Recent ufahamu items

Rational Actors of Moral Economists: Gender Relations and the Peasant Family in Sub-Saharan Africa

Wed, 3 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

No abstract

UFAHAMU Interviews Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

For this special retrospective issue commemorating 52 years of Ufahamu , the editors had the unique opportunity to interview former editor, and current Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley. Dr. Kelley is a renowned historian of social movements, culture, labor struggle, and Black intellectualism in the U.S., African Diaspora and African continent himself. Known for such acclaimed publications as Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination , and Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression , Many are less familiar with Dr. Kelley’s background and academic training in African history. Dr. Kelley walks us through his time as a graduate student trying to study South African communists, and how Africa remained central in his work despite its shifting focus (in large part due to the political constraints of...

From Bande de filles à Mariannes noires: Universalism and Decolonization of Imagination

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000
From Bande de filles à Mariannes noires: Universalism and Decolonization of Imagination

Radical Africanism

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000
Republished from Ufahamu 1972: Volume 3, Issue 2

Vandalizing History: Nehemiah Cisneros’s Ghetto Mythologies

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000
Vandalizing History: Nehemiah Cisneros’s Ghetto Mythologies

‘You got so much to bleed to clean slate’: Notes Toward a Black Philosophy of Skepticism

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000
‘You got so much to bleed to clean slate’: Notes Toward a Black Philosophy of Skepticism

James H. Meriwether’s Tears, Fire, and Blood: The United States and the Decolonization of Africa

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000
James H. Meriwether’s Tears, Fire, and Blood: The United States and the Decolonization of Africa

Philipp Schulz, Male Survivors of Wartime Sexual Violence: Perspectives From Northern Uganda.

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000
Philipp Schulz, Male Survivors of Wartime Sexual Violence: Perspectives From Northern Uganda.

Ufahamu 50 Years On

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000
Editorial

“The Classroom Must be Turned into a Riot”: The Necessity of Teaching Afrikan Students in Afrikan Ways (A Pan-Afrikan View)

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000
“The Classroom Must be Turned into a Riot”: The Necessity of Teaching Afrikan Students in Afrikan Ways (A Pan-Afrikan View)

Adrienne Cohen, Infinite Repertoire: On Dance and Urban Possibility in Postsocialist Guinea

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000
Adrienne Cohen, Infinite Repertoire: On Dance and Urban Possibility in Postsocialist Guinea

Joy Owen, Congolese Social Networks: Living On The Margins In Muizenberg, Cape Town

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000
Joy Owen, Congolese Social Networks: Living On The Margins In Muizenberg, Cape Town

ShotSpotter and Militarism

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000
ShotSpotter and Militarism

UFAHAMU Interviews Dr. Sondra Hale

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

For this special retrospective issue commemorating 52 years of Ufahamu , the editors had the unique opportunity to interview the journal’s co-founder Dr. Sondra Hale, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Ufahamu republished Dr. Hale’s powerful 1972 article “Radical Africanism” in this issue—here Hale explains the context of the piece and the political climate in which it was originally published. As a dedicated educator and accomplished academic, Professor Hale’s wide-reaching research includes investigating conflict, gender, citizenship, political movements, diaspora studies, and feminist art across Africa and the Middle East. Dr. Hale’s career is marked by a life-long commitment to both local and international feminist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist organizing, making her a scholar-activist in the truest sense. In this interview, Hale takes us on a personal journey from Los Angeles...

Front Matter

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000
Front Matter, Table of Contents, Contributors

Thomas Hendriks, Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000
Thomas Hendriks, Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession

Building Black Anarchist Futures: A Review Essay on Lorenzo Ervin’s Anarchism and the Black Revolution and William Anderson’s The Nation on No Map

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000
Building Black Anarchist Futures: A Review Essay on Lorenzo Ervin’s Anarchism and the Black Revolution and William Anderson’s The Nation on No Map

Ulysses Jenkins’ Without Your Interpretation

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000
Ulysses Jenkins’ Without Your Interpretation

“Not Yet Uhuru” and “Aborted Voyage”: A Comparative Study of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood and George Lamming’s Natives of My Person

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The essay explores Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s and George Lamming’s disenchantment with the political dispensation of their countries with flag independence as opposed to actual liberation. The paper adopts a comparative approach to analyze the neocolonial predicament in Kenya and the legacies of the slave trade in the Caribbean through their respective novels Petals of Blood and Natives of My Person . A close examination of both novels reveals that the writers focused on the histories of Kenya and the Caribbean, attributing the predicament of the modern period to the past. The two writers, the essay will reveal, offer diagnoses of the problems of society and of human beings with Ngugi attributing malignancy to the political structures in Kenya, and Lamming arguing that malignancy is embedded in the human personality. While Ngugi’s radicalism sees hope for social change through a political revolution, Lamming’s psychological...

Transnational Migration, Identity, and the African Literary Experience

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This essay seeks to examine transnational migration by looking primarily at 20 th- century writers historicizing the concept of the ‘post-colonial’ and pointing to its development as captured in their writing. In the paper, transnational migration is viewed as the movement of persons across national boundaries where the migrants live their lives across borders, participating simultaneously in social relations that embed them in more than one nation-state, and in which there is a process by which such immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. Going by this definition, all major African writers (such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, and the like), with the possible exception of Ayi Kwei Armah, are transmigrants. This is because their migration took place—is taking place—within fluid social spaces and identity-forming contexts, which are constantly reworked through...

A King or A Priest in the City of 201 Gods: Interrogating the Place of the Oòni in the Religious system of Ilé-Ifè in Southwest Nigeria

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The tradition of the origin of the Yorùbá people of Western Nigeria, Republic of Benin, Togo, and the Diaspora indicate one source, Ilé-Ifè, where the varieties of their indigenous political system originated. However, since the colonial period, a debate remains about the place of the Oòni, the King of Ilé-Ifè, in the political and religious systems of the Yorùbá nation, which has led to a perennial discourse across Yorùbáland. Using literature, primary sources such as oral interviews, and participant observations of rituals and festivals spanning several years, this study critically analyses the position of the Oòni in the religious system of Ilé-Ifè. The findings of this study reveal that the festivals in Ilé-Ifè are within the purview of certain family compounds headed by the Ìsòrò (king-priests). It also discovered that the mandatory performance of the Oòni in Ifè festivals is limited the Ìdìó, Olójó, Edì, Ìtàpá, Pokùlere and Ifá festivals only. The participatory...

Front Matter

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

For an Anti-Colonial Reading of the Racist Polemic on Miss France

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

“ONWARD AND INWARD”

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Editorial

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

“From Historical Facts to Poetic Truths”: The Nigerian Civil War and Other Subjects: An Exploration of Texts and Images in Painting

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Msia Kibona Clark, Hip-Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018). pp. 312.

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Table of Contents

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Part I—Dedication to Professor Allen F. Roberts

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Predator in Love

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Keeping Safe From COVID-19

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Asking Different Questions: Case Studies in Collaborative Research from the Fowler Museum at UCLA

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Resistance Movement of the Mareko People against the Fascist Aggression and Occupation in South-central Ethiopia

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The primary objective of the present paper is to explore the patriotic resistance movement of the Mareko people of south-central Ethiopia against Italy’s colonialist aggression and five-year occupation between 1935 and 1941. The paper also uncovers the role played by the Mareko people and other ethno-linguistic individual freedom fighters who opposed the Fascist administration within the Mareko woreda (district). Though the then governor of the Dobena sub-district and his officers became the leading collaborators (banda) with the Fascist administrators, the majority of the Mareko people strongly resisted these detractors. Like other nations, nationalities and peoples of Ethiopia, the estimated 110 Mareko marched against the invaders at the battle of Maychew in 1936 despite enduring major casualties. Acknowledging the local spiritual leadership of Wärѐqѐ Märeyamѐ and Qegnazmach Tuji Anjilo, this paper celebrates the local Mareko defiance in staving off the encroaching...

Contributors

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Césars, Creation, Independence, and Radicality

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Reflections on a Common Purpose in Expanding the Frontiers of Global African Scholarship

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The enormous contributions of global African scholars to the academic fields of arts, social sciences, and humanities cannot be understated. This accomplishment has not received adequate recognition in a world dominated by Western scholarship. This domination is not unexpected because the production, distribution, and consumption of knowledge are historically charged, both politically and economically. It is not accidental that the domineering “international” publishers and journals in the global academy are based in the West. Knowledge production in the field of African studies has been affected by this reality. Hence, there is an urgent need to transcend current methodological and pedagogical approaches. Because knowledge is the bulwark of the survival of any group of people, global African scholars in the field of African studies have the mandate of heeding the warnings of the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop. Diop has argued that for African scholarship to attain...

Energy Trajectories and Solar Energy Imaginaries of the Maasai

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Solar energy development in Tanzania is steeped in discourses of Western technological transfer whereby the devices themselves are lauded as central innovating agents—the “doers”—that are solutions to local poverty. The trend intensifies in Maasai spaces, where a long history of marginalization in development projects has shaped the narratives of energy change around the practices and perspectives of pastoralists. In this paper, drawing from ethnographic work on Tanzania’s solar energy landscape, including 50 unstructured interviews with Maasai herders, city-dwellers of Arusha, Tanzania, and representatives from foreign solar energy firms, I show how the Maasai reconfigure incoming solar energy devices through locally generated knowledges, philosophies, and technologies in calculated efforts to chart their own futures. Using a sociotechnical imaginaries approach, I analyze interviews, historical literature and other relevant documents to underscore how Maasai pastoralists...

Retelling the Mau Mau Past from the Mbeere Perspective

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This article analyzes the contested historical narrative behind the Mbeere’s role in the Mau Mau movement. Specifically, it explores the role of memorialization and marginalization in reconfiguring this past. With respect to the latter, the Mbeere were ostracized from the Mau Mau movement after the Kenyan Parliament, headed by Dedan Kimathi, sought to consolidate support by encouraging local officials to lobby bordering ethnic groups. As a result, the Mbeere, who were suspected to be pro-government and anti-Mau Mau, faced brutal reprisals from the Kikuyu and the Embu, key players in the movement. Although the physical violence may have ended, the symbolic violence of denial and ostracism persists as the Mau Mau movement’s memory is popularized and commodified through the British government’s acknowledgement of their abuse against Kenyans in the Mau Mau struggle. The dominant history of the Mau Mau rebellion is harrowing for the Mbeere Mau Mau veterans, who in fact existed...

Marlène Schiappa, Femonationalism and Us

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000
Marlène Schiappa, Femonationalism and Us

Film Censorship and Identity in Kenya

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The postcolonial government in Kenya has embarked on a sustained war against identity by banning locally and internationally produced motion pictures that depict LGBTQ themes in the ongoing national discourse on gender identity. In 2014 and 2018, the government effectively banned two films by local directors ( The Stories of Our Lives and Rafiki) for including the LGBTQ community in this discourse. Within the same period, officials banned The Wolf of Wall Street and Fifty Shades of Grey, both by international directors, for their explicit sexual content. The bans attracted public attention and triggered a debate over the country’s censorship laws in particular and gender identity in general. However, while paying specific attention to postcolonial censorship laws that aimed to retain the status quo, the debaters failed to ground their arguments in their proper historical...

Diaspora, Identity, and Representation in Non- Figurative African Photography

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

African photography has long been closely linked to portraiture, initially in the way that it was used as an ethnographic tool during the colonial period and eventually as a means of visual identity-building and self-fashioning in studio photography when Africans appropriated the form and decided to use it for themselves. It can be argued that portraiture, in its ability for representation, perhaps lends itself to photography that is linked to identity politics. However, by looking at the works of three artists, Edson Chagas, Francois-Xavier Gbré, and Mame-Diarra Niang, this essay looks at the ways in which these African photographers approach issues of identity and diaspora without using the portrait, but rather by interrogating the form of photography itself, and its relation to the photographer’s subjectivity. These three artists all photograph various African cities, specifically Luanda, Abidjan, and Dakar, from their own distinct diasporic viewpoints, whether as...

A Return

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000
A Return

Ann Goerdt, Donna Page, Herbert M. Cole, Peter E. Udo Umoh, Leonard Kahan, and Faustino Quintanilla, Deformity Masks and Their Role in African Cultures: The Ann Goerdt Collection, (Bayside, New York: QCC Art Gallery Press, 2018). pp. 116.

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000
Ann Goerdt, Donna Page, Herbert M. Cole, Peter E. Udo Umoh, Leonard Kahan, and Faustino Quintanilla, Deformity Masks and Their Role in African Cultures: The Ann Goerdt Collection, (Bayside, New York: QCC Art Gallery Press, 2018). pp. 116.

Delphine Fongang, ed. The Postcolonial Subject in Transit: Migration, Borders, and Subjectivity in Contemporary African Diaspora Literature. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018). pp. 176.

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000
Delphine Fongang, ed. The Postcolonial Subject in Transit: Migration, Borders, and Subjectivity in Contemporary African Diaspora Literature. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018). pp. 176.

When the Zombie Becomes Critic: Misinterpreting Fela’s “Zombie” and the Need to Reexamine His Prevailing Motifs

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Although Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s musical career began in the 1950s, it was in the 1970s that he emerged as a formidable force on the scene. This was not just because of the multifaceted Afrobeat genre that he generated, or his versatility as an instrumentalist, but because he used his music, incomparably, to expose corruption, confront the excesses of government and slam the acquiescence of the larger populace. Sadly, however, his greatest hit, “Zombie” (1976), has been widely misconstrued as an attack on Nigeria’s military, particularly the army. While the zombie theme may, in part, scoff at military regimented traditions, it disseminates a much wider message that condemns complicity and docility in the face of subjugation. This is despite the display of army personnel on the jacket of the original album, and recurring cynical commands that have been erroneously restricted to military parade protocol. To describe “Zombie” as an attack on the military is to relegate Fela’s...

The Continuation of the Past by Other Means

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000
The Continuation of the Past by Other Means

Editorial

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Racism: The Comparison with the United States is not Absurd

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000
Racism: The Comparison with the United States is not Absurd

Customary Law in Anglophone Cameroon and the Repugnancy Doctrine: An Insufficient Complement to Human Rights

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the application of the repugnancy doctrine in the administration of customary law in Anglophone Cameroon and unravels the relationship it fosters with human rights. The paper adopts a qualitative methodology grounded in doctrinal research and argues that state courts of Anglophone Cameroon have shown an exaggerated reliance on the doctrine and have readily invoked it as an alternative measure to incorporate human rights norms in their jurisprudence. The inference to be drawn from this development is that state courts are employing the repugnancy doctrine as a medium to engage with human rights in the enforcement of customary law. This is an unfortunate development given that, in the absence of clear standards of application, the repugnancy doctrine provides wide discretionary latitude to judges who, as case law reveals, may deflect interest in the enforcement of human rights. Consequently, the doctrine has been relied upon to justify standards that...

Front Matter

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000
Front Matter

Dignity for Black Laborers: Bernard Magubane, Anthony Ngubo, and the African Student Challenge to Segregation and Racial Liberal Ideology in Southern California

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This essay examines the activism and scholarship of two South African sociologists and African Studies professors, Bernard Magubane and Anthony Ngubo during their time as graduate students at UCLA in the 1960s. Focusing on Magubane and Ngubo, I argue that migrant students from Southern Africa used research and protest politics to contest the postwar racial liberal ideology that dominated African studies and sectors of the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements from Southern California to Southern Africa. Ngubo, Magubane, and their colleagues united with the struggles of the Black working class in Los Angeles. They used their research and activism to challenge Cold War liberal ideas of life in California and the United States by likening the struggles of African Americans to the plight of Blacks in Southern Africa.

Crystal Biruk, Cooking Data: Culture & Politics in an African Research World. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018). pp. 296.

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000
Crystal Biruk, Cooking Data: Culture & Politics in an African Research World. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018). pp. 296.

Émergence, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, 2013–2020

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000
Émergence, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, 2013–2020

Melissa Hackman, Desire Work: Ex-Gay and Pentecostal Masculinity in South Africa. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). pp. 216.

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000
Melissa Hackman, Desire Work: Ex-Gay and Pentecostal Masculinity in South Africa. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). pp. 216.

Contributors

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000
Contributors

Archaeological Research in Akwa Ibom State: A Call for Attention

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In discussing the cultural and historical development of a place, it is important to note that in a company of written records and oral traditions, the archaeological record plays a critical part in illuminating the past. Archaeological research in Nigeria dates back to the precolonial period, and over time, several discoveries have been made in different locations reflecting the history and culture of ancient Nigeria. However, when examining the archaeological discoveries and sites within the country, we observe the nonexistence of significant examples of archaeological evidence peculiar to Akwa Ibom State. This shows that the place of archaeology has been neglected over time, and an obvious void does exist. Why is this so in Akwa Ibom State? What factors led to the neglect or deficiency and how can these be tackled? This article brings this dearth to the fore and calls the attention of designated authorities, relevant institutions, stakeholders within the state, and...

Table of Contents

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000
Table of Contents

Laura Fair, Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audience and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2018). pp. 452.

Fri, 4 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Laura Fair, Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audience and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2018). pp. 452.

Table of Contents

Fri, 4 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Table of Contents

The Dictatorship of Biomedicine in Equatorial Guinea

Fri, 4 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This paper offers a critique to the present-day biomedical health care system in Equatorial Guinea. It argues that biomedical care represents a failure to meet its people’s needs. A preliminary research study and the collection of published work and data drawn from observations during 2017 and 2018 concluded that the current Equatoguinean dictatorship has negatively influenced the development and success of biomedicine as a model of equitable and accessible medicine, and quality health care for all. Despite the investments of global health organizations and the government’s commitments, the rates of maternal, child, and infant mortality remain high while the prevalence of endemic and epidemic diseases, such as malaria and HIV/AIDS, continues to rise. In addition, biomedical infrastructures lack committed and caring medical personnel, efficient technological environments, accessible and affordable health care programs, and awareness campaigns that reach out to the population....

Rukhsana A. Siddiqui (ed.), Subsaharan Africa in the 1990s: Challenges to Democracy and Development. (West Point, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1997). pp. 221.

Fri, 4 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Rukhsana A. Siddiqui (ed.), Subsaharan Africa in the 1990s: Challenges to Democracy and Development. (West Point, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1997). pp. 221.

Artwork | Light coming through darkness…Hope seeps in…

Fri, 4 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Artwork | Light coming through darkness…Hope seeps in…

Artwork | pastelDAR

Fri, 4 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Artwork | pastelDAR

E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Blacktino Queer Performance. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). pp. 573.

Fri, 4 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000
E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Blacktino Queer Performance. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). pp. 573.

Front Matter

Fri, 4 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Front Matter

Colonial Modernity: Progress, Development, and Modernism in Nigeria

Fri, 4 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This article reshapes modernist study through a historical approach. In a move to decenter and decolonize modernism, I focus here on its emergence in decolonizing Nigeria of the 1960s, specifically in the poetry of Christopher Okigbo, contending that modernism is an aesthetic movement that must be understood in its relation to colonialism, imperialism, and coloniality. I sketch out the coloniality of knowledge and being in Nigeria, or the ways in which colonialism has continued to impact Nigerian governance and political life, long after the country’s nominal liberation from British rule. I approach coloniality by examining notions of progress and development and the western standards to which these concepts are bound. Okigbo’s work, and its critical reception, form the centerpiece of my analysis. Like Nigerian economics, Okigbo’s poetry has been overdetermined through neocolonial notions of progress and development. I posit Okigbo’s poetry instead as a modernist negotiation...

Post-War Reintegration, Reconstruction and Reconciliation Among the Anioma People of Nigeria

Fri, 4 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Much has been written on the Nigerian Civil War. However, its impact on some minority groups has been largely neglected. This oversight has affected scholarly treatment of how forces emanating from the war impacted the Anioma people. Though predominantly Igbo-speaking, the Anioma were geographically on the Nigerian side during the war. The dynamics of the war as an ethnic conflict ensured that Aniomaland was a major battlefront. At the end of the war, the Anioma were a distressed group. Houses, homes, careers, dreams, aspirations and individuals lay in ruins. This left the people and their territory in need of major rehabilitation. This article focuses on the rehabilitation and reintegration of the Anioma into the society. It attempts this against the background of the Nigerian government’s policy of rehabilitation and the trumpeted principle of “no victor, no vanquished,” which dominates discourses on the war. Employing primary and secondary sources, the work probes how the...

A Momentous Year: On Protest and Pandemic Shaping Our Future

Fri, 4 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000
A Momentous Year: On Protest and Pandemic Shaping Our Future

Contributors

Fri, 4 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Contributors

Space and Colonial Alterity: Interrogating British Residential Segregation in Nigeria, 1899-1919

Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The policy of segregation is undoubtedly a resented feature of colonial rule in Africa. However, discussions of the residential racial segregation policy of the British colonial administration in Africa invariably focus on “settler colonies” of South, Central, and East Africa. British colonial West Africa hardly features in such discussions since it is widely believed that these areas, which had no large-scale European settler populations, had no experience relevant to any meaningful discussion of multi-racial colonial relationships. Some studies even deny the existence of racially segregated areas in places other than the settler colonies. Despite evidence that residential racial segregation formed one of the principles that facilitated the implementation of British colonial policy in Nigeria, the Nigerian experience has not been given a fully coherent treatment. This paper examines Nigeria’s experience of officially directed residential segregation. It argues that...

Poems | Condolence Register | The Tryst

Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Poems | Condolence Register | The Tryst

Table of Contents

Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Table of Contents

Contributors

Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Contributors

Artwork | My Dream

Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Artwork | My Dream

Mildred Mortimer, Women Fight, Women Write: Texts on the Algerian War (Charlottesville; London: University of Virginia Press, 2018). pp. 284.

Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Mildred Mortimer, Women Fight, Women Write: Texts on the Algerian War (Charlottesville; London: University of Virginia Press, 2018). pp. 284.

The Tragedy of The Girl-Child: A Feminist Reading of Ngozi Omeje’s The Conquered Maiden and Amma Darko’s Faceless

Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This paper is a critical interrogation of Ngozi Omeje’s The Conquered Maiden and Amma Darko’s Faceless from the feminist ideological perspective. While Ngozi Omeje looks at the place of the girl-child from the Igbo’s cultural world view using the platform of the theater, Amma Darko explores the predicament and the subjugation of the girl-child from the Ghanaian socio-cultural perspective using the novel as her medium. This paper examines the predicaments and the socio-cultural prejudice against the girl-child in the patriarchal society of Nigeria and in matriarchal Ghanaian society. The theoretical framework of the paper is based on the feminist sociological theory that re-examines and compares the treatment of women vis-a-vis men in society. This theory also evaluates issues of bias, prejudice and discrimination against women, and by implication the girl-child, to determine whether or not women have been fairly or justly...

A Marxian Analysis on The Bond Between Capitalism and the Oppression of Nigerian Women Since Colonial Times

Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there have been several attempts to diminish the significance of Marxism in academia. It is clear that, despite the large body of work on the dialectics of the subjugation and challenges of women today, only an inconsequential fraction of research examines the contribution of the capitalist mode of production towards this reality. This study examines the systematic oppression and exploitation of Nigerian women since the introduction of capitalism into the Nigerian context. The study contends that several sexist policies enacted by the British colonialist government facilitated the capitalist exploitation of the Nigerian masses and that the global exploitation of women is inseparable from capitalism.

Tamba M’Bayo, Muslim Interpreters in Colonial Senegal, 1850-1920: Mediations of Knowledge and Power in the Lower and Middle Senegal River Valley (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016). pp. 234.

Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Tamba M’Bayo, Muslim Interpreters in Colonial Senegal, 1850-1920: Mediations of Knowledge and Power in the Lower and Middle Senegal River Valley (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016). pp. 234.

Renewed Commitments

Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Renewed Commitments

Front Matter

Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Front Matter

Artwork | Ije Agwo (Snake)

Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Artwork | Ije Agwo (Snake)

Gavin Steingo, Kwaito’s Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). pp. 320.

Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Gavin Steingo, Kwaito’s Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). pp. 320.

The Vitality of Yoruba Culture in the Americas

Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

How did Africans create homes for themselves and maintain ancestral practices after being forcefully taken across the Middle Passage as enslaved people into various regions of the New and Old Worlds? In the Americas, they found themselves in a place clearly distinct from African cultural and geographical landscapes and were forced to adapt to strange climates and contend with alien cultures unfamiliar to those of their homeland. Rather than being completely steamrolled by colonial pressure, however, Africans of various ethnicities actively contended with the diverse influences of the colonial context. Such practices have, in turn, shaped the continued cultural diversity of the Americas to this day. This paper explores the diffusion and vitality of Yoruba culture, in particular throughout the nineteenth century in Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, and Trinidad and Tobago, where Yoruba forms of religion, Roman Catholic sensibilities, and indigenous cosmographies formed hybridized spiritualties...

Artwork | Exodus

Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000
Artwork | Exodus

Exhibition Review | Meleko Mokgosi: Bread, Butter, and Power

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000
Exhibition Review | Meleko Mokgosi: Bread, Butter, and Power

The Largest Black Nation Outside Africa and its Racist Politics

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000
The Largest Black Nation Outside Africa and its Racist Politics

Poet Spotlight | Thato Magano

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000
Poet Spotlight | Thato Magano

Radical Pan-Africanism and Africa’s Integration: A Retrospective Exploration and Prospective Prognosis

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The recent clamor by some African leaders for an integrated Africa, anchored on the notion of a quasi-federal government as championed by Kwame Nkrumah and other radical Pan-Africanists in the early 1960s, has revived an issue that many thought had been buried at the 1963 Addis Ababa conference. It has also placed the radical variant of Pan-Africanism on the discursive radar. Against this background, this article adopts descriptive, historical, and analytical methods to retrospectively examine and to provide a prospective prognosis on the place of radical Pan-Africanism in the African integration project. In it, we show that many agential and structural factors have frustrated and continue to frustrate attempts to achieve the supranational African community promoted by radical Pan- Africanists. We argue that these factors cannot be divorced from the nature of post-colonial African states, which offer opportunities to ruling elites that a supranational environment cannot....

Poem | Faces of Shame

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000
Poem | Faces of Shame

Poem | ELLE

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000
Poem | ELLE

Maguzawa and Nigerian Citizenship: Reflecting on Identity Politics and the National Question

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Previous scholars have suggested varied opinions about the history of the Maguzawa people. While some have argued that the term Maguzawa (plural) is a Hausa word, others have asserted that Bamaaguje derives from the Arabic word Majus, which means a Magian adherent of Magaaism. Magaaism was a religion similar to Zoroastrianism. Among the Hausa people, some have argued that the Maguzawa form one of the ethnic groups of the Hausa Kingdom and are descendants of Maguji, one of the eleven traditional Chiefs of Kasa Hausa (Hausaland). Presently, some people use the term to refer to those who, even after the Jihad of Uthman dan Fodio in 1804 in the northern part of the country, have refused to accept the new religion and thus either have continued traditional worship or have accepted Christianity. Both Temple (1922) and Smith (1987) have characterized these people as traditional Hausa families (indigenous people) who were untouched by Islam and who escaped the authority of Sarkin...

Poetry Collection | Excerpts from The Complicated Lives of Islands

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Poems included: “Little Boy Dying,” “Missing Pearls,” “The House of Métis,” “The End of the World is Pleasure,” “Waste,” and “Legacies of Trauma”

Adam Mayer, Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria (London: Pluto Press, 2016). pp. 241.

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000
Adam Mayer, Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria (London: Pluto Press, 2016). pp. 241.

Front Matter

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000
Front Matter

“Healing a Hurting Heart”: FEMRITE’s Use of Narrative and Community as Catalysts for Traumatic Healing

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In 1996, a group of notable Ugandan women writers created FEMRITE, the Ugandan Women Writers Association. Over the last twenty years, it has become an essential element of Ugandan literary society, the largest and most successful women’s writing group in East Africa, and one of the most influential literary communities on the African continent. Because of cultural and political violence in the region, a large proportion of FEMRITE’s writings reflect various forms of trauma. This calls for engagement with trauma theories. I argue that through strategies of narrative recuperation and the establishment of communities, FEMRITE has created avenues for women writers, their subjects, and their readers to engender healing from trauma. After discussing FEMRITE’s social programs, such as interviewing war refugees or AIDS victims, I analyze two texts by FEMRITE author Beatrice Lamwaka to demonstrate the manifestations of trauma in her stories and the ways they are narrated, as...

Table of Contents

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000
Table of Contents

Excerpt and Artwork | A Romance with Vultures

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Excerpt from “A Romance with Vultures”Artwork included: On the Road to Golgotha (1998); The “Convultural” Conference (1994); The Trial of UNN (1997); Letter to my Countrymen (1993); No One But Me (1998); The Drowning of the General Oracle (1994); Professor, the Miserable Egghead (1997)

Of Bosal and Kongo: Exploring the Evolution of the Vernacular in Contemporary Haiti

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In this article, I trace the multiple layers of meaning behind the words “bosal” and “kongo” in contemporary Haiti. I read the sociopolitical origins of the two terms, both of which issue from the slave era, and trouble the attributes that scholars traditionally ascribe to them. I also explore how two Haitian folklore characters, Uncle Bouki and Ti Malis, reflect and comment on historical and contemporary class divisions. Then, using interviews as a basis for my discussion, I explore the two terms’ varied meanings within popular culture before analyzing them as terms not only of denigration but also of empowerment. To do this, I compare popular uses of the terms with the appropriation of the term “nigger” in African American popular culture.

Bodies that Matter: Calixthe Beyala’s Female Bodies and Strategies of Hegemonic Subversion

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Without challenging hegemony, liberal Francophone African feminists unearth aspects of patriarchal African cultural practices that objectify women. In contrast, radical Francophone African feminists call for drastic change to these practices through reappropriating the female body as a way to liberate African women from patriarchal oppression. They challenge the patriarchal order by opposing gender roles and stereotypes and by taking a decisive stand for total female liberation. They call for a radical reordering of patriarchal societies through the annulment of binary oppositions that classify women as “other.” In this article, I follow Judith Butler’s lead in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex1 and explore Calixthe Beyala’s commitment to African women’s liberation from oppression. Beyala’s approach presents auto-eroticism, homicide, infanticide, refusal of marriage, bodily and psychical dis-eroticization, and physical transformation of female bodies...

Overview and Artwork | Crisis and Violence in Niger Delta as a Creative Resource in Painting

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Artwork included: The Execution of the Ogoni Four (2014); The Ogoni Nine (2014); The Agony of the Niger Delta Women (2014)