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African universities and the challenge of postcolonial development Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe
Extensively ignored by the literature on the subject, recent interest in the fate of academic freedom in Africa is linked with shared concerns about the exploding nature of its societal crises. The collapse of political integration and social cohesion; the decline of the civil society and the implosion of conflicts; the rise of authoritarian, non-developmental populist regimes amid extreme poverty;
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Waka waka politician: what are the drivers of party switching in Nigeria? Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Victor Agboga
Most existing literature on the causes of party switching both in Africa and around the world is built on tenuous empirical foundations. The question of why members of parliament (MPs) switch parties has hardly been asked directly either to the MPs themselves or to everyday voters. While MPs could lie or give more favourable accounts that suit their interests, putting this question to them could uncover
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Mapping hidden journeys of Gambian migration and return Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Pamela Kea
Countering the focus on crisis and irregularity that frames dominant representations of African migration to Europe, this article explores Gambian migrant women’s journeys of return. It is argued that Gambian women returnees’ financial resources, levels of education, kinship relations and social networks have positioned them in such a way that they can benefit from the opportunities and possibilities
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Tangled crises in Turkana: investigating the spread of Prosopis in Kenya’s northern drylands Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Samuel F. Derbyshire, Acacia Leakey, Lucas Lowasa
Following a severe drought in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the invasive shrub Prosopis, a kind of mesquite native to South America, was introduced by international organizations to locations across Kenya’s drylands, including the Turkana region in the far north. Prosopis, known as etirae in Turkana, was envisaged as a solution to a range of problems, including deforestation, fuelwood shortages and
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Digital learning in techno-utopia? Do-it-yourself education in Kibera, Nairobi Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Nele Van Doninck
This article argues that, despite techno-utopian narratives of digital self-directed learning (through content freely available on the internet) and its proposed opportunities for upward social mobility, digital learning is and remains a highly contextual practice, rooted in local realities and aspirational trajectories. Through learning with a community-based organization (CBO) that offers tech training
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‘Money looks for money’: managing financialization in eastern Uganda Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-10-11 Ben Jones, Sarah Amongin
Savings groups are an important feature of life in rural Uganda and elsewhere. They have been celebrated as an ‘alternative’, community-based approach to economic development with a particular focus on empowering women. In this article we offer a more critical perspective, showing how a savings group in a village in eastern Uganda informs more general experiences of financialization. Joining the group
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Ironies of accomplishment: negative aspiration, economic resentment and the myth of the middle class on Nairobi’s new urban outskirts Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-10-11 Peter Lockwood
Exploring the ‘hollow’ character of middle-class status in contemporary Kenya, this article shows how upwardly mobile young Kenyans struggle to cope with the expectations for distribution that their displays of achievement create. Focusing on the urbanizing peripheries of Nairobi, it shows how accusations of envy (wivu) made about poorer friends and relatives reflect their anxieties about failing to
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‘We deserve new things’: (anti-)bricolage in Lomé’s makerspaces Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-10-11 Janine Patricia Santos
This article traces bricolage in the city of Lomé, Togo, as it is given meaning, practised and resisted by the ‘makers’ involved in the city’s makerspaces. While the Lévi-Straussian definition of bricolage as ‘making do’ given limited resources is heralded as an innovative practice in the Euro-American Maker Movement, Lomé’s makers appear to distance themselves from the concept due to its perceived
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Researching post-independence Africa in regional archives: possibilities and limits in Benin, Cabo Verde, Ghana and Congo-Brazzaville Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-10-11 Alexander Keese, Annalisa Urbano
Africa’s regional archives offer crucial records to explore the continent’s postcolonial past. Although these archives are often difficult to locate and access and are exposed to several challenges that might even threaten their existence, this article presents a solid case for reconsidering their importance. Recent trends, aptly labelled ‘postcolonial African archival pessimism’, have mainly pointed
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Frontiers of belonging and politics of identity: the materiality of funeral rituals and festivals in Nigeria’s urban space Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Onyekachi E. Nnabuihe
This article draws from funeral rituals and performative festivals to reflect on how and why burials, reburials and performances of Eyo and Nzem Berom festivals provide excellent examples of cultural politics and represent occasions for the (re)production of kinship, belonging and claims to ownership in the cities of Lagos and Jos. It argues that existing literature on the politics of belonging in
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“How will God hear us?”: Sonic and linguistic difference among Kinshasa’s Églises des Noirs Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Margot Luyckfasseel
This article studies how anti-Christian, ‘traditionally African’ organizations, locally known as Églises des Noirs, navigate religious competition in the Congolese capital through sonic and linguistic strategies. It focuses on the understudied Mpadist community, a ‘dissident’ branch of the better known Kimbanguist church. Mpadists mobilize diverging appreciations and meanings of sound and language
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On bundling: the aesthetics of exchange and growth in central Uganda Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Sandra Calkins, Tyler Zoanni
In central Uganda, even a casual observer would notice the widespread presentation of often identical commercial services and goods – fruit vendors, street food or motorcycle taxis, for instance – in a small shared area. This article brings the dynamics of this phenomenon into view under the heuristic rubric of ‘bundling’, reflecting both on diverse examples from present-day Kampala and on some of
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Digital fashionistas: young women, wealth-in-followers and matronage in Yaoundé, Cameroon Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Ewa Majczak
Against the background of post-Cold War trade and media liberalization, this article examines how young women living in Yaoundé, Cameroon, share digital images of their crafted styles via WhatsApp. Such sharing is an act of influence usually aimed at building the woman’s name as a digital ‘fashionista’, in that it constitutes a virtual potential for persuading others to copy one’s style. When this
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Technology overrule: pre-literate Akan orality and the musket Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Gamel O. Wiredu
The history of the human–technology relation points to binary (positive and negative) evaluations of technology’s role. One reason for this binary is the limited view of technology in terms of physical and tangible devices. Another is an extreme global view of the relationship, which neglects global diversity. However, technology includes non-physical devices such as speech. Moreover, people hold different
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From American to Cisse: Sufism and the remaking of diasporic ties across the Atlantic Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Samiha Rahman
Since the 1980s, hundreds of predominantly working-class African-American Muslims have travelled or relocated to the rural yet renowned city of Medina Baye, Senegal. They were invited there by Shaykh Hassan Cisse, a Senegalese Islamic scholar and leader in the Tijani tariqa (Sufi order). This article focuses on the experiences of African-American and fellow diaspora Black Muslims living and learning
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West African Sufism and the matter of Black life Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Youssef Carter
In this article, I consider how migration practices around the Black Atlantic and discourses of repatriation mobilize Black African diasporic Muslim identities in present-day Senegal and in a mosque in South Carolina that is situated on land that was formerly a slave plantation. I use the term ‘reversion’ as a vocabulary of ‘diasporic becoming’ to signal how notions of Islamic piety are coupled with
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Rejoicing of the hearts: Turkish constructions of Muslim whiteness in Africa south of the Sahara Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Ezgi Güner
This article analyses the racial framing of the humanitarian encounter between Turkish and African Muslims as a trope of first contact. Intensifying humanitarian relations with Africa south of the Sahara, in tandem with the foreign policy of the AKP (Justice and Development Party), has led to the emergence of a racialized affective regime in Turkey that endows Islamic philanthropy with new racial meanings
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White-adjacent Muslim development: racializing British Muslim aid in Mali Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Rhea Rahman
Muslim aid organizations are relatively new actors in the Western aid industry. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research with the UK-based NGO Islamic Relief, I explore the organization’s engagement with a school in need of repair in southern rural Mali that is also the site of a sacred shrine of importance to locals. I examine the contextual global logics of racialization that undergird different
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Reimagining African womanhood in an unjust world order: exploring the writings of Ghanaian women’s rights advocates, 1970s–1980s Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Mélanie Lindbjerg Machado-Guichon
This article provides the first systematic exploration of the ideas on inequality of the two Ghanaian women’s rights advocates Annie Jiagge and Florence Dolphyne, who were both part of the Ghanaian National Council on Women and Development during the 1970s and 1980s. Zooming in on their work and writings during this time, I challenge the view offered by some scholars that these decades were ‘apolitical’
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Burying at all costs: investing in funerals in southern Benin Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Joël Noret
Drawing on research conducted in southern Benin since 2000, this article explores the entanglements between grief, social status and funerals, and accounts for the conditions and the motives of the massive and multifarious investments – inextricably psychic, social and economic – in funerals that can be witnessed locally. I argue that, far from being mere ‘conspicuous consumption’, funeral expenses
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Building concrete futures: materiality and urban lives in West Africa Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Armelle Choplin
In West Africa, concrete is increasingly taking hold of physical landscapes, popular consciousness, and everyday conversations. Ubiquitous and pervasive, concrete is now an integral part of West African urban materiality and cultural identity. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory on the production of space, I consider this material as both a product and a producer of urban space. By tracing flows of
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A share in the sands: trips, pits and potholes in Accra, Ghana Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Katherine Dawson
This article deploys sand as a potential way of engaging with contemporary livelihoods in the Ghanaian city of Accra – one of many metropolitan nodes in an urbanizing region of West Africa. Both as a very real material at the heart of concrete urbanization and as metaphorically indicative of the shifting landscapes of opportunity and income on which lives and livelihoods are marked out, sand is offered
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Goats, materials and uncertainty in Nairobi Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Joost Fontein
Kiamaiko in Nairobi hosts one of the largest goat markets in East Africa. The goats come from across Kenya and the region, as do many of the people there, illustrating how regional movements of human and animal bodies are part of Nairobi’s becoming, and making Kiamaiko an extremely diverse part of the city. Through a discussion of the working lives of people involved in Kiamaiko’s goat meat industry
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Tasting ‘kienyeji’: gustatory explorations of city futures in Nakuru, Kenya Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Nick Rahier
In Nakuru, a secondary city in Kenya, the city’s future is explored multi-sensorially. In this article, I argue that Nakuru residents explore urban futures through the taste of different kinds of foods. I examine how the relational power of taste not only triggers visceral imaginaries of greener and ‘cooler’ futures in which bodies and landscapes grow more ample, lush and healthy but also invokes memories
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City of icebergs: materiality, surface and depth in Nairobi’s built environment Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Constance Smith
This article considers the materiality and substance of the built environment in Nairobi in light of concerns about surface, depth and the power of the unseen. Taking Nairobi’s high-rise construction boom and a recent spate of collapsed buildings as its starting point, it examines how longstanding ideas about the hidden and invisible dynamics of African cities do not operate in a realm distinct from
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Modelling the city: bedroom drawer blueprints as urban planning in Maputo, Mozambique Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Morten Nielsen
It has become a well-rehearsed truism that the growth of sub-Saharan African cities is the result of an amassing of persons, things and knowledge that takes place in the absence of centrally planned development initiatives and without any tightly orchestrated coordination of social life. Under such conditions, the argument goes, urbanites make do with whatever resources are available while increasingly
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Urban fractures: mobility, risk and the accidenté in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of Congo Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Trisha Phippard
Changing practices of motorized mobility in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have given rise to what residents call the ‘accidenté’: a victim of a traffic accident, often involving the city’s increasingly ubiquitous motorcycles. This article explores the significance of the accidenté in Kikwit’s social universe and considers how everyday urban mobilities are imbued with a sense of bodily
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On the mobility of ghosts: spectral journeys in the South African lowveld Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Isak Niehaus
In studies of Southern Africa, ancestors and possessing spirits have received far greater attention than ghosts. It is only in recent years that fragmentary references to ghosts have begun to appear in the ethnographic record. In this article, I seek to redress this imbalance by documenting stories and accounts of encounters with ghosts in the South African lowveld. I turn to studies of ghosts in Asia
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Sunni and Shia Muslim and Christian encounters in northern Nigeria Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Musa Ibrahim
This article analyses how the circulation of ideas and hybrid rituals between Shia Muslims and Christians reveals a much more intentional political process whereby minority religious groups consciously create shared experiences and a sense of commonality in the face of political marginalization in northern Nigeria. One example is the Shia invention of Jesus’s Mawlid (Jesus’s birthday), which they perform
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The Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria (MSSN) since 1954: education, Muslim–Christian encounters and regional variation Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Adeyemi Balogun
The Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria (MSSN) is a movement that promotes the Islamic identity of Muslims in Nigeria’s educational institutions. Despite promoting the same objectives around the country, a comparison of the MSSN’s activities between the northern and southern regions of Nigeria suggests that the success of the movement varies in many aspects. This is because there are two main types
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Embracing and denouncing the ‘Mecca uniform’ in Nigerian mass media, 1950s–1970s Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Sara Katz
Nigerian Muslims have undertaken the hajj for centuries. As Nigeria approached independence in the 1950s, Muslims began to discuss and debate this practice on a national scale, through Islamic associations and political committees and in the Nigerian press. At the same time, Muslim politicians began to publicly don the ‘Mecca uniform’, the white robe (thawb) and black cord (‘iqāl) common to Saudi Arabia
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Censorship, citizenship and cosmopolitan unity in Muslim and Christian creative responses to repression in northern Nigeria Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Carmen McCain
Nigeria is often portrayed as having a ‘Muslim north’ and a ‘Christian south’. Such representations oversimplify the complicated interrelationships between the two religious communities and their geographic locations. Similarly, while much has been written on the conflict between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria’s Middle Belt region, there has been less scholarly attention to the philosophical and
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The clash of sound, image and light: inter- and intra-religious entanglements and contestations during Mawlūd celebrations in the city of Jos, Nigeria Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Murtala Ibrahim
This article explores recent inter- and intra-religious entanglements and contestations between Sufi Muslims, members of the Izala and Christianity, which have emerged as a result of a new way of celebrating Mawlūd in the Nigerian city of Jos. Through the adept use of loudspeakers, Izala projects a sense of dominance over the public sphere of the city and uses this as a platform to critique the Sufis
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A history of ‘Yan haƙiƙa, a revisionist Islamic group in northern Nigeria Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Kabiru Haruna Isa
‘Yan haƙiƙa are a Sufi group that has come to prominence in the second decade of the twenty-first century in northern Nigeria, with a significant following in Kano. Although members of the group perceive themselves to be bona fide followers of the path of Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (Senegalese Islamic scholar and founder of Tijaniyya-Ibrahimiyya), they are considered by Sunni Muslims (both Salafis and Sufis)
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Northern Nigerian intellectuals, Sudan, and the “eclectic style” in contemporary Islamic thought Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Alexander Thurston
This article examines two northern Nigerian Muslim intellectuals – Aminu Sagagi and Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (enthroned as Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II of Kano, 2014–20) – whose approaches, in different ways, exemplify a self-consciously eclectic Islamic intellectual style. Their eclecticism breaks with categories familiar from the study of Islam in Africa and Nigeria, categories such as Sufis, Salafis and
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The politics of literature in Malawi: Filemon Chirwa, Nthanu za Chitonga and the battle for the Atonga tribal council Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Thandeka Cochrane
In 1932, as Nyasaland (present-day Malawi) was heading to indirect rule, a small vocal community in the north of the country resisted the colonial government’s attempts to assign them a Native Authority. Instead, they proposed their own form of government: a council of thirty-two mafumu (chiefs) who would make decisions on an egalitarian basis, the Atonga tribal council. The champion of this alternative
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Getting by in a bibliometric economy: scholarly publishing and academic credibility in the Nigerian academy Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-12-23 David Mills, Abigail Branford
Why are Nigeria’s universities launching a growing number of open access journals while simultaneously expecting their academic staff to publish ‘internationally’? And what impact do these expectations have on Nigerian journals? Drawing on interviews with editors and publishers, we describe the emergence of a hyperlocal ‘credibility economy’ within the Nigerian academy. The great majority of Nigerian
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The social contract and industrial citizenship: Nigerian trade unions’ role in the recurring fuel subsidy protests Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Camilla Houeland
This article brings new perspectives on state–citizen relations in African petro-states by analysing the role of Nigerian trade unions in the recurring fuel subsidy protests. Nigerian trade unions have played an instrumental role in protests against fuel subsidy removals since the mid-1980s, most recently in the massive 2012 protest known as ‘Occupy Nigeria’. Based on the idea that the fuel subsidy
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Sign language as a technology: existential and instrumental perspectives of Ugandan Sign Language Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-09-30 Gitte Beckmann
The introduction of Ugandan Sign Language in Acholi, northern Uganda, was part of a growing internationally linked disability movement in the country and was set within the framework of development policy and human rights-based approaches. In this context, Ugandan Sign Language appeared as a technology of development. But how did the appropriation of Ugandan Sign Language change deaf people’s lives
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‘The food is not enough’: disability and food aid technologies in a Ugandan refugee settlement Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-09-30 Maria-Theres Schuler
In Uganda’s refugee policy framework, food aid targets the most vulnerable – among them people with disabilities – using a categorization system. This article explores the entanglements of this technology of food distribution with disabled people’s socialities. It reveals that the system does not achieve its proposed rationale of creating equal opportunities for people who are disadvantaged within
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‘My eyes are my ears’: Deaf people appropriating AIDS education messages in Uganda Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-09-30 Ambrose Murangira
The Ugandan effort to provide AIDS education for the entire population raised questions about how to reach people with disabilities. Based on semi-structured interviews and participant observation with Deaf people in Kampala, this study examined how communication technologies are used in general by Deaf people, and what is specific to communicating about HIV and AIDS. It found that communication technologies
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Sticks and wheelchairs for elderly people in central Uganda: values of utility, provenance and presentation Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-09-30 Rehema Namaganda, David Kyaddondo, Isaac Kajja, Steven Kiwuwa
While mobility-assistive devices ease movement and independence of persons with disabilities, their use may depend on their social and symbolic meaning. This article departs from our observation that elderly people in Wakiso in Uganda own a variety of assistive technologies yet do not utilize them all equally. Our findings are based on data collected through conversations, interviews and observations
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‘Losing complexes’: navigating technology, moral careers and mobility among disabled people in Kinshasa Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-09-30 Clara Devlieger
In moral careers of personhood and subjectivity of people who are mobility impaired, technologies such as mobility aids can become intertwined with teleologies of personal progress. This article examines how technologies shaped and expressed personal growth and social identity among those who took part in transnational trade between Kinshasa and Brazzaville. Engaging with a particular socio-technical
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‘Its name is Awetasc’: devices and the everyday life of people with physical disability in Ethiopia Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-09-30 Virginia De Silva
This article aims to shed light on the institutions involved in spreading a ‘culture of rehabilitation’ and distributing devices (crutches, wheelchairs and protheses) in Tigray, where rehabilitation is strictly bound to the development agenda and to the ‘modernization’ of the country. Moreover, it questions the ways in which people, in practice, deal with such devices: in some cases, they are perceived
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Saving the ‘indigenous banks’: moral politics of economic sovereignty in Ghana’s 2017–19 financial crisis Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-09-30 Anna-Riikka Kauppinen
Nine Ghanaian private banks collapsed during the country’s 2017–19 financial crisis. Apart from public audits that revealed liquidity problems and large portfolios of non-performing loans, the crisis generated vibrant debate on ‘indigenous banks’ as integral to national economic sovereignty. At the centre of these debates was a contested central bank-led project to inject equity in five struggling
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Bureaucratic valves: paperwork as a contested tool in the international transfer of the franc CFA in Congo-Brazzaville Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-09-30 Rundong Ning
Africanists have written much about interactions between multiple currencies in Africa, yet paperwork-based regulations that apply to these interactions remain less studied. Meanwhile, ethnographic studies of paperwork examine the roles of documents more in state administration than in commercial transactions. Based on ethnographic research with individuals and institutions involved in the international
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The meaning and uses of privatization: the case of the Ethiopian developmental state Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-09-30 Christina Tekie Collins
Not long after his election as prime minister of Ethiopia, Dr Abiy Ahmed declared that the country would privatize state-owned enterprises (SOEs) such as Ethiopian Airlines and Ethio Telcom, opening up sectors once considered off limits to foreign capital as part of his medemer reforms. On the surface, it might appear as if the Ethiopian leader was signalling a greater embrace of neoliberal (or market
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Credible risk: private credit bureaus and the work of loan officers in West Africa Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-09-30 Vanessa Watters Opalo
In 2015, the Central Bank of West African States selected a private credit bureau to build a digital platform to collect and analyse financial data across the eight-country West African Economic and Monetary Union, including the activities of credit cooperatives and microfinance agencies that serve many West African borrowers. The credit-reporting platform promises to produce new and valuable knowledge
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Investing in independence: popular shareholding on the West African stock exchange Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-09-30 James Christopher Mizes
According to contemporary investors on the Regional Stock Exchange of West Africa (Bourse Régionale des Valeurs Mobilières de l’Afrique de l’Ouest or BRVM), President Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s post-independence plan to privatize state-owned enterprises in Côte d’Ivoire gave birth to the region’s financial market. Yet the bourse’s original promise of ‘indigenous’ control of financial investment has long
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Scientific knowledge and sexual advocacy: African publics, choiceless citizens and potential confounders Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-06-24 Renugan Raidoo
This article is concerned with science and sexuality, and the possibilities and pitfalls of using the former to change minds about the latter, taking as its main source of data a report released by the Academy of Science of South Africa in 2015, Diversity in Human Sexuality: implications for policy in Africa. I frame the report in terms of co-production – borrowed from science and technology studies
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Girl at the margin: historicizing Adunni’s subjective rendition of colonial Lagos, 1930–60 Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-06-24 Tunde Decker
This article tells one of the many stories that remain largely untold despite the vast literature on colonial Lagos history. Although the social history of Lagos has witnessed increasing interest on the part of historians and scholars from other disciplines and has been told in relation to sex, childhood, social welfare, state, gender and elitism, many personal renditions of the city’s history are
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‘Why invite her here? Her voice is ʿawra!’: vocal nudity debates and Muslim female preachers in northern Nigeria Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-06-24 Rahina Muazu
This article analyses the debates surrounding the ʿawra (nudity or nakedness in Arabic) of the female voice – what I call here vocal nudity – and the public presence of the female voice in Nigeria. It focuses on the preaching activities of two Muslim female preachers, Malama Khadija Gambo Hawaja and Malama Dr Zahrau Muhammad Umar, who present tafsīr (Qurʾanic interpretation; Hausa: tafsīrin azumi)
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Migration, authority and the gendered organization of labour in artisanal gold mining in Sierra Leone (and Mozambique) Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-06-24 Blair Rutherford
Recent studies of migration into artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) have explored the motivations, strategic agency and professional trajectories of women and men miners who move to mine. In this article, I seek to shift the focus from the ‘push/pull’ factors in migration to consider the varied entanglements of mobility with authority and power relations pervasive through rural institutions. The
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Disrupted dreams of development: neoliberal efficiency and crisis in Angola Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-03-29 Jon Schubert
Thanks to oil revenues, since the end of the war in 2002, Angola has largely eschewed the usual donor conditionalities in its state-led reconstruction process; the 2014 oil price drop, however, revealed the limits of this economic miracle. Coupled with a long-overdue political transition inside the ruling party, this moment of designated crisis has opened up spaces for elites to inject their continued
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Never enough: neoliberalizing Namibian middle-class marriages Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-03-29 Julia Pauli
Neoliberal ideologies have not only transformed the Namibian economy but also reconfigured some of the most intimate domains of everyday life. In the course of the last forty years, marriage in Namibia has changed from a widespread and affordable life transition to a costly celebration of middle-classness. To be married today is a sign of middle-class achievement, lifestyle and prosperity. The downside
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‘You can’t do politics without money’: female politicians, matronage, and the limits of gender quotas in Kenya Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-03-29 Miriam Jerotich Kilimo
In 2010, Kenya introduced a gender quota to boost women’s political representation. The quota mandated that a single gender should not hold more than two-thirds of elective and appointive positions in public bodies. When few women won seats in elections in 2013 and 2017, political parties fulfilled the gender quota by nominating hundreds of women as members of county assemblies (MCAs). Drawing on fieldwork
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The chameleonic nature of freedom: notes on the concept of fahafahana in the Highlands of Madagascar Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-03-29 Marco Gardini
This article explores the conceptual and practical meanings of fahafahana (‘freedom’ in Malagasy) in the Highlands of Madagascar, a context where the legacies of past forms of slavery have left deep marks both in local memories and in social and economic hierarchies. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which specific notions of freedom have been elaborated against the background of the local history
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Ibadi Muslim schools in post-revolutionary Zanzibar Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-03-29 Kimberly T. Wortmann
This article examines how the schools of the Ibadi-Omani diaspora have had an impact on religious education and Afro-Arab relations in post-revolutionary Zanzibar. Much of the existing literature about Ibadism and the Omani diaspora in Zanzibar centres on the island’s economic history, stories of Arab elites under sultanate rule and the politics of the 1964 revolution. Little work explores how Ibadis
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From ‘ethnic militias’ to ‘jungle justice’? Research and change in vigilantism in Nigeria Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-03-29 Dany Franck A. Tiwa
The aim of this article is to initiate a new debate on vigilantism in Nigeria by arguing for a re-examination of the links between crime and vigilantism. It contends that, although the existing literature has shed considerable light on the practice of vigilantism in Nigeria, it has also obscured entire dimensions of the problem. By focusing exclusively on vigilante groups or ethnic militias, scholars
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Franklin Obeng-Odoom, Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (hb £85 – 978 1 108 49199 0). 2020, 376 pp. Africa (IF 1.235) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Alice Nicole Sindzingre