Afro American Studies

African Performance Arts and Political Acts presents innovative formulations for how African performance and the arts shape the narratives of cultural history and politics. This collection, edited by Naomi André, Yolanda Covington-Ward, and Jendele Hungbo, engages with a breadth of African countries and art forms, bringing together speech, hip hop, religious healing and gesture, theater and social justice, opera, radio announcements, protest songs, and migrant workers' dances. The spaces include village communities, city landscapes, prisons, urban hostels, Township theaters, opera houses, and broadcasts through the airwaves on television and radio as well as in cyberspace. Essays focus on case studies from Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania.

How can we promote people-centered governance in Africa? Cell phones/ information and communications technology (ICT) are shown to be linked to neoliberal understandings of more democratic governance structures, defined by the Worldwide Governance Indicators as: the rule of law, corruption-control, regulation quality, government effectiveness, political stability/no violence, and voice and accountability. However, these indicators fall short: they do note emphasize gender equity or pro-poor policies. Writing from an African feminist scholar-activist perspective, Assata Zerai emphasizes the voices of women in two ways: (1) she examines how women's access to ICT makes a difference to the success of people-centered governance structures; and (2) she demonstrates how African women's scholarship, too often marginalized, must be used to expand and redefine the goals and indicators of democratice governance in African countries. Challenging the status quo that praises the contributions of cell phones to the diffusion of knowledge and resultant better governance in Africa, this book is an important read for scholars of politics and technology, gender and politics, and African Studies.

In the distant future, while studying the land of Barzakh in the Sahara, members of the Institute for the Archeology of Human Thought unearth the bones of Gara, a young man, whose Myelin will unravel the secrets of his ancient consciousness. A foreigner in his own land, Gara, in search of a better humanity, has traveled through three eras, from the 11th-century deserts of Mauritania to the dystopic future, inadvertently sowing the seeds of his own destruction.

Pastor Nicholas Adejuwon and his beautiful wife Nkechi run Rivers of Joy Church, the rave-of-the-moment Lagos megachurch. The media-savvy supercouple project the picture of a perfect family and a prosperous church. However, there are scandalous secrets hidden under the surface. When Nkechi decided to investigate her husband's rumored indiscretion, it was merely to satisfy her curiosity. What she unravels is a web of bruising secrets that run deeper than she could ever imagine, threatening her reality as she knows it. Believers and Hustlers is an exposé on the underbelly of Nigeria's Pentecostal fervor and the lives of rich celebrity posterity preachers, their motivations, rivalries, pretenses, and fears. This bold novel tells an important story about our times - the quest for power, the fears that trigger it, the hypocrisy that sustains it - and how religion can be weaponized to shroud it all in a mystery. At its core, however, it's a story of life, of love, power, and the ironies that fate often deals us at the end of our desperate quests.

With comprehensive examples from researchers across East Africa, West Africa, and Southern Africa, the book examines how primary, secondary, and tertiary education was affected by the pandemic and how its effects are shaping the future of education in Africa. This book addresses diverse issues relating to COVID-19 and education, including the gendered-, classed-, and disability-related effects of the pandemic; African educators' and students' experiences with different remote learning technologies; and the outcomes of government interventions in education, such as prolonged school closures. The chapters and case studies highlighted in the volume represent the voices of African educators, students, and parents as they share their experiences of the pandemic and their perspectives on how learning should be optimised to better manage future disruptions to education. This book is the first of its kind to comprehensively examine the effects of COVID-19 on education in Africa and will be essential reading for researchers, academics, and scholars of African education, international and comparative education, and education policy.

Disabled women represent one of the most marginalised minority groups in the world, hence they are largely silent while their sexuality is ignored, suppressed, forbidden and buried underneath the carpet. Until recently, most of the Global Northern published literature on the subject of the sexuality of disabled women has predominantly been constructed from hearsay and second-hand narratives in studies which draw from the perspectives of parents, service providers and advocates, without much consultation of the relevant women. By facilitating the voice of disabled women in Zimbabwe and illuminating their experiences of sexuality, this book hopes to shift the experiences of sexuality of disabled women from the periphery of society to the fore. Disability and Sexuality in Zimbabwe presents original research on an issue that is thus far not found in local research data. Whilst addressing the paucity of literature on the subject, the book informs policy and practice and enhances the existing body of knowledge by making recommendations towards the development of a disability and sexuality framework that is rooted in the African context. This book is of interest to students and scholars of African studies, disability studies, sociology, psychology, social work, nursing, education studies, geography, women's and gender studies and interdisciplinary studies. Additional audiences include a wide range of health, social care, and educational professionals and practitioners, as well donors, disabled people's organisations, charities, government departments, NGOs, supranational organisations, and policy makers

In Gesture and Power Yolanda Covington-Ward examines the everyday embodied practices and performances of the BisiKongo people of the Lower Congo to show how their gestures, dances, and spirituality are critical in mobilizing social and political action. Conceiving of the body as the center of analysis, a catalyst for social action, and as a conduit for the social construction of reality, Covington-Ward focuses on specific flash points in the last ninety years of Congo's troubled history, when embodied performance was used to stake political claims, foster dissent, and enforce power. In the 1920s Simon Kimbangu started a Christian prophetic movement based on spirit-induced trembling, which swept through the Lower Congo, subverting Belgian colonial authority. Following independence, dictator Mobutu Sese Seko required citizens to dance and sing nationalist songs daily as a means of maintaining political control. More recently, embodied performance has again stoked reform, as nationalist groups such as Bundu dia Kongo advocate for a return to precolonial religious practices and non-Western gestures such as traditional greetings. In exploring these embodied expressions of Congolese agency, Covington-Ward provides a framework for understanding how embodied practices transmit social values, identities, and cultural history throughout Africa and the diaspora.  

This anthropological study offers a crucial contribution to scholarly debates about the making of African modernity by considering the implementation and reception of gender reform in the West African context. Historically, attempts at implementing gender reform in West Africa have been met with suspicion. Beyond the perception that such reforms subvert traditional structures of authority and community, many worry that these efforts are inextricably connected to Western imperialism and colonialism. Ludovic Lado's The Politics of Gender Reform in West Africa examines the politics of a legislative process entirely driven by the state and meant to narrow the gender gap in Ivorian society. Lado discusses the legislative processes by which states have sought to reduce the gender gap between men and women, probes the potential impact of this reform on the condition of women by exploring the practice of civil marriage in Abidjan, and assesses the reception of the reform among Catholics and Muslims in Côte d'Ivoire. Throughout this readable and engaging study, Lado examines how the relationship between secular powers and religious authorities has determined the direction gender reforms have taken. Although the predominant focus in this text remains on gender reforms in Côte d'Ivoire, Lado also discusses their correlates in Niger, Senegal, and Mali. He shows that the success or failure of gender reforms in West Africa has relied on the interaction of various power relationships that structure the international, national, local, religious, and domestic arenas within which West Africans go about their lives. The book concludes with an informed reflection on the relationship among religions, the state, and gender reforms that highlights some of the issues at stake in the domestication of hegemonic modernity in Africa.

Stakeholder Perspectives on World Heritage and Development in Africa argues that World Heritage Sites (WHS) across the African continent should adopt practical, innovative, creative, and alternative management approaches that bring greater socio-economic benefits to society, whilst protecting their Outstanding Universal Value.

A female immigration officer in Kenya strives to thwart the efforts of an American expatriate pastor with a white savior complex.

This volume re-centres African women scholars in the discourse on African women and peacebuilding, combining theoretical reflections with case studies in a range of African countries. The chapters outline the history of African women's engagement in peacebuilding, introducing new and neglected themes such as youth, disability, and religious peacebuilding, and laying the foundations for new theoretical insights. Providing case studies from across Africa, the contributors highlights the achievements and challenges characterising women's contributions to peacebuilding on the continent. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of peacebuilding, African security and gender.