. Nash

In Black Feminism Reimagined Jennifer C. Nash reframes black feminism’s engagement with intersectionality, often celebrated as its primary intellectual and political contribution to feminist theory. Charting the institutional history and contemporary uses of intersectionality in the academy, Nash outlines how women’s studies has both elevated intersectionality to the discipline’s primary program-building initiative and cast intersectionality as a threat to feminism’s coherence. As intersectionality has become a central feminist preoccupation, Nash argues that black feminism has been marked by a single affect—defensiveness—manifested by efforts to police intersectionality’s usages and circulations. Nash contends that only by letting go of this deeply alluring protectionist stance, the desire to make property of knowledge, can black feminists reimagine intellectual production in ways that unleash black feminist theory’s visionary world-making possibilities..

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2019

Locating Politics in Ethiopia’s Irreecha Ritual
[تحديد ماهية السياسة في طقوس مجموعات إريشا الإثيوبية]
Author: Serawit Bekele Debele

In Locating Politics in Ethiopia’s Irreecha Ritual Serawit Bekele Debele gives an account of politics and political processes in contemporary Ethiopia as manifested in the annual ritual performance. Mobilizing various sources such as archives, oral accounts, conversations, videos, newspapers, and personal observations, Debele critically analyses political processes and how they are experienced, made sense of and articulated across generational, educational, religious, gender and ethnic differences as well as political persuasions. Moreover, she engages Irreecha in relation to the hugely contested meaning making processes attached to the Thanksgiving ritual which has now become an integral part of Oromo national identity.
Publisher: Brill Publications, 2019.

Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia
[قصص عن الأمل المرارة: حالة دراسة مشيدي الطرق الصينيين في إثيوبيا]
Author: Miriam Driessen

China’s new globalism plays out as much in the lives of ordinary workers who shoulder the task of implementing infrastructure projects in the world as in the upper echelons of power. Through unprecedented ethnographic research among Chinese road builders in Ethiopia, Miriam Driessen finds that the hope of sharing China’s success with developing countries soon turns into bitterness, as Chinese workers perceive a lack of support and appreciation from Ethiopian laborers and state entities. The bitterness is compounded by their position at the margins of Chinese society, suspended as they are between China and Africa and between a poor rural background and a precarious urban future. Workers’ aspirations and predicaments reflect back on a Chinese society in flux as well as China’s shifting place in the world. Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia sheds light on situations of contact in which disparate cultures meet and wrestle with each other in highly asymmetric relations of power. Revealing the intricate and intimate dimensions of these encounters, Driessen conceptualizes how structures of domination and subordination are reshaped on the ground. The book skillfully interrogates micro-level experiences and teases out how China’s involvement in Africa is both similar to and different from historical forms of imperialism.
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press, 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.

Research Africa News: January 15th, 2020

Volume 3, Issue 3– December, 2019
The Third Issue of Research Africa Reviews, Volume 3, was published in early January 2020. The reviews may be found on the Research Africa Reviews website.

Open Call for Papers
The 4th AEGIS Thematic Conference on Africa in the Indian Ocean is planned to take place at Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon, on 23-24 April 2020.
Like the previous thematic conferences, we are bringing together researchers from Europe, Africa and Asia working on Africa in the Indian Ocean, with the aim of expanding the network of the AEGIS Collaborative Research Group on Africa in the Indian Ocean (CRG-AIO), and of producing an international peer-reviewed publication, either in the form of a book or a special issue of an Africanist journal.
The general theme of the two-day Conference is “New Gulf Streams – Middle East and Eastern Africa intersected”, and is organised in interdisciplinary thematic panels focussing on the interconnections between Horn of Africa & Eastern Africa societies and the Middle East countries, with a special focus on the challenges of recent geopolitical, religious and economic ties between these regions.
Read the details for proposals here

A Database of Fugitive Slave Ads Reveals Thousands of Untold Resistance Stories

Freedom on the Move from Cornell University is the first major digital database of fugitive slave ads from North America.

Readers of the May 24, 1796 Pennsylvania Gazette found an advertisement offering ten dollars to any person who would apprehend Oney Judge, an enslaved woman who had fled from President George Washington’s Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon.
Read the details in this link here

This Saharan Village Is Home to Thousands of Ancient Texts Preserved in Desert Libraries
By Jessica Stewart on August 8, 2019

Nestled in the Sahara, the medieval village of Chinguetti in Mauritania is an incredible jewel of Berber culture. Once an important outpost on trade and pilgrimage routes, the desert village contains wonderful examples of Berber Saharan architecture. It is also an important center of learning thanks to its desert libraries, which are filled with scientific and Qur’anic texts dating to the Middle Ages.
Read the details in this link here

Who Is Competing to Own Researcher Identity?
By Roger C. Schonfeldjan 6, 2020

Tweet Share 2 Pin Buffer Share 2SHARES PRINT THIS PAGE The largest scholarly publishers today are driven by one major near-term strategic concern — to reduce leakage and thereby bolster the value of the subscription bundle. But while they work belatedly to address this priority through Seamless Access (RA21), GetFTR, and even partnerships with ResearchGate, the savviest of them are keeping their eyes on the true structural transformation that the internet has wrought. We are witnessing the transformation away from a journal-centric model of scholarly publishing towards a researcher-centric model of scholarly communication. Success in this new environment requires engagement with researcher identity, which is a struggle even for most of the largest publishing houses. Who is competing to own researcher identity and how can other publishers engage this vital role?
Read the details in this link here.
The Emperor from Africa
It is tranquil these days at the triumphal arch of Septimius Severus in Leptis Magna, on the coast of Libya. The cube of white marble, scooped through by four arches and decorated with friezes of Septimius and his family, stands like a museum piece on the city’s southern edge. But it’s easy to imagine dusty foot, hoof and cart traffic bustling around the edifice some 18 centuries ago when the arch straddled the coast road running west to Carthage, in what is now Tunisia, and the road south into the Sahara. Like many of the city’s magnificent ruins, the arch speaks to the power and resourcefulness of the first African to rule the Roman Empire. Septimius, who ruled from 193 to 211 CE, was the 18th emperor in a line dating back to Julius Caesar in the first century BCE.
Read the rest of the story in this link.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Ethiopia’s Wildlife Treasures
[ثروة الحيوانات البرية في اثيوبيا]
Author (Editor): Håkan Pohlstrand

Ethiopia is a treasure trove of wildlife secrets that are to be discovered, marvelled and preserved. The diversity of mammals and birds have evolved because of the unique geographic conditions of the land: highland forests, lofty plateaus, dense jungles, fertile valleys, parches pans, and the Great Rift Valley that splits the country in the middle. Ethiopia is a huge country with rare animals such as the elusive Dibatag and the endemic Walia Ibex. Nearly every year, a new species is discovered. Recognition and appreciation of the diversity and extraordinary number of endemics in Ethiopia is needed to keep these treasures for future generations. Understanding and finding a healthy balance between the needs for habitat preservation for wildlife as well as human populations is an important key if Ethiopia has hopes of keeping her treasures..
Publisher: Shama Books, Ethiopia, 2019.

The Algerian War Retold: Of Camus’s Revolt and Postwar Revolt
[اعادة رواية الحرب الجزائرية: تمرد كاموس و مسألة ثورة ما بعد الحرب]
Author: Meaghan Emery

The Algerian War Retold: Of Camus’s Revolt and Postwar Reconciliation focuses on specific aspects of Albert Camus’s ethical thought through a study of his writings in conjunction with late 20th- and early 21st-century works written by Franco-Maghrebi authors on the topic of the Algerian War (1954-1962). It combines historical inquiry with literary analysis in order to examine the ways in which Camus’s concept of revolt — in his novels, journalistic writing, and philosophical essays — reverberates in productions pertaining to that war. Following an examination of Sartre’s and Camus’s debate over revolution and violence, one that in another iteration asks whether FLN-sponsored terrorism was justified, The Algerian War Retold uncovers how today’s writers have adopted paradigms common to both Sartre’s and Camus’s oeuvres when seeking to break the silence and influence France’s national narrative. In the end, it attempts to answer the critical questions raised by literary acts of violence, including whether Camusian ethics ultimately lead to justice for the Other in revolt. These questions are particularly poignant in view of recent presidential declarations in response to years of active pressure applied by associations and other citizens’ groups, prompting the French government to acknowledge the state’s abandonment of the harkis, condemn the repression of peaceful protest, and recognize the French army’s systematic use of torture in Algeria..
Publisher: Routledge 2019.

Alienation and Freedom
[الاغتراب والحرية]
Author: Frantz Fanon Editor(s): Jean Khalfa, Robert J. C. Young Translator: Steven Corcoran.

Since the publication of The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, Fanon’s work has been deeply significant for generations of intellectuals and activists from the 60s to the present day. Alienation and Freedom collects together unpublished works comprising around half of his entire output – which were previously inaccessible or thought to be lost. This book introduces audiences to a new Fanon, a more personal Fanon and one whose literary and psychiatric works, in particular, take centre stage. These writings provide new depth and complexity to our understanding of Fanon’s entire oeuvre revealing more of his powerful thinking about identity, race and activism which remain remarkably prescient. Shedding new light on the work of a major 20th-century philosopher, this disruptive and moving work will shape how we look at the world.
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2018.

African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church.
[الكاثوليكية الأفريقية: التحرر من الاستعمار واعادة هيكلة الكنيسة]
Author: Elizabeth A. Foster,

……
Publisher: Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019.

The Politics of Disease Control: Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890–1920
[سياسة الحد من الأمراض: تاريخ مرض النوم القهري في شرق إفريقيا 1890-1920]
Author: Mari K. Webel

Webel draws case studies from colonial Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda to frame her arguments within a zone of vigorous mobility and exchange in eastern Africa, where African states engaged with the Belgian, British, and German empires. Situating sleeping sickness control within African intellectual worlds and political dynamics, The Politics of Disease Control connects responses to sleeping sickness with experiences of historical epidemics such as plague, cholera, and smallpox, demonstrating important continuities before and after colonial incursion. African strategies to mitigate disease, Webel shows, fundamentally shaped colonial disease prevention programs in a crucial moment of political and social change.
Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2019

Zimbolicious Anthology: An Anthology of Zimbabwean Literature and Arts, Vol 4
[مختارات زيمبوليس: مختارات الأدب والفن الزيمبابوي ، المجلد 4]
Author (Editor): Tendai Rinos Mwanaka, Jabulani Mzinyathi

The latest Zimbolicious offering has nonfiction, poetry, an interview, fiction and incisive visual art. Works were received from regular contributors and relatively new artists. The poets with their collective audacious eye keenly observe society and reveal the pimples, warts and all that is afflicting the society; talk about the dying, already dead and decaying Zimbabwean currency or nonexistent currency, the emancipation of women, the grinding poverty and the political challenges Zimbabwe faces. Others deal with spirituality and religion, love, growing up without a father figure. Nonfiction work leaves one under a barrage of questions: What it means to be a Zimbabwean, the defining and dissecting of Zimbabwe’s literature, writing, self-publishing are put under serious scrutiny. Some delicious slices of the scenic Zimbabwean landscape are featured and a continuation in investigating what home is in a selection of visual art pieces The fiction is speculative, bittersweet and stays on your mind like a memory of that long, long forgotten summer of love as each fictionist deal with issues related to relationships, love, the lack of, the impermanence of which is an ever recurring leitmotiv in these works, thus therefore, this Zimbolicious is a must read, robust, incisive collection of Zimbabwean Literature and the arts.
Publisher: Mwanaka Media and Publishing, 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.

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.