Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972022000547
Martha Evans
Therehasbeenaresurgenceof interest inradio inAfrica inrecentyears,withpublications such as Guerrilla Radios in Southern Africa (2021)1 and Radio in Africa (2012)2 exploring different aspects ofwhat is often referred to as ‘Africa’smedium’. Now Liz Gunner, an editor of the lattercollection,haswrittena full-lengthexploratoryaccountof thehistoryofZulu radio. Radio Soundings hones in on radio’s role in establishing a complex modern black identity in South Africa and beyond. Gunner is a prodigious scholar whose substantive body ofwork examines oral culture and literature in Africa. Her background in historical research and textual analysis results in an insightful understanding of how black South Africans have approached radio, both as producers and as listeners. Making associations with indigenous radio in countries such as Australia and Nepal, Radio Soundings explores the popular African-language radio stations of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), not only as manifestations of ‘his master’s voice’ but also as potentially unifying, if not subversive, media. The National Party, as Gunner shows, was correct to fear the potentially ‘modernizing’ effects of radio on the black population, for the broadcasts operated as ‘wild card’ ‘sound texts’ (p. 34) that migrated via unpredictable networks to connect rural and urban communities. Focusing on Zulu radio and radio drama in particular, Gunner’s analysis spans a period of eighty years. Given that two airings of a radio play can reach the same size audience as would take a stage drama over two years (p. 76), it is something of an indictment that so little scholarly attention has been given to the genre, and Gunner’s book breaks new ground in this respect. The book is structured into three parts: ‘Sound and “migration”’; ‘Distance and memory’; and ‘Drama, language and everyday life’. This provides a (more or less) chronological, highly readable history of interlinked events, figures and broadcasting practices. The first two chapters chart the role of pioneers K. E. Masinga and Alexius Buthelezi, both of whom might be seen as ambiguous, trickster figures. Although they may have had to enter the SABC offices via the back door, as Gunner points out, their understanding of and interactions with their audiences (the hostel dwellers, beer brewers, white-collar workers and teachers of urban communities) undercut the staid broadcasts engineered by the apartheid state and were largely responsible for the creation of new radio publics. Chapters 3 and 4 explore radio from afar, focusing on Bloke Modisane and Lewis Nkosi, both Drum writers whose intellectualism was enriched by their encounters with the US civil rights movement and the experience of exile in the 1960s. These
{"title":"Liz Gunner, Radio Soundings: South Africa and the black modern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (hb £78.99 – 978 1 1084 7064 3; pb £19.99 – 978 1 1084 5635 7). 2019/2020, x + 224 pp.","authors":"Martha Evans","doi":"10.1017/S0001972022000547","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972022000547","url":null,"abstract":"Therehasbeenaresurgenceof interest inradio inAfrica inrecentyears,withpublications such as Guerrilla Radios in Southern Africa (2021)1 and Radio in Africa (2012)2 exploring different aspects ofwhat is often referred to as ‘Africa’smedium’. Now Liz Gunner, an editor of the lattercollection,haswrittena full-lengthexploratoryaccountof thehistoryofZulu radio. Radio Soundings hones in on radio’s role in establishing a complex modern black identity in South Africa and beyond. Gunner is a prodigious scholar whose substantive body ofwork examines oral culture and literature in Africa. Her background in historical research and textual analysis results in an insightful understanding of how black South Africans have approached radio, both as producers and as listeners. Making associations with indigenous radio in countries such as Australia and Nepal, Radio Soundings explores the popular African-language radio stations of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), not only as manifestations of ‘his master’s voice’ but also as potentially unifying, if not subversive, media. The National Party, as Gunner shows, was correct to fear the potentially ‘modernizing’ effects of radio on the black population, for the broadcasts operated as ‘wild card’ ‘sound texts’ (p. 34) that migrated via unpredictable networks to connect rural and urban communities. Focusing on Zulu radio and radio drama in particular, Gunner’s analysis spans a period of eighty years. Given that two airings of a radio play can reach the same size audience as would take a stage drama over two years (p. 76), it is something of an indictment that so little scholarly attention has been given to the genre, and Gunner’s book breaks new ground in this respect. The book is structured into three parts: ‘Sound and “migration”’; ‘Distance and memory’; and ‘Drama, language and everyday life’. This provides a (more or less) chronological, highly readable history of interlinked events, figures and broadcasting practices. The first two chapters chart the role of pioneers K. E. Masinga and Alexius Buthelezi, both of whom might be seen as ambiguous, trickster figures. Although they may have had to enter the SABC offices via the back door, as Gunner points out, their understanding of and interactions with their audiences (the hostel dwellers, beer brewers, white-collar workers and teachers of urban communities) undercut the staid broadcasts engineered by the apartheid state and were largely responsible for the creation of new radio publics. Chapters 3 and 4 explore radio from afar, focusing on Bloke Modisane and Lewis Nkosi, both Drum writers whose intellectualism was enriched by their encounters with the US civil rights movement and the experience of exile in the 1960s. These","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"62 1","pages":"882 - 883"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89492989","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972022000420
Virginia De Silva
Abstract 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 as useful; in others, they are considered as something requiring a hard process of adjustment and marking a bodily difference. How is the ‘deviced’ body experienced? Are there some ‘techniques of the body’ that resist the biopolitical devices imposed by the culture of rehabilitation? I answer these questions through evidence collected during ethnographic fieldwork carried out between October 2014 and August 2015 in the regional state of Tigray, Ethiopia.
{"title":"‘Its name is Awetasc’: devices and the everyday life of people with physical disability in Ethiopia","authors":"Virginia De Silva","doi":"10.1017/S0001972022000420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972022000420","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract 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 as useful; in others, they are considered as something requiring a hard process of adjustment and marking a bodily difference. How is the ‘deviced’ body experienced? Are there some ‘techniques of the body’ that resist the biopolitical devices imposed by the culture of rehabilitation? I answer these questions through evidence collected during ethnographic fieldwork carried out between October 2014 and August 2015 in the regional state of Tigray, Ethiopia.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"70 1","pages":"522 - 539"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85633088","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972022000493
Rehema Namaganda, D. Kyaddondo, I. Kajja, S. Kiwuwa
Abstract 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 of thirty elderly people visited in their homes between July 2016 and January 2017. We found that elderly people with mobility disabilities valued devices for the greater autonomy they afforded, although dependence was also valued in some situations. The source or provenance of a device imbued it with meaning. Holding onto it regardless of how much one used it was in a way like holding onto the social relationship that the artefact represented, and the same can be said of abandoning it. Devices were also valued according to the manner in which they portrayed the user to the rest of the world – either positively as cosmopolitan and cared for, or negatively as sickly.
{"title":"Sticks and wheelchairs for elderly people in central Uganda: values of utility, provenance and presentation","authors":"Rehema Namaganda, D. Kyaddondo, I. Kajja, S. Kiwuwa","doi":"10.1017/S0001972022000493","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972022000493","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract 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 of thirty elderly people visited in their homes between July 2016 and January 2017. We found that elderly people with mobility disabilities valued devices for the greater autonomy they afforded, although dependence was also valued in some situations. The source or provenance of a device imbued it with meaning. Holding onto it regardless of how much one used it was in a way like holding onto the social relationship that the artefact represented, and the same can be said of abandoning it. Devices were also valued according to the manner in which they portrayed the user to the rest of the world – either positively as cosmopolitan and cared for, or negatively as sickly.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"60 1","pages":"484 - 500"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81446541","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1017/S000197202200033X
Anna-Riikka Kauppinen
Abstract 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 Ghanaian banks through a special purpose vehicle (SPV), Ghana Amalgamated Trust (GAT). Set against the historical dominance of foreign banks in West Africa and Ghana’s recent history of political fault lines, this article explores the moral discourses and popular discontents of harnessing an SPV – a device typically used to isolate financial risk – for a desire for African economic sovereignty. Drawing on banking archives, public debates and fieldwork in a private bank selected as a benefactor of the SPV, I focus on the contests of value that emerge when costly banking sector reforms meet a critical public that doubts the sincerity of politicians and bankers as economic ‘reformers’. Arguing that ‘indigenous banks’ became a moral category that embedded abstractions of finance in a nationalist discourse of affect and sentiment, this article illuminates the long history of centring domestic ownership of financial infrastructures in postcolonial African economic policymaking.
{"title":"Saving the ‘indigenous banks’: moral politics of economic sovereignty in Ghana’s 2017–19 financial crisis","authors":"Anna-Riikka Kauppinen","doi":"10.1017/S000197202200033X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S000197202200033X","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract 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 Ghanaian banks through a special purpose vehicle (SPV), Ghana Amalgamated Trust (GAT). Set against the historical dominance of foreign banks in West Africa and Ghana’s recent history of political fault lines, this article explores the moral discourses and popular discontents of harnessing an SPV – a device typically used to isolate financial risk – for a desire for African economic sovereignty. Drawing on banking archives, public debates and fieldwork in a private bank selected as a benefactor of the SPV, I focus on the contests of value that emerge when costly banking sector reforms meet a critical public that doubts the sincerity of politicians and bankers as economic ‘reformers’. Arguing that ‘indigenous banks’ became a moral category that embedded abstractions of finance in a nationalist discourse of affect and sentiment, this article illuminates the long history of centring domestic ownership of financial infrastructures in postcolonial African economic policymaking.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"330 1","pages":"561 - 580"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80484028","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972022000353
Vanessa Watters Opalo
Abstract 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 about borrowers’ creditworthiness and risk. But valuable in what ways and for whom? Private credit bureaus rely on vast arrays of personal and financial data in order to produce credit reports and consumer credit scores that claim to represent the creditworthiness of individual borrowers. Cooperative loan officers, instead, understand creditworthiness to be highly variable and rely on relational metrics in order to determine risk as well as carefully overseeing existing loans to ensure their timely repayment. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with loan officers at a small-scale credit cooperative in Lomé, Togo, this article examines how the impending arrival of a private credit bureau and new credit-reporting technologies highlights the distinction between the ways in which credit bureaus and loan officers understand the nature of financial risk, as well as the centrality of loan officers and their management of borrower debt in sustaining the field of small-scale lending in Togo.
2015年，西非国家中央银行(Central Bank of West African States)选择了一家私人信贷局来构建一个数字平台，以收集和分析西非经济与货币联盟(West African Economic and Monetary Union) 8国的金融数据，包括为许多西非借款人提供服务的信贷合作社和小额信贷机构的活动。信用报告平台承诺提供有关借款人信誉和风险的新的有价值的信息。但有什么价值，对谁有价值?私人信用机构依靠大量的个人和财务数据来制作信用报告和消费者信用评分，这些报告和评分声称代表了个人借款人的信誉。相反，合作社信贷员理解信用度是高度可变的，他们依靠关系指标来确定风险，并仔细监督现有贷款以确保及时偿还。本文基于对多哥lomoviel一家小型信用合作社信贷员的人种学实地考察，考察了即将到来的私人信用局和新的信用报告技术如何突出了信用局和信贷员理解金融风险本质的方式之间的区别，以及信贷员及其对借款人债务管理在维持多哥小额贷款领域中的核心作用。
{"title":"Credible risk: private credit bureaus and the work of loan officers in West Africa","authors":"Vanessa Watters Opalo","doi":"10.1017/S0001972022000353","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972022000353","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract 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 about borrowers’ creditworthiness and risk. But valuable in what ways and for whom? Private credit bureaus rely on vast arrays of personal and financial data in order to produce credit reports and consumer credit scores that claim to represent the creditworthiness of individual borrowers. Cooperative loan officers, instead, understand creditworthiness to be highly variable and rely on relational metrics in order to determine risk as well as carefully overseeing existing loans to ensure their timely repayment. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with loan officers at a small-scale credit cooperative in Lomé, Togo, this article examines how the impending arrival of a private credit bureau and new credit-reporting technologies highlights the distinction between the ways in which credit bureaus and loan officers understand the nature of financial risk, as well as the centrality of loan officers and their management of borrower debt in sustaining the field of small-scale lending in Togo.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"5 1","pages":"625 - 643"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89305612","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972022000328
Ru Ning
Abstract 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 transfer of the franc CFA in Congo-Brazzaville during a severe foreign exchange (forex) shortage from 2016 to 2021, this article argues that the participants in forex transactions manoeuvre paperwork to regulate the speed of the forex outflow – where paperwork functions as what I term ‘bureaucratic valves’. Responding to the outflow of forex caused by the oil price slump since 2015, the Bank of Central African States (BEAC) required numerous documents from buyers of forex to justify their demand. This policy slowed down international money transfers because it took more effort to meet the paperwork requirements. Yet banks, money-transfer agencies and individuals in Congo subsequently developed their own paperwork-based mechanisms to cope with this change. These manoeuvres show that paperwork is a flexible and essential tool for adjusting transactions for different participants, especially in the money markets and in (central) banking in Africa.
{"title":"Bureaucratic valves: paperwork as a contested tool in the international transfer of the franc CFA in Congo-Brazzaville","authors":"Ru Ning","doi":"10.1017/S0001972022000328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972022000328","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract 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 transfer of the franc CFA in Congo-Brazzaville during a severe foreign exchange (forex) shortage from 2016 to 2021, this article argues that the participants in forex transactions manoeuvre paperwork to regulate the speed of the forex outflow – where paperwork functions as what I term ‘bureaucratic valves’. Responding to the outflow of forex caused by the oil price slump since 2015, the Bank of Central African States (BEAC) required numerous documents from buyers of forex to justify their demand. This policy slowed down international money transfers because it took more effort to meet the paperwork requirements. Yet banks, money-transfer agencies and individuals in Congo subsequently developed their own paperwork-based mechanisms to cope with this change. These manoeuvres show that paperwork is a flexible and essential tool for adjusting transactions for different participants, especially in the money markets and in (central) banking in Africa.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"1 1","pages":"581 - 601"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81258158","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972022000365
J. C. Mizes
Abstract 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 gone unrealized. In response, a West African investor advocacy organization is coordinating a regional awareness programme that introduces ‘the culture of the stock exchange’ to an audience of West Africans largely unfamiliar with financial securities. Members of this shareholders’ association share a critique of elite monetary institutions and advance in their place a more popular vision of savings, investment and exchange. Drawing on ethnographic research in Abidjan and Dakar, I analyse how these petits porteurs (small shareholders) frame the morality and politics of their investments. The petits porteurs often make good money on the market, but even when they take on ‘crisis-level’ losses they nevertheless extoll the virtues of transparency, formality and control that the stock exchange is thought to provide. In contrast to similar cases elsewhere in the world, I argue that this form of popular politics on the BRVM is far more than an instrument for the accumulation strategies of financial elites: it is a new and distinct style of political engagement in which petits porteurs are, in the name of the West African ‘people’, coupling together anti-elite and anti-colonial critiques with a set of familiar market devices. I characterize this political engagement as popular shareholding.
根据西非区域证券交易所(Bourse rgionale des Valeurs mobilires de l’afrique de l’West或BRVM)的当代投资者的说法，Côte科特迪瓦总统flix Houphouët-Boigny在独立后将国有企业私有化的计划催生了该地区的金融市场。然而，港交所最初承诺的“本土”控制金融投资的承诺早就没有实现。作为回应，一个西非投资者倡导组织正在协调一个区域意识项目，向基本上不熟悉金融证券的西非听众介绍“证券交易所的文化”。这个股东协会的成员都对精英金融机构持批评态度，并提出了一种更受欢迎的储蓄、投资和交换愿景。根据在阿比让和达喀尔进行的人种学研究，我分析了这些小股东(小股东)如何为他们的投资制定道德和政治框架。小搬运工通常在市场上赚得盆满钵满，但即便是在遭受“危机级别”损失的时候，他们也会称赞证券交易所被认为提供的透明、正规和控制的优点。与世界其他地方的类似案例相比，我认为BRVM上的这种形式的大众政治远不止是金融精英积累策略的工具:它是一种新的、独特的政治参与风格，在这种政治参与风格中，小商贩以西非“人民”的名义，将反精英和反殖民主义批评与一套熟悉的市场手段结合在一起。我把这种政治参与描述为大众持股。
{"title":"Investing in independence: popular shareholding on the West African stock exchange","authors":"J. C. Mizes","doi":"10.1017/S0001972022000365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972022000365","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract 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 gone unrealized. In response, a West African investor advocacy organization is coordinating a regional awareness programme that introduces ‘the culture of the stock exchange’ to an audience of West Africans largely unfamiliar with financial securities. Members of this shareholders’ association share a critique of elite monetary institutions and advance in their place a more popular vision of savings, investment and exchange. Drawing on ethnographic research in Abidjan and Dakar, I analyse how these petits porteurs (small shareholders) frame the morality and politics of their investments. The petits porteurs often make good money on the market, but even when they take on ‘crisis-level’ losses they nevertheless extoll the virtues of transparency, formality and control that the stock exchange is thought to provide. In contrast to similar cases elsewhere in the world, I argue that this form of popular politics on the BRVM is far more than an instrument for the accumulation strategies of financial elites: it is a new and distinct style of political engagement in which petits porteurs are, in the name of the West African ‘people’, coupling together anti-elite and anti-colonial critiques with a set of familiar market devices. I characterize this political engagement as popular shareholding.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"26 1","pages":"644 - 662"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83121162","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1017/s000197202200050x
S. Whyte
{"title":"AFR volume 92 issue 4 Cover and Front matter","authors":"S. Whyte","doi":"10.1017/s000197202200050x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s000197202200050x","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"52 1","pages":"f1 - f4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91195416","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972022000407
S. Whyte, H. Muyinda
An elderly lady with a limp selects her longest walking stick to help her through the mud to her garden. Deaf people watch attentively as a pastor delivers a sermon in sign language. Refugees with disabilities sit on their sacks of rations at a food distribution centre. A woman describes the difficulty in getting used to her prosthesis after she lost her leg. Assistants help to push the heavily laden tricycles of polio survivors onto a ferry. A deaf taxi passenger shows her destination to the conductor on her smartphone. The abilities of impaired bodies are often enhanced – more or less successfully – by assistive technologies. Whether these include devices, like crutches, or whether they are less material, but no less consequential, systems for enabling ‘ the disabled ’ , technologies are meant to augment the functioning of bodies. Whether this happens, how, to what purposes and under what conditions are empirical questions. They are also analytical questions that require a framework for considering the relations between bodies, technologies, sociality and political economy. Addressing these questions is the task undertaken by the contributors to this special issue on disability and technology. 1 instrumen-tality consequences wheelchair sign at play. framework loosely
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Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972022000456
Clara Devlieger
Abstract 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 environment facilitates both personal movement and cross-border mobility, and therefore becomes central to the ways in which individuals present themselves as ‘losing complexes’ – that is, their perceived frustrations about their disability. Exchanging a stick for a crutch or a hand-cranked tricycle for a wheelchair facilitates different forms of movement and expresses how one seeks to navigate between embarrassment, pride and respectability. Mobility aids thus serve as an index of different moments in moral careers of progress and decline, while their complementarity or incompatibility with public infrastructure is instrumental in creating and disaggregating social assemblages of disabled people. Through the rise and collapse of border trade between Kinshasa and Brazzaville, I discuss how crutches, cargo tricycles, wheelchairs and ferries shaped socialities and subjectivities over the long term. Considering the role of technology problematizes analyses of moral careers of personhood as attributed by others, drawing attention to personal agency and entanglement with a socio-technical environment.
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