Pub Date : 2020-02-24DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2020.1724808
R. Sacks
This article looks at the material remains of the African independence era in Johannesburg's Constitution Hill (2004) and Kinshasa's Tour de l'échangeur de Limete (1974) according to how they function within their respective cityscapes. Adapting Walter Benjamin's method, I trace the contemporary meanings of built representatives of momentous eras.
这篇文章着眼于非洲独立时期在约翰内斯堡宪法山(2004)和金沙萨的Tour de l' samchangeur de Limete(1974)的物质遗迹，根据它们在各自城市景观中的作用。采用本雅明的方法，我追溯了重大时代的建筑代表的当代意义。
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Pub Date : 2020-01-16DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2019.1707100
Julia Viebach
This paper analyses the connectivities between violence, memory, personhood, place and human substances after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. It explores the practice of ‘care-taking’ at genocide memorials – the preservation and care of human remains – to reveal how survivors of the Genocide remake their worlds through working with the remnants of their dead loved ones. I argue that ‘care-taking’ is a way to rebuild selves and to retain lost relations to the dead that still interfere in the everyday lives of the living. Survivors project their emotions, sentiments and confusion about an uncertain future onto the remains. Care-taking re-verses time because it gives back dignity to those who died ‘bad deaths’ during the Genocide. I further argue that the memorials are a vehicle for what I coin ‘place-bound proximity’ that enables a material space of communication between care-takers and their dead loved ones, provides a last resting place and a ‘home’ for both the living and the dead. Following a ‘victim-approach’ this paper draws on extensive fieldwork conducted in Rwanda since 2011.
{"title":"Mediating ‘absence-presence’ at Rwanda’s genocide memorials: of care-taking, memory and proximity to the dead","authors":"Julia Viebach","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2019.1707100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2019.1707100","url":null,"abstract":"This paper analyses the connectivities between violence, memory, personhood, place and human substances after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. It explores the practice of ‘care-taking’ at genocide memorials – the preservation and care of human remains – to reveal how survivors of the Genocide remake their worlds through working with the remnants of their dead loved ones. I argue that ‘care-taking’ is a way to rebuild selves and to retain lost relations to the dead that still interfere in the everyday lives of the living. Survivors project their emotions, sentiments and confusion about an uncertain future onto the remains. Care-taking re-verses time because it gives back dignity to those who died ‘bad deaths’ during the Genocide. I further argue that the memorials are a vehicle for what I coin ‘place-bound proximity’ that enables a material space of communication between care-takers and their dead loved ones, provides a last resting place and a ‘home’ for both the living and the dead. Following a ‘victim-approach’ this paper draws on extensive fieldwork conducted in Rwanda since 2011.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"389 1","pages":"237 - 269"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86656767","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 : 2020-01-10DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2019.1707101
Wafula Yenjela
This article reads two 18th Century classical Swahili epics of war as coded critiques of empire. Here, Empire refers not only to Europe but also the Arab world's conquest histories on the Indian Ocean seaboard. The epics: Mwengo bin Athumani's Chuo cha Tambuka (1728), ‘The Epic of Tabuk’, and Mgeni bin Faqihi's Utenzi wa Rasi’lGhuli (1855), ‘The Epic of Rasi’lGhuli’, are typically read in terms of their religious content and have been deemed apolitical; that they are merely concerned with translating Arabic tales for Islamic spiritual purposes. Through a critical approach, the article asserts that the epics deeply reflect on East African conquests as they are written in the era of Swahili coast conquests by the Portuguese and the Omani Arabs. They portray the oppressed, whose imagined piety is emphasized, appropriating religious authority to launch revolutions against their conquerors. The article demonstrates that the epics are political strategies of liberation from militarily powerful empires bent on consolidation of territory and exploitation. The poetic craft of winding tales of war not only nurtured and sustained the revolutionary spirit, but also reveals the warring atmosphere that defined the Swahili in their efforts to imagine a community in the years of imperial incursions.
这篇文章读了两篇18世纪斯瓦希里经典的战争史诗，作为对帝国的编码批评。在这里，帝国不仅指欧洲，也指阿拉伯世界在印度洋沿岸的征服历史。史诗:Mwengo bin Athumani的《Chuo cha Tambuka》(1728)，《Tabuk的史诗》，以及Mgeni bin Faqihi的《Utenzi wa Rasi’lghuli》(1855)，《Rasi’lghuli的史诗》，通常是根据其宗教内容来阅读的，被认为是非政治的;他们只是为了伊斯兰教的精神目的而翻译阿拉伯故事。通过批判的方法，文章断言，史诗深刻反映了东非的征服，因为它们是在葡萄牙人和阿曼阿拉伯人征服斯瓦希里海岸的时代写成的。他们描绘被压迫者，强调他们想象中的虔诚，利用宗教权威发动反对征服者的革命。这篇文章论证了史诗是一种政治策略，目的是从军事强大的帝国中解放出来，巩固领土和剥削。史诗般的战争故事不仅滋养和维持了革命精神，而且揭示了战争氛围，这种氛围定义了斯瓦希里人在帝国入侵年代努力想象一个社区的过程。
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2020.1717361
M. Stasik, Valerie Hänsch, D. Mains
Ethnographic accounts of Africa in the late 20th century described a continent in which people were seemingly waiting endlessly for a future that would not come (Ferguson 1999; Piot 2010). Driven by normative temporal narratives of modernity and development, citizens and states imagined linear incremental movements through time. From individuals who envision better lives through work, education or migration, to larger community’s agendas for collective empowerment, to government’s long-term visions of national renewal, Africa has been rife with expectations for the future. For both states and citizens, the realization of these multiple futures is routinely delayed and often indefinitely postponed, creating a stark divide between expectation and reality. Across the continent a sense that the future is an elusive good and the present is a chronic state of waiting emerged in the aftermath of neoliberal structural adjustment policies that accelerated inequality, poverty, unequal resource access and marginalization (Ferguson 2006). Perhaps more than any other area, it is in the lives of youth that scholars have examined the gap between expectations of progress and a reality of stagnation (e.g. Archambault 2012; Cole 2004; Hansen 2005; Mains 2012; Masquelier 2005, 2019; Weiss 2009). Youth not only wait for economic development, they wait for maturation and growth in their own lives, as they struggle to attain normative expectations for the life course and become adults. In the face of persistently unmet expectations, many young people have experienced frustration, disillusion, despair or apathy. Scholars have attempted to conceptualize this experience of youth with the notion of ‘waithood’ (Honwana 2012). Attributed to a combination of persisting structures of gerontocratic and patrimonial rule and of economic pressures under neoliberal capitalism, the effects of structural adjustment, in particular, waithood describes the involuntarily prolonged adolescence of (mainly male and urban) youth grappling with issues of poverty, underemployment, access to education and, more generally, social and political marginalization. Deprived of access to the resources needed for attaining markers of social adulthood (i.e. stable income, marriage, family and household formation), youth are effectively put in a state of prolonged waiting that generates feelings of boredom, frustration and shame (Mains 2007, 2017; Masquelier 2013; Schielke 2008). Studies of expectations of development and youth waithood in Africa follow similar logics. Through engagement with modernizing discourses, like formal education, Africans have
{"title":"Temporalities of waiting in Africa","authors":"M. Stasik, Valerie Hänsch, D. Mains","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2020.1717361","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2020.1717361","url":null,"abstract":"Ethnographic accounts of Africa in the late 20th century described a continent in which people were seemingly waiting endlessly for a future that would not come (Ferguson 1999; Piot 2010). Driven by normative temporal narratives of modernity and development, citizens and states imagined linear incremental movements through time. From individuals who envision better lives through work, education or migration, to larger community’s agendas for collective empowerment, to government’s long-term visions of national renewal, Africa has been rife with expectations for the future. For both states and citizens, the realization of these multiple futures is routinely delayed and often indefinitely postponed, creating a stark divide between expectation and reality. Across the continent a sense that the future is an elusive good and the present is a chronic state of waiting emerged in the aftermath of neoliberal structural adjustment policies that accelerated inequality, poverty, unequal resource access and marginalization (Ferguson 2006). Perhaps more than any other area, it is in the lives of youth that scholars have examined the gap between expectations of progress and a reality of stagnation (e.g. Archambault 2012; Cole 2004; Hansen 2005; Mains 2012; Masquelier 2005, 2019; Weiss 2009). Youth not only wait for economic development, they wait for maturation and growth in their own lives, as they struggle to attain normative expectations for the life course and become adults. In the face of persistently unmet expectations, many young people have experienced frustration, disillusion, despair or apathy. Scholars have attempted to conceptualize this experience of youth with the notion of ‘waithood’ (Honwana 2012). Attributed to a combination of persisting structures of gerontocratic and patrimonial rule and of economic pressures under neoliberal capitalism, the effects of structural adjustment, in particular, waithood describes the involuntarily prolonged adolescence of (mainly male and urban) youth grappling with issues of poverty, underemployment, access to education and, more generally, social and political marginalization. Deprived of access to the resources needed for attaining markers of social adulthood (i.e. stable income, marriage, family and household formation), youth are effectively put in a state of prolonged waiting that generates feelings of boredom, frustration and shame (Mains 2007, 2017; Masquelier 2013; Schielke 2008). Studies of expectations of development and youth waithood in Africa follow similar logics. Through engagement with modernizing discourses, like formal education, Africans have","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"1 - 9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73288007","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 : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2019.1697312
Joseph Mujere
Informal mining settlements in Rustenburg, South Africa, grew exponentially due to the removal of apartheid-era spatial controls in the late 1980s and the boom in platinum mining in the early 2000s. These informal settlements lack official recognition, and this generates collective uncertainty and engenders different forms of waiting. Residents wait for employment, services, and ultimately official recognition of their settlement and its integration into the Rustenburg Local Municipality. As residents wait, they also fashion various strategies to alleviate their situation. Drawing on ethnographic data collected from the Ikemeleng informal settlement on the outskirts of Rustenburg town, this article combines an analysis of experiences of waiting with the conditions and structures that generate waiting. It argues that waiting in informal settlements is not characterized by passive acquiesce but is an engaged activity that is informed by residents’ reflexive responses to the different structures and regimes of waiting. The article argues that informal settlements should be viewed as zones of waiting, not only because they are spaces that generate waiting, but most importantly because residents engage in active waiting.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2019.1697309
G. Dobler
Waiting has become an important topic for the social sciences and a metaphor for the situation of young people in a variety of regions. This essay proposes to take a step back from metaphors of waithood, stuckedness, timepass or boredom to newly ask what waiting is and what social consequences it has. I see waiting as the evaluation of a situation; by social framing, this evaluation can coagulate into a specific action. Both evaluation and action are characterized by future orientation, passivity, uncertainty, stasis, and absence of intrinsic value. Waiting, I show, is an important medium of social cooperation on the one hand, of the allocation of resources on the other. Both lead to the unequal distribution of waiting. Those who have to wait can wait in competition to each other or jointly, and joint waiting can become a seed of social critique. Building on these elements of a conceptual framework, I ask if there is anything specific about waiting in Africa. I argue that contemporary waithood is produced and reproduced by global economic structures, and I describe ways in which these can translate into an unequal distribution of waiting – in Africa and beyond.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2019.1697317
Valerie Hänsch
In this paper, I explore patience as an attitude towards imposed waiting in uncertainty among peasants in rural Northern Sudan who were flooded out of their homes along the Nile during the 2003–2009 Merowe dam construction project. My aim is to examine the complex temporalities that appear in the politics of displacement. I show how such temporal alterations were related to the implementation of a large infrastructural project and to the shaping of the Manasir people’s perception of time as they attempted to stay and revive life in their homeland on the shores of the emerging reservoir. Corresponding to the gendered experience of imposed inactivity and the resultant dissolution of time, patience is practised to varying degrees. Amongst the displaced communities, patience, as a temporal practice, represents a commitment both to future divine rewards and to living within the present situation. This commitment, in turn, offers hope and enables people to persevere. I argue that patience is not, as is often assumed, a quietist attitude, but a political practice directed against attacks by the state.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2019.1697315
J. Beek
In Northern Ghana, the microfinance company DKM convinced large segments of the population to give them money based on spectacular rates, only to fail spectacularly and leave many people bankrupt in 2016. Such Ponzi schemes are anything but unusual, in Africa and elsewhere, and have been studied as manifestations of an ever-accelerating neoliberal capitalism. Yet, the affected people remember DKM and its manager fondly, and they have abandoned the wait to get their money back. Instead of exploring economic questions, this paper will explore practices of waiting in the context of the scheme to understand the connection between social relationships and imagined futures. In DKM, actors engaged in deeply social forms of waiting, and these were part of late-modern financial schemes, leading to various forms of synchronization. When the tension between the social and instrumental aspects of this waiting emerged after the scheme’s collapse, actors – in Northern Ghana at least – ultimately decided to preserve their relationships. Looking back, actors speak about this period as a time of hope, a time in which waiting seemed to be over in a more existential sense.
{"title":"Waiting, relationships and money in a Ponzi scheme in Northern Ghana","authors":"J. Beek","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2019.1697315","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2019.1697315","url":null,"abstract":"In Northern Ghana, the microfinance company DKM convinced large segments of the population to give them money based on spectacular rates, only to fail spectacularly and leave many people bankrupt in 2016. Such Ponzi schemes are anything but unusual, in Africa and elsewhere, and have been studied as manifestations of an ever-accelerating neoliberal capitalism. Yet, the affected people remember DKM and its manager fondly, and they have abandoned the wait to get their money back. Instead of exploring economic questions, this paper will explore practices of waiting in the context of the scheme to understand the connection between social relationships and imagined futures. In DKM, actors engaged in deeply social forms of waiting, and these were part of late-modern financial schemes, leading to various forms of synchronization. When the tension between the social and instrumental aspects of this waiting emerged after the scheme’s collapse, actors – in Northern Ghana at least – ultimately decided to preserve their relationships. Looking back, actors speak about this period as a time of hope, a time in which waiting seemed to be over in a more existential sense.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"153 1","pages":"107 - 120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86133284","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 : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2019.1697311
Serawit B. Debele
In this article I look at collective payers by Ethiopian asylum seekers to explore how religious narratives are mobilized to deal with temporal angst in the context of waiting. I posit that waiting is a site of multifaceted struggles in which subjectivities are constituted, in response to both the violence waiting imposes and the anticipated freedom it carries with it. Asylum seekers confront life in waiting in various ways until they attain what they wait for and ‘settle’ in the host country. To settle is imagined as living in Europe as independent and self-reliant workers who could generate their own income which is contingent on waiting for the acceptance of their applications for asylum. Whether people attain what they wait for or not, their subjectivities are formed through a certain idea of themselves, an understanding of their situation and their practices, all of which are located within histories and structures of power relations. My analysis draws on ethnographic data generated from fieldwork conducted in 2016–2017 among Oromo asylum seekers in the city of Nuremberg, Germany.
{"title":"Waiting as a site of subject formation: examining collective prayers by Ethiopian asylum seekers in Germany","authors":"Serawit B. Debele","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2019.1697311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2019.1697311","url":null,"abstract":"In this article I look at collective payers by Ethiopian asylum seekers to explore how religious narratives are mobilized to deal with temporal angst in the context of waiting. I posit that waiting is a site of multifaceted struggles in which subjectivities are constituted, in response to both the violence waiting imposes and the anticipated freedom it carries with it. Asylum seekers confront life in waiting in various ways until they attain what they wait for and ‘settle’ in the host country. To settle is imagined as living in Europe as independent and self-reliant workers who could generate their own income which is contingent on waiting for the acceptance of their applications for asylum. Whether people attain what they wait for or not, their subjectivities are formed through a certain idea of themselves, an understanding of their situation and their practices, all of which are located within histories and structures of power relations. My analysis draws on ethnographic data generated from fieldwork conducted in 2016–2017 among Oromo asylum seekers in the city of Nuremberg, Germany.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"39 3 1","pages":"52 - 64"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79903902","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 : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2019.1697310
Niklas Hultin
In early 2016, the Gambia experienced an unexpected political transition when the long-term autocrat Yahya Jammeh left the country and was replaced with a democratically elected president. This article examines this transition and its aftermath from the perspective of waiting. It addresses what happened after the waiting was over – after Jammeh had left. It uses the twin ideas of resignation and resentment, primarily in relation to ethnicity, to describe how waiting is extended pasts its original endpoint. In doing so, the article draws a contrast between the teleological assumptions of much of the transitional justice and political transition literatures and distinguishes between the transactional waiting often discussed in the anthropological literature and the transitional waiting seen in the Gambia.
{"title":"Waiting and political transitions: anticipating the new Gambia","authors":"Niklas Hultin","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2019.1697310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2019.1697310","url":null,"abstract":"In early 2016, the Gambia experienced an unexpected political transition when the long-term autocrat Yahya Jammeh left the country and was replaced with a democratically elected president. This article examines this transition and its aftermath from the perspective of waiting. It addresses what happened after the waiting was over – after Jammeh had left. It uses the twin ideas of resignation and resentment, primarily in relation to ethnicity, to describe how waiting is extended pasts its original endpoint. In doing so, the article draws a contrast between the teleological assumptions of much of the transitional justice and political transition literatures and distinguishes between the transactional waiting often discussed in the anthropological literature and the transitional waiting seen in the Gambia.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"16 1","pages":"106 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89116455","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}
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