Pub Date : 2021-06-07DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1931385
P. Lambertz
The comparatively cheap and mechanically accessible Chinese dakadaka diesel engines and their shotteur Z-drives have enabled wooden baleinières to significantly impact waterborne mobility, trade and transportation on the Congo River and its tributaries. While baleinières are artisanal watercraft made of local building materials, their engines are globally circulating technologies, which are able to unfold their economic, hydrodynamic and socio-technical affordances thanks to a number of local technical adaptations. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork in Tshopo province (DR Congo) foregrounding the engines’ use, the article discusses the adaptations the Chinese engines and their propulsion system undergo to enable a felicitous engagement of their intrinsic engineered forces with the muscular, natural, and social forces present in their local riverine habitat. While this entanglement of forces depends on the distributed character of collective onboard engine care, it also encourages the emergence of baleinière owners (armateurs) as a new group of local entrepreneurs. These insights help us understand why, despite frequent breakdowns, the engines and the boats they propel enable and democratize the access to new forms of connectivity and mobility for large parts of Congo’s riverine and travelling urban populations. In a context of enduring economic precarity, the technical intervention of ‘removing (the engine’s) backward gear’ (Li. kolongola marche arrière) is therefore also of metaphoric significance.
{"title":"Longola Marche Arrière! Chinese diesel engines on Congo’s inland waterways","authors":"P. Lambertz","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2021.1931385","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2021.1931385","url":null,"abstract":"The comparatively cheap and mechanically accessible Chinese dakadaka diesel engines and their shotteur Z-drives have enabled wooden baleinières to significantly impact waterborne mobility, trade and transportation on the Congo River and its tributaries. While baleinières are artisanal watercraft made of local building materials, their engines are globally circulating technologies, which are able to unfold their economic, hydrodynamic and socio-technical affordances thanks to a number of local technical adaptations. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork in Tshopo province (DR Congo) foregrounding the engines’ use, the article discusses the adaptations the Chinese engines and their propulsion system undergo to enable a felicitous engagement of their intrinsic engineered forces with the muscular, natural, and social forces present in their local riverine habitat. While this entanglement of forces depends on the distributed character of collective onboard engine care, it also encourages the emergence of baleinière owners (armateurs) as a new group of local entrepreneurs. These insights help us understand why, despite frequent breakdowns, the engines and the boats they propel enable and democratize the access to new forms of connectivity and mobility for large parts of Congo’s riverine and travelling urban populations. In a context of enduring economic precarity, the technical intervention of ‘removing (the engine’s) backward gear’ (Li. kolongola marche arrière) is therefore also of metaphoric significance.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"15 - 34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88853497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-13DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1902831
Chloé Lewis
This article examines the production of knowledge about sexual violence in the postcolonial warscape of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with a particular eye on the politics of statistics. Over the last decade, ‘hard numbers’ have become central to ‘knowing’ sexual violence in conflict, including in DRC. Statistics depicting the exceptional scale of sexual violence in DRC were core to its making as the ‘rape capital of the world’. Given the challenges of quantifying this sensitive issue, sexual violence statistics are nevertheless imbued with striking, if misleading, reliability. In this piece, I explore how sexual violence statistics in DRC are produced and consider what they can and cannot convey. Subsequently placing DRC in historical context, I highlight eerie resonances of this contemporary emphasis on sexual violence with the country’s colonial past. Doing so, I join postcolonial scholars in calling attention to colonial durabilities that shape the knowledges that are not only accepted, but perhaps expected, in a region long cast under a deeply and intimately sexuo-racialised gaze. Notably, this gaze is one that depicts the ‘Congolese woman’ as always-already a victim, and the ‘Congolese man’ as always-already defined by presumed ‘perpetratorhood’. Affirming the importance of such analytical vigilance vis-à-vis sexual violence statistics in particular, this article concludes by calling for concurrent authorial vigilance on the part of critical scholars. Indeed, we must ensure that efforts to complicate dominant narratives of sexual violence in DRC do not undermine, silence, or deny the experiential realities encoded in the knowledges we critique.
{"title":"The making and re-making of the ‘rape capital of the world’: on colonial durabilities and the politics of sexual violence statistics in DRC","authors":"Chloé Lewis","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2021.1902831","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2021.1902831","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the production of knowledge about sexual violence in the postcolonial warscape of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with a particular eye on the politics of statistics. Over the last decade, ‘hard numbers’ have become central to ‘knowing’ sexual violence in conflict, including in DRC. Statistics depicting the exceptional scale of sexual violence in DRC were core to its making as the ‘rape capital of the world’. Given the challenges of quantifying this sensitive issue, sexual violence statistics are nevertheless imbued with striking, if misleading, reliability. In this piece, I explore how sexual violence statistics in DRC are produced and consider what they can and cannot convey. Subsequently placing DRC in historical context, I highlight eerie resonances of this contemporary emphasis on sexual violence with the country’s colonial past. Doing so, I join postcolonial scholars in calling attention to colonial durabilities that shape the knowledges that are not only accepted, but perhaps expected, in a region long cast under a deeply and intimately sexuo-racialised gaze. Notably, this gaze is one that depicts the ‘Congolese woman’ as always-already a victim, and the ‘Congolese man’ as always-already defined by presumed ‘perpetratorhood’. Affirming the importance of such analytical vigilance vis-à-vis sexual violence statistics in particular, this article concludes by calling for concurrent authorial vigilance on the part of critical scholars. Indeed, we must ensure that efforts to complicate dominant narratives of sexual violence in DRC do not undermine, silence, or deny the experiential realities encoded in the knowledges we critique.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"55 - 72"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90082409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1935087
Anusa Daimon
Zimbabwe’s agrarian reform (‘Third Chimurenga’) narrative continues to cast more insights into the fate of farm workers, many of whom, as descendants of black Africans in the former British and Portuguese central African colonies of what are today Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique, were not seen as ‘Zimbabwean enough’ to benefit from the exercise. While many of these workers were adversely affected, a few, particularly the senior farm supervisors/foremen, showed agency in exploiting the miniscule avenues offered by the reform to position themselves, and eventually access land. Some became intermediaries between the state, the new black settler farmers and former white owners, sowing mutual trust and ambience within a volatile and potentially explosive situation. Using ethnographic data from an A1-designated case study farm (Billdore/Riverside) in the Trelawney/Banket commercial farming area in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland West province, the article suggests that such micro-level positionalities and functions proved critical in the ensuing politics of land appropriation that was predicated on partisan citizenship and belonging rhetoric. Despite their state of unbelonging, some of these previously landless migrant workers have emerged from the shadows of the Third Chimurenga and become their own masters, forging mutual relations and land-labour arrangements amidst the uncertainties of the ever-changing Zimbabwean land tenure system and political environment.
{"title":"In the shadows of the third Chimurenga?: African migrant intermediaries and beneficiaries within Zimbabwe’s agrarian reform matrix","authors":"Anusa Daimon","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2021.1935087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2021.1935087","url":null,"abstract":"Zimbabwe’s agrarian reform (‘Third Chimurenga’) narrative continues to cast more insights into the fate of farm workers, many of whom, as descendants of black Africans in the former British and Portuguese central African colonies of what are today Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique, were not seen as ‘Zimbabwean enough’ to benefit from the exercise. While many of these workers were adversely affected, a few, particularly the senior farm supervisors/foremen, showed agency in exploiting the miniscule avenues offered by the reform to position themselves, and eventually access land. Some became intermediaries between the state, the new black settler farmers and former white owners, sowing mutual trust and ambience within a volatile and potentially explosive situation. Using ethnographic data from an A1-designated case study farm (Billdore/Riverside) in the Trelawney/Banket commercial farming area in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland West province, the article suggests that such micro-level positionalities and functions proved critical in the ensuing politics of land appropriation that was predicated on partisan citizenship and belonging rhetoric. Despite their state of unbelonging, some of these previously landless migrant workers have emerged from the shadows of the Third Chimurenga and become their own masters, forging mutual relations and land-labour arrangements amidst the uncertainties of the ever-changing Zimbabwean land tenure system and political environment.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"78 1","pages":"183 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84069833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1894956
Nkulukelo Sibanda
In this account, I deploy Mikhail Bhakhtin’s concept of the carnival to frame the November 2017 demonstrations in Harare, Zimbabwe, that led to the resignation of former president Robert Mugabe as a carnivalesque or ‘theatrical’ performance. I examine the spatial and theatrical characteristics of this carnivalesque demonstration, highlighting how it created a special form of free and familiar contact among people divided by political, professional and class barriers. Methodologically, I draw from my personal recollections, video recording and photographs in the public domain, the particular spectacular performative that characterize this demonstration as a performance, to historically reconstruct the performance. I submit that these public performances, which mainly took part on the main streets of Harare, challenged and allowed demonstrators to performatively subvert all forms of social (and political) privilege and governmentality. I conclude that through disrupting governmentality and constituting a horizon of meaning and expectation, the performer-demonstrators claimed back their spatial agency, determining and choosing how they democratically used the public space in these urban centres and simultaneously, Zimbabwe’s political landscape.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-06DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1902830
P. Guinard
Why look at art to understand an African city like Johannesburg? African cities are often studied through the lens of urban dilemmas that are supposed to characterize them. Whereas it is common to study the role of art in the (un)making of Western cities, it is still quite uncommon to do so for African cities. In the case of South African cities, more and more scholars are nevertheless using art in order to challenge this imbalance and to propose a more qualified and sensitive approach to daily life in urban spaces. This paper aims to pursue this effort by looking at Inhabitant, a performance organized by Sello Pesa and Vaughn Sadie in Johannesburg in 2011. From a cultural and urban geographer’s perspective, this performance is particularly interesting since it is offering a new vision of Johannesburg and its public spaces as they are lived by city dwellers, while inviting the audience of the performance to act upon this vision, if not to perform it. Through close qualitative analysis of Inhabitant, I will argue that art can transform urban spaces, both symbolically and materially, by fostering a change in perceptions and, consequently, in representations and practices.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-11DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2020.1850305
J. Cane
This article is an attempt to foreground considerations in African cities of three-dimensional urbanism, or what Eyal Weizman has called the ‘politics of verticality’. Through analysis of the work of three builder/artists the article resists a strain of persistent horizontality in African urban studies. The focus of this article is on three specific urban forms which are contested in interesting and provocative ways. The first, the Tower, in Limete Kinshasa is simultaneously a built form, an imagined space, a set of processes, a film and a theoretical proposition for Filip de Boeck and Sammy Baloji. The second structure is a radical reimagining of Bodys Isek Kingelez’s childhood agricultural village as a megacity of cardboard skyscrapers, paper parks and polystyrene promenades. Kimbembele Ihunga (1994) is a three-by-two-meter ‘extreme maquette’ in which Kingelez presents an unbuildable city which is nevertheless intended in all seriousness as a visionary proposal for post-independence African urbanism. The third structure is a literary residential high-rise, the Maianga Building in Luanda. Ondjaki’s novel, Transparent City (2018) presents the biography of a building in a general state of decay but which is, counterintuitively, not a burden to its residents; in fact, its idiosyncratic dysfunction offers some promising, pleasant and useful affordances.
这篇文章试图突出非洲城市的三维城市主义，或者Eyal Weizman所说的“垂直政治”。通过对三位建筑师/艺术家作品的分析，本文抵制了非洲城市研究中一种持久的横向性。本文的重点是三种具体的城市形式，它们以有趣和挑衅的方式受到争议。第一个是金沙萨莱姆特的塔，它同时是一个建筑形式，一个想象的空间，一套过程，一部电影和一个理论命题，对于菲利普·德·博克和萨米·巴洛吉来说。第二个结构是对Bodys Isek Kingelez童年时期的农业村庄的彻底重新构想，将其变成一个由纸板摩天大楼、纸公园和聚苯乙烯长廊组成的巨型城市。Kimbembele Ihunga(1994)是一个3米乘2米的“极限模型”，其中Kingelez呈现了一个无法建造的城市，尽管如此，它还是严肃地作为独立后非洲城市主义的一个有远见的建议。第三个结构是罗安达的Maianga大厦，一座文学住宅高层建筑。翁佳基的小说《透明城市》(Transparent City, 2018)讲述了一栋总体上处于衰败状态的建筑的故事，但与人们的直觉相反，它对居民来说并不是负担;事实上，它的特殊功能障碍提供了一些有希望的、令人愉快的和有用的启示。
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1884107
R. Salley
It is not easy to define where, for Kemang Wa Lehulere, the making of art begins and ends. Wa Lehulere’s artworks suggest an attitude toward looking focused on less developed aspects in contemporary art criticism and art history. The artworks perform this task by insisting on the attention and involvement of the viewer in ways that make artistic production and viewer reception a potently intertwined and productive place of attention. This article argues that Wa Lehulere’s creative practice reflects contested and changing ideas of visual cultural knowledge in South Africa. My personal encounters with Wa Lehulere’s artwork over the years, through direct engagements at exhibitions, in talking about reference images, sketches, and unfinished object assemblages in the artist’s studio, and in moments of reflection on the artist’s own way of describing their practice, have informed my ideas about creative practices loosely described as ‘conceptual art’ in the space of South Africa. The contestations and changes that I see through these visual gestures are seen to organically expand into the vicissitudes of cultural, social, and political dynamics. Wa Lehulere’s artwork as an analytic device changes the viewer’s long-term perception (of learning) and, in this context, delivers a form of perceptual learning oriented toward decolonial education. It permits a choreography of and for future narratives. As such, Wa Lehulere’s performances, drawings, photographs, and texts function as forms of sense-making for other sights. Such visual and theoretical activities of critical conceptual art are produced by and effectively inform changing definitions of art, care ethics, and freedom in periods of transformation wherein such cultural phenomena become crucial to liberatory practices.
对于Kemang Wa Lehulere来说，定义艺术创作的起点和终点并不容易。瓦·勒胡勒尔的作品表明了一种关注当代艺术批评和艺术史中欠发达方面的态度。艺术作品通过坚持观众的注意力和参与来完成这一任务，使艺术生产和观众接受成为一个潜在的相互交织和富有成效的关注场所。本文认为，瓦·勒胡勒尔的创作实践反映了南非视觉文化知识观念的争议和变化。多年来，我与Wa Lehulere的艺术作品的接触，通过直接参与展览，在艺术家的工作室里谈论参考图像，草图和未完成的物体组合，以及在艺术家自己描述他们实践的方式的反思时刻，告诉了我关于南非空间中被松散地称为“观念艺术”的创造性实践的想法。我通过这些视觉姿态看到的争论和变化被视为有机地扩展到文化、社会和政治动态的变迁中。Wa Lehulere的艺术作品作为一种分析工具，改变了观众的长期感知(学习)，并在此背景下提供了一种面向非殖民化教育的感知学习形式。它允许对未来的叙述进行编排。因此，Wa Lehulere的表演、绘画、照片和文本都是为其他景点创造意义的形式。这种批判性观念艺术的视觉和理论活动是由转型时期对艺术、关怀伦理和自由的不断变化的定义产生的，在转型时期，这种文化现象对解放实践至关重要。
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1884108
J. Harrington, H. Deacon, P. Munyi
This article investigates the justifications for Kenya's pioneering 2016 legislation to protect the interests of communities in their traditional knowledge. Drawing on parliamentary, governmental and media sources, it argues that law reform was underpinned by political concerns about the exploitation of valuable resources by foreign concerns. This problematization of traditional knowledge in terms of national sovereignty and development defines the scope of the legislation and leads to a number of important shortcomings and contradictions. It puts the nation state at the heart of the legal regime, limiting enforcement to the national territory and giving authorities ultimate the power to override community decisions. While the legislation should be adjusted to address these issues, we also suggest that communities should pursue non-legal alternatives, including the encouragement of ethical commercial conduct through media campaigns and licensing agreements.
{"title":"Sovereignty and development: law and the politics of traditional knowledge in Kenya","authors":"J. Harrington, H. Deacon, P. Munyi","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2021.1884108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2021.1884108","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the justifications for Kenya's pioneering 2016 legislation to protect the interests of communities in their traditional knowledge. Drawing on parliamentary, governmental and media sources, it argues that law reform was underpinned by political concerns about the exploitation of valuable resources by foreign concerns. This problematization of traditional knowledge in terms of national sovereignty and development defines the scope of the legislation and leads to a number of important shortcomings and contradictions. It puts the nation state at the heart of the legal regime, limiting enforcement to the national territory and giving authorities ultimate the power to override community decisions. While the legislation should be adjusted to address these issues, we also suggest that communities should pursue non-legal alternatives, including the encouragement of ethical commercial conduct through media campaigns and licensing agreements.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":"95 - 114"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90449887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1909881
Sasha Mathew
This commentary article examines how the commodity form of knowledge – enclosed within the rigid structures of intellectual property (IP) – bears the imprint of Eurocentric, patriarchal, and capitalist forces which produced IP regimes. The commoditization of knowledge is a process mediated by historical asymmetries of power. This manifesto makes the argument that liberating knowledge production from oppressive histories and hierarchical structures – instead, locating it within a reclaimed public domain – is a necessarily feminist and decolonial enterprise. Knowledge producers everywhere are invited to interrupt the continued appropriation of knowledge by capitalism by refusing to participate in corporatized intellectual property regimes. Those who inhabit or are adjacent to dominant structures of power can affirm alternative mediations of intellectual value rooted in feminist and decolonial theories of community, commons, and exchange, rather than legalistic and capitalist property regimes that favour corporations and hyper-individualism.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1920749
S. Kessi, Zoe Marks, Elelwani L. Ramugondo
This introduction to the second installment of a two-part special issue focuses on actors and spaces that facilitate different forms of progress or push-back in decolonizing African Studies. We map how student activists have served as agents of decolonial change on campuses over time, and argue that intersectional and feminist leadership characterize the current generation of activism. We then explore how classrooms and curricula serve as sites of synthesis between student and faculty activists, and conservative professional and disciplinary norms. Drawing on activist campaigns and articles in the special issue, we present five questions that serve as a starting point for decolonizing courses. Finally, we acknowledge the ways that academic disciplines enforce parochial professional norms and epistemic standards in academia, while also linking academic knowledge production to global marketplaces and intellectual property regimes. We contend that the interplay of these three categories of agents shapes cycles of transformation and patterns of re-consolidation.
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