Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2023.2230165
I. Owusu-Mensah, F. B. Ijon
ABSTRACT Zongo communities – comprising migrants from the northern savannah of Ghana and neighbouring Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Northern Nigeria – are keenly involved in Ghanaian politics, especially leading up to national elections. Representing an important constituency, zongo residents expect their fair share of representation in government to compensate their diverse contributions to political activities. This article examines this expectation and how zongo residents perceive government policies and actions – including the creation of the Ministry of Inner Cities and Zongo Development – seeking to address their feelings of disengagement. Primary data were gathered during 2018 through a survey, focus group discussions and interviews and analysed from a social exclusion theory perspective. Most participants reported that there was no representation of the zongos at national or local government level. Further, the findings seemed to affirm that zongo residents are only politically important before and during elections. Participants in our study branded government interventions aimed at including zongo communities as merely cosmetic and tricking zongo residents into believing that government cares for them.
{"title":"Good for Elections but not for Government: Zongos and the Politics of Exclusion in Ghana","authors":"I. Owusu-Mensah, F. B. Ijon","doi":"10.1080/00020184.2023.2230165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2023.2230165","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Zongo communities – comprising migrants from the northern savannah of Ghana and neighbouring Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Northern Nigeria – are keenly involved in Ghanaian politics, especially leading up to national elections. Representing an important constituency, zongo residents expect their fair share of representation in government to compensate their diverse contributions to political activities. This article examines this expectation and how zongo residents perceive government policies and actions – including the creation of the Ministry of Inner Cities and Zongo Development – seeking to address their feelings of disengagement. Primary data were gathered during 2018 through a survey, focus group discussions and interviews and analysed from a social exclusion theory perspective. Most participants reported that there was no representation of the zongos at national or local government level. Further, the findings seemed to affirm that zongo residents are only politically important before and during elections. Participants in our study branded government interventions aimed at including zongo communities as merely cosmetic and tricking zongo residents into believing that government cares for them.","PeriodicalId":51769,"journal":{"name":"African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42089727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2023.2241833
S. O. Ombere, E. Nyambedha, T. Haller, S. Merten
ABSTRACT Maternal healthcare is a global agenda. Kenya introduced free maternity services (FMS) in 2013 to allow women to give birth for free in all government public health facilities. The introduction of FMS was timely due to the high maternal mortality rate in Kenya. FMS was also introduced to fulfil the Jubilee Party government’s elections campaign promises. It is, however, not known how primary beneficiaries and health providers perceived the FMS roll-out following the presidential directive in 2013. This article aims to explore the roles of political contestations in FMS as a social protection scheme in Kenya. In this qualitative ethnographic study in Kilifi County, we interviewed the mothers who utilised FMS and the health workers who implemented the policy. The data gathered was analysed contextually and thematically. The prevailing narrative from the health services professionals and the mothers who participated in our study is that FMS is ‘the president’s thing’ and has a clear political orientation; it is seen as deceiving the public in two ways: first by shrouding political interests, and second by adding to the burden of women, as delivery was not free – all the other services and medication before and after birth came at a cost. Health workers feel helpless and frustrated and, in most cases, they have to cope with meagre resources to ensure safe births. In some cases, quality of care is compromised due to supply-side constraints. This article shows how social protection has been used to gain political mileage and has not considered the local needs of the maternal healthcare system.
{"title":"Anti-Politics and Free Maternal Health Services in Kilifi County, Kenya","authors":"S. O. Ombere, E. Nyambedha, T. Haller, S. Merten","doi":"10.1080/00020184.2023.2241833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2023.2241833","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Maternal healthcare is a global agenda. Kenya introduced free maternity services (FMS) in 2013 to allow women to give birth for free in all government public health facilities. The introduction of FMS was timely due to the high maternal mortality rate in Kenya. FMS was also introduced to fulfil the Jubilee Party government’s elections campaign promises. It is, however, not known how primary beneficiaries and health providers perceived the FMS roll-out following the presidential directive in 2013. This article aims to explore the roles of political contestations in FMS as a social protection scheme in Kenya. In this qualitative ethnographic study in Kilifi County, we interviewed the mothers who utilised FMS and the health workers who implemented the policy. The data gathered was analysed contextually and thematically. The prevailing narrative from the health services professionals and the mothers who participated in our study is that FMS is ‘the president’s thing’ and has a clear political orientation; it is seen as deceiving the public in two ways: first by shrouding political interests, and second by adding to the burden of women, as delivery was not free – all the other services and medication before and after birth came at a cost. Health workers feel helpless and frustrated and, in most cases, they have to cope with meagre resources to ensure safe births. In some cases, quality of care is compromised due to supply-side constraints. This article shows how social protection has been used to gain political mileage and has not considered the local needs of the maternal healthcare system.","PeriodicalId":51769,"journal":{"name":"African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44274237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2023.2221064
Caio Simões de Araújo, Srila Roy
ABSTRACT Across the Global North and South, there have been exciting engagements with the concept of the archive in recent decades. These debates are of both scholarly and political significance, especially when it comes to contemporary struggles for minority rights, belonging, and recognition. The overlapping fields of gender, sexuality, and queer studies have made major contributions to rethinking the archive - to raise new and important questions about gendered and sexualised intimacies, affect, memory, historical formations, activism and contemporary cultural practice. Contributing to this growing body of work, the present Special Issue: Intimate Archives: Interventions on Gender, Sexuality and Intimacy presents cutting-edge scholarship in African studies - working from various disciplinary standpoints - to occupy, engage and play with the archive as a politically urgent and intellectually productive theme. In this introduction, we underscore how the contributions to the volume mobilise the ‘archive' as more than an institution or a place; it works as an underlying metaphor and a call for thorough contextualisation and a radical re-imagination of the historical experiences - the intimate historicity – of gendered and sexualised lives amidst societal and political change, from colonialism to liberation, from criminalisation of sexual ‘deviance’ to ongoing struggles for visibility and rights not only in Africa but in the broader Global South.
{"title":"Intimate Archives: Interventions on Gender, Sexuality and Intimacies","authors":"Caio Simões de Araújo, Srila Roy","doi":"10.1080/00020184.2023.2221064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2023.2221064","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Across the Global North and South, there have been exciting engagements with the concept of the archive in recent decades. These debates are of both scholarly and political significance, especially when it comes to contemporary struggles for minority rights, belonging, and recognition. The overlapping fields of gender, sexuality, and queer studies have made major contributions to rethinking the archive - to raise new and important questions about gendered and sexualised intimacies, affect, memory, historical formations, activism and contemporary cultural practice. Contributing to this growing body of work, the present Special Issue: Intimate Archives: Interventions on Gender, Sexuality and Intimacy presents cutting-edge scholarship in African studies - working from various disciplinary standpoints - to occupy, engage and play with the archive as a politically urgent and intellectually productive theme. In this introduction, we underscore how the contributions to the volume mobilise the ‘archive' as more than an institution or a place; it works as an underlying metaphor and a call for thorough contextualisation and a radical re-imagination of the historical experiences - the intimate historicity – of gendered and sexualised lives amidst societal and political change, from colonialism to liberation, from criminalisation of sexual ‘deviance’ to ongoing struggles for visibility and rights not only in Africa but in the broader Global South.","PeriodicalId":51769,"journal":{"name":"African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43501775","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2023.2200367
G. Ncube, Adriaan van Klinken
ABSTRACT This article discusses the work of Abdellah Taïa, the first openly gay Moroccan novelist to write his queerness, as a major contribution to an emergent queer African Islamic discourse. Bringing Taïa’s work into conversation with diverse literary texts from elsewhere on the continent, the article makes two major interventions in the field of queer African studies. First, it centres Islam as a resource for queer agency, creativity and subjectivity in contemporary Africa. This addresses Western conceptions of queer politics and queer rights that operate on a largely secular, if not anti-religious and specifically anti-Islamic basis. Second, it renegotiates the marginality of North Africa, and especially the Maghreb, in queer African studies. This addresses problematic historic divisions between North and sub-Saharan Africa, and acknowledges the political, cultural and intellectual unity of the continent. The article demonstrates that literary works make visible queer lived experiences on the continent. Drawing on Michelle Caswell’s ideas of the ‘archiving of the unspeakable’ and Achille Mbembe’s concept of the ‘unarchivable’, this article adopts a ‘scavenger methodology’ to argue that literary works are important in creating an emergent queer African Islamic discourse as well as an alternative archive of African queer lived experiences.
{"title":"Abdellah Taïa and an Emergent Queer African Islamic Discourse: Texts, Visibility and Intimate Archives","authors":"G. Ncube, Adriaan van Klinken","doi":"10.1080/00020184.2023.2200367","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2023.2200367","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article discusses the work of Abdellah Taïa, the first openly gay Moroccan novelist to write his queerness, as a major contribution to an emergent queer African Islamic discourse. Bringing Taïa’s work into conversation with diverse literary texts from elsewhere on the continent, the article makes two major interventions in the field of queer African studies. First, it centres Islam as a resource for queer agency, creativity and subjectivity in contemporary Africa. This addresses Western conceptions of queer politics and queer rights that operate on a largely secular, if not anti-religious and specifically anti-Islamic basis. Second, it renegotiates the marginality of North Africa, and especially the Maghreb, in queer African studies. This addresses problematic historic divisions between North and sub-Saharan Africa, and acknowledges the political, cultural and intellectual unity of the continent. The article demonstrates that literary works make visible queer lived experiences on the continent. Drawing on Michelle Caswell’s ideas of the ‘archiving of the unspeakable’ and Achille Mbembe’s concept of the ‘unarchivable’, this article adopts a ‘scavenger methodology’ to argue that literary works are important in creating an emergent queer African Islamic discourse as well as an alternative archive of African queer lived experiences.","PeriodicalId":51769,"journal":{"name":"African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48978578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2023.2174076
Caio Simões de Araújo
ABSTRACT This article investigates the politics of queer and transgender visual representation and archiving in relation to the short film Sisters (2003) and related photographs, which were produced in Maputo, Mozambique, by the Danish photographer Ditte Haarløv Johnsen in the early 2000s. Understood as a visual archive, this material represents two people, Ingrácia and Antonieta, and their group of friends, many of whom called themselves manas (sisters), but also variably self-identified as gay men, travestis, and trans. The article chronicles my engagement with this itinerant archive, and with the people who produced it, retracing the biography of these materials as they travelled between Maputo and Johannesburg, where they elicited radically different reactions from local publics and raised critical questions about the politics of in/visibility and representation in Southern Africa. In exploring this case, the article interrogates what forms of queer and transhistorical subjectivities are made visible through the film and related photographs, considering that both the materiality of the camera and the medium of the visual allow for particular modes of self-inscription and archive-making. The article suggests that Sisters engages forms of transhistoricity that cut across time and space to bind trans and queer pasts, presents, and future.
{"title":"Sex, Lives and Videotape: The Transhistoricity of an Itinerant Visual Archive","authors":"Caio Simões de Araújo","doi":"10.1080/00020184.2023.2174076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2023.2174076","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article investigates the politics of queer and transgender visual representation and archiving in relation to the short film Sisters (2003) and related photographs, which were produced in Maputo, Mozambique, by the Danish photographer Ditte Haarløv Johnsen in the early 2000s. Understood as a visual archive, this material represents two people, Ingrácia and Antonieta, and their group of friends, many of whom called themselves manas (sisters), but also variably self-identified as gay men, travestis, and trans. The article chronicles my engagement with this itinerant archive, and with the people who produced it, retracing the biography of these materials as they travelled between Maputo and Johannesburg, where they elicited radically different reactions from local publics and raised critical questions about the politics of in/visibility and representation in Southern Africa. In exploring this case, the article interrogates what forms of queer and transhistorical subjectivities are made visible through the film and related photographs, considering that both the materiality of the camera and the medium of the visual allow for particular modes of self-inscription and archive-making. The article suggests that Sisters engages forms of transhistoricity that cut across time and space to bind trans and queer pasts, presents, and future.","PeriodicalId":51769,"journal":{"name":"African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48629791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2023.2214521
S. Duff
ABSTRACT While historians of twentieth-century South Africa have made use of women’s memoirs as an archive, this article argues that these memoirs can also be regarded as historiography. In Ruth First’s 117 Days (1965), Ellen Kuzwayo’s Call Me Woman (1985), and Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: A South African Autobiography by Emma Mashinini (1989), authors critique and reconstitute narratives of the South African past, told through the lives of politically engaged women. They present versions of South African history that not only act as a corrective to the apartheid state-sanctioned narrative of South African history as white supremacist triumph, but also probe the limits of the histories narrated by liberation movements.
{"title":"Twentieth-Century South African Women’s Memoir as Historiography","authors":"S. Duff","doi":"10.1080/00020184.2023.2214521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2023.2214521","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT While historians of twentieth-century South Africa have made use of women’s memoirs as an archive, this article argues that these memoirs can also be regarded as historiography. In Ruth First’s 117 Days (1965), Ellen Kuzwayo’s Call Me Woman (1985), and Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: A South African Autobiography by Emma Mashinini (1989), authors critique and reconstitute narratives of the South African past, told through the lives of politically engaged women. They present versions of South African history that not only act as a corrective to the apartheid state-sanctioned narrative of South African history as white supremacist triumph, but also probe the limits of the histories narrated by liberation movements.","PeriodicalId":51769,"journal":{"name":"African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41477581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2023.2204062
Serawit B. Debele
ABSTRACT Through a speculative reading of crime reports from the 1960 and ‘70s, this article grapples with the way in which Ethiopians who refuse to be fixed within gender binaries were introduced to readers as social problems. Considering the violence gender-non-conforming people are subjected to – including by some cisgender members of the queer community itself – I closely study some of these archives to ask what could emerge if we engage them imaginatively. I experiment with the crime reports to see what a speculative reading might afford us in writing a history of the present. I subject the reports to speculation on what might have been instead of being loyal to archives and what they present to us. In an act of defying the authority of the archive, which gives a narrow and skewed account of lived experiences, I introduce a speculative biography of three gender-non-conforming Ethiopians in a fashion that moves away from the crime narrative within which they were limited. In so doing, however, I do not claim to recover their voice, their wishes and desires; I rather read a theory of how their existence was made (im)possible/freedom was practised. Though I heavily draw on the crime reports from Amharic newspapers, I juxtapose these with recently produced documentaries, my own childhood memories, ethnography as well as conversations with members of the queer community at home and in the diaspora.
{"title":"Trans(forming) Archives: Speculative Biographies of Ethiopians Between and Beyond Genders","authors":"Serawit B. Debele","doi":"10.1080/00020184.2023.2204062","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2023.2204062","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Through a speculative reading of crime reports from the 1960 and ‘70s, this article grapples with the way in which Ethiopians who refuse to be fixed within gender binaries were introduced to readers as social problems. Considering the violence gender-non-conforming people are subjected to – including by some cisgender members of the queer community itself – I closely study some of these archives to ask what could emerge if we engage them imaginatively. I experiment with the crime reports to see what a speculative reading might afford us in writing a history of the present. I subject the reports to speculation on what might have been instead of being loyal to archives and what they present to us. In an act of defying the authority of the archive, which gives a narrow and skewed account of lived experiences, I introduce a speculative biography of three gender-non-conforming Ethiopians in a fashion that moves away from the crime narrative within which they were limited. In so doing, however, I do not claim to recover their voice, their wishes and desires; I rather read a theory of how their existence was made (im)possible/freedom was practised. Though I heavily draw on the crime reports from Amharic newspapers, I juxtapose these with recently produced documentaries, my own childhood memories, ethnography as well as conversations with members of the queer community at home and in the diaspora.","PeriodicalId":51769,"journal":{"name":"African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48143073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2023.2214898
M. Meneses
ABSTRACT What narratives carry women who experienced war in the first person, even if they are not military or even directly part of a nationalist movement? How can they challenge the colonial and nationalist archives, that insist in silencing women’s experiences in their chronicles? In contemporary Mozambique, while the dominant nationalist historiography has acknowledged the role played by the women who left home and joined the nationalist armed struggle, the analysis tends to rend invisible the experiences of women that, from home, participated in the struggle. Methodologically, archival research is combined with ethnographic methods to explore the lived experiences of African women whose destinies were crossed by the nationalist war in Mozambique (1964–1974). In-depth interviews with three women, supported by semi-structured interviews with relatives and acquaintances, are used to research ‘home’ as a key political space of women’s anti-colonial resistance and a context where emancipatory projects were dreamed. In parallel, this article aims to discuss the patriarchal dimension of knowledge kept in official archives, thus contributing to questioning the masculine hegemony in the ‘national’ discourse, as well as to reintroduce the question of agency and instrumentality back into the liberation narrative.
{"title":"Silent Agents of Nationalist Struggle? Women of Mozambique, Fighting a War Within a War","authors":"M. Meneses","doi":"10.1080/00020184.2023.2214898","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2023.2214898","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT What narratives carry women who experienced war in the first person, even if they are not military or even directly part of a nationalist movement? How can they challenge the colonial and nationalist archives, that insist in silencing women’s experiences in their chronicles? In contemporary Mozambique, while the dominant nationalist historiography has acknowledged the role played by the women who left home and joined the nationalist armed struggle, the analysis tends to rend invisible the experiences of women that, from home, participated in the struggle. Methodologically, archival research is combined with ethnographic methods to explore the lived experiences of African women whose destinies were crossed by the nationalist war in Mozambique (1964–1974). In-depth interviews with three women, supported by semi-structured interviews with relatives and acquaintances, are used to research ‘home’ as a key political space of women’s anti-colonial resistance and a context where emancipatory projects were dreamed. In parallel, this article aims to discuss the patriarchal dimension of knowledge kept in official archives, thus contributing to questioning the masculine hegemony in the ‘national’ discourse, as well as to reintroduce the question of agency and instrumentality back into the liberation narrative.","PeriodicalId":51769,"journal":{"name":"African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45726504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2023.2212606
Emily Bridger, Erin Hazan
ABSTRACT Despite contemporary concerns about sexual violence in South Africa, the longer history of violence against women has been insufficiently explored. This article examines the apartheid-era archive on sexual violence, exploring what methodologies can be used and histories written based on its contents. It argues that this archive is marked by a contradictory dichotomy of both excess and absence. While many sources from the 1950s to 1980s, and particularly white-authored ones, ignore sexual violence, others depict it in abundance and often gruesome detail. This surfeit of material shockingly confronts the researcher through both its quantity and the violent racism and misogyny that permeates each narrative. Yet there are coinciding glaring silences in the archive, particularly pertaining to Black women’s subjectivities. This renders Black women both hyper visible and invisible in the apartheid archive. Sexual violence is simultaneously hidden, spectacularised and made quotidian and banal. This article grapples with this peculiar mix of surfeit and silence and what the archive means for contemporary understandings of sexual violence in South Africa.
{"title":"Surfeit and Silence: Sexual Violence in the Apartheid Archive","authors":"Emily Bridger, Erin Hazan","doi":"10.1080/00020184.2023.2212606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2023.2212606","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Despite contemporary concerns about sexual violence in South Africa, the longer history of violence against women has been insufficiently explored. This article examines the apartheid-era archive on sexual violence, exploring what methodologies can be used and histories written based on its contents. It argues that this archive is marked by a contradictory dichotomy of both excess and absence. While many sources from the 1950s to 1980s, and particularly white-authored ones, ignore sexual violence, others depict it in abundance and often gruesome detail. This surfeit of material shockingly confronts the researcher through both its quantity and the violent racism and misogyny that permeates each narrative. Yet there are coinciding glaring silences in the archive, particularly pertaining to Black women’s subjectivities. This renders Black women both hyper visible and invisible in the apartheid archive. Sexual violence is simultaneously hidden, spectacularised and made quotidian and banal. This article grapples with this peculiar mix of surfeit and silence and what the archive means for contemporary understandings of sexual violence in South Africa.","PeriodicalId":51769,"journal":{"name":"African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41462791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2022.2095616
Ignatius Gutsa
ABSTRACT Most ethnographies still pay little attention to the subsistence experiences of older adult women heading household in Africa. Drawing from nineteen months of ethnographic research in Domboshava communal lands, this article addresses this gap in knowledge by discussing the position of older women heading households in rural Zimbabwe and the impact of historical and current challenges on their subsistence activities. In this article, I argue that there is no typical African widow. I further argue that these older adult women’s historical and present experiences have led to the visible reversals in the remittance flows, poor social networks, changing gender relations, ill health, the impact of HIV and AIDS, changing household structures, as well as multiple and competing responsibilities. All these factors are coalescing together to affect the older adult women’s subsistence activities and their capacity to take care of themselves, their immediate and extended families.
{"title":"Making Ends Meet: Experiences of Older Women Heading Households in Rural Domboshava, Zimbabwe","authors":"Ignatius Gutsa","doi":"10.1080/00020184.2022.2095616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2022.2095616","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Most ethnographies still pay little attention to the subsistence experiences of older adult women heading household in Africa. Drawing from nineteen months of ethnographic research in Domboshava communal lands, this article addresses this gap in knowledge by discussing the position of older women heading households in rural Zimbabwe and the impact of historical and current challenges on their subsistence activities. In this article, I argue that there is no typical African widow. I further argue that these older adult women’s historical and present experiences have led to the visible reversals in the remittance flows, poor social networks, changing gender relations, ill health, the impact of HIV and AIDS, changing household structures, as well as multiple and competing responsibilities. All these factors are coalescing together to affect the older adult women’s subsistence activities and their capacity to take care of themselves, their immediate and extended families.","PeriodicalId":51769,"journal":{"name":"African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46644470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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