Publications

Africanisation, decolonisation and transformation are different conceptual ideas and principles that have emerged at different moments of South Africa’s (SA) history as a way of engaging with colonial-apartheid oppression and its legacies. These three discourses tend to be engaged in isolation from each other and continue to be polarised by many. This non-combined approach, however, has limitations, as it risks limiting our (re)imagination of the future of South African higher education (SAHE) from multiple perspectives. Since the dawn of South Africa’s democracy, transformation has been a favoured discourse and conceptual framework. However, the 2015 Fallist protests revealed that the transformation approach, when applied alone, cannot adequately redress South Africa’s colonial-apartheid legacies in higher education; there is a need to include and be inherently guided by the anti-oppression ideologies that informed resistance against colonialism and apartheid because they articulate(d) a particular vision for what a liberated South Africa should look like. Inspired by Es’kia Mphahlele – who believed that after independence new ideas will demand expression and create organs of public opinion, and a hybridity of ideas will rid formerly oppressed societies of their oppressive practices – this article explores and analyses the discourses of transformation, decolonisation and Africanisation relative to the South African higher education system. Having considered South Africa’s history of colonialism and apartheid, and how it has impacted the present day higher education system, I ultimately propose a hybrid-pluriversal approach that combines insights from all three frameworks. Potentially, this approach can positively impact the ongoing process of redressing colonial-apartheid legacies in the South African education system.

In Ayi Kwei Armah’s texts, the figure serves as a nexus of aesthetic and ethical visions that opens the literary text to innovative and non-conventional readings, enhancing the relationship between the literary work as a mise en scene and mise en abyme of graphic signs with other art forms such as plastic arts, painting, sculpture, photography, etc. In this chapter, I set out to critically probe the nature of that figure, as represented in some of the key works of Ayi Kwei Armah. I explore the various ways in which this author employs aesthetic forms that constitute different ways of grappling with the ‘figure’ of his quest. This quest encompasses his ideological views of Africa’s past, culture and possible renaissance and the continuous re-imagination of his role as an African author in a global system in which Africa continues to occupy a marginal position. The figures of this quest take different forms in his works as he progressively perfects his creative medium and vision, depicting different facets of postcolonial realities and emergent existential challenges to the African self

Ouma lays bare the subtleties and complexities of far-right alliances in the geopolitical arena, Africa’s entanglement in these dramas, and imaginable global futures for the continent

The boom in South–South relations since the early 2000s has seen a flurry of investment in African infrastructure from emerging markets across the Global South. While the extent to which these projects spur growth is constantly debated, few studies have addressed their impact on ground-level political and socio-economic practices in Africa—or their consequences for transnational governance more broadly. Through the lens of infrastructure, this book investigates the developmental ideas, processes and techniques that have travelled to and emerged from Africa as a result of Global South–led projects. How have they been adapted, transformed and contested by local actors? How does this shape business–society relations? And how has this challenged the Western-dominated global order? The contributors zoom in on large-scale Chinese-, Brazilian- and Indian-funded ventures—dams, ports, roads and mines—across countries including Kenya, Mozambique and the DRC. These ‘frontier zones’, bringing together politicians and practitioners, campaign groups and communities from Africa and elsewhere, offer a unique insight into the global workings of our contemporary world. Taking a bottom-up approach, Africa’s Global Infrastructures explores the longer-term significance and implications of these pluralistic socio-economic interactions, for the continent and beyond.

This special issue “Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected” comes out of the first conference of the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple. Reconfiguring African Studies, which took place from 14th to 17th July 2021. Like the conference, the special issue is dedicated to the cluster’s annual theme and heuristic angle of modes of relating. In the overall research agenda of the Africa Multiple, the notion of relationality takes centerstage. With the focus on Africa not as a given but as a multiple constantly in the making, relations through which it is constituted and upated necessarily come to the fore. Our attention is drawn to processes, appearances and practices and hence to the variety of modes of coming into relation. Accordingly, next to medialities, spatialities, and temporalities, modalities is a heuristic angle in Africa Multiple meant to structure the study of relations we encounter in African lifeworlds, which can take a vast spectrum of forms, like e.g. exchange, acceptance, adaptation, convergence, dependence, hierarchization, conflict, struggle, resistance, and denial. Furthermore, modalities is fundamentally interlinked with the Africa Multiple Cluster’s key concept of reflexivity, which requires the researchers to reflect upon the relational modalities of their position and the very conditions of their knowledge production. This issue’s six contributions which approach modes of relations from a variety of perspectives and with a view on different African countries and their diasporic links, were written by scholars from a variety of disciplines, namely, sociology, geography, anthropology, religious and literary studies and philosophy. Furthermore, in line with critically reflecting upon the modalities of academic knowledge production, it also contains contributions by two artists, the French photographer Aurélien Gillier, who enters in a dialogue with the sociologist Joschka Philipps, and the Kenyan author Yvonne Ahdiambo Owuor, who critically reflects on creative forms of knowledge production on and in Africa.

The image of South Korea abroad is very much dominated by the political heritage of the Korean War and the divide between North and South Korea. The armistice since the end of the war and ongoing threats from the North justify the massive presence of US American forces close to the capital Seoul, such that American popular culture and especially African American popular culture are very present in the music scene. Parallel to the historical legacy of the war, South Korea has succeeded in creating a positive image by using the soft power of popular culture over the last twenty-five years, since the 2000s; the leading music groups that have become representative of South Korean popular culture draw much from African American popular culture when it comes to songs, dance and fashion. This article will follow three phenomena illustrative of this trend: the first is situated in the music industry, where big enterprises and the indie scene are striving for diversity while facing fluid convergences; the second is the phenomenon of K-dramas produced by Netflix. The argument will follow a chronological order so that the interaction between music, performance, production and series becomes visible. Finally, reggae, as a very specific music genre representing freedom and diversity, will illustrate the marginalized status of an indie scene with occasional connections to hip-hop. These examples provide some insight into the in/visibility of African American and African popular culture in South Korea and the struggle for diversity in a country based on the myth of being a monoethnic nation.

Antipode has become a key platform for engaging with decolonial and anticolonial scholarship, as well as adjacent fields such as Black geographies, Indigenous studies, Latin American feminism, and work on settler-colonialism. African reference points in this literature, however, have been far less common, both in the journal and more broadly in radical geography. Recognizing that there are several loci of enunciation for decolonial and anticolonial work, we committed to curating a series of conversations with and interventions by leading scholars from Africa and its diaspora associated with these epistemic and political projects. This long-read article, a first for the journal, brings these conversations and interventions together, highlighting the power of each as well as the common threads that connect them.

The concept Diaspora applied to Africa is a misnomer of sorts, bearing in mind that Africa was the original home of the oldest human beings. Science has discussed how the earlier waves of emigrant Africans (humans originally domiciled in Africa) have adapted to their environment, becoming various shades as melanin presence dictated. Later groups are in India, Tonga, New Zealand, Australia, the Americas: black skinned, flat nose, but with various forms of stretchered out hair. These earlier groups are not called, technically, Diaspora. Only recent migrants to the West, Europe, Asia Minor, Asia and the Americas are called Diaspora: they migrated voluntarily for various reasons or they were forced out of Africa as captives. Part of the challenges that African Studies instigate are fraught because of (a) the participation of continental Africans in slavery wars in Eastern, Central Africa, Northern and Central Africa; (b) the Middle Passage of the Atlantic and the Sahara/Pacific; (c) the empty baggage syndrome and epistemicide and, (d) the Willie Lunch Syndrome of Divide and Conquer exemplified in Obama phenomenon. African studies writ large must then encompass (a) Repairing the Breach; (b) Recovering the Heritage - Calypso, Blues and Jazz, Reggae, Rastafari, Sports; (c) Restoring Indigenous Knowledge Systems by erasing epistemicide and (d) Restoring the African humanity. These efforts must be multi/inter disciplinary and encompass all domains of human intellectual theory and practice. Recovering the human intellectual traditions and knowledge systems of continental and Diasporas would be a treasure trove of ideas to solve many of the challenges faced by humanity today; this will require transcending what Claude Ake has dubbed “Social Science as Imperialism”. In this essay, I attempt to sketch what would constitute a more appropriate, historiographically accurate and globally judicious understanding of African Studies that is holistic. My goal is to sketch an African Studies that is not segmented on the basis of the agendas of exogenous forces bent on decimating global African peoples, by playing diverse groups against each other, but one which recognizes the continuity of human heritage as primarily African heritage writ large, and one which recognizes that the African Diasporas, recent and classical, are all continuous with Africa feeding and renewing the world with humanity by virtue of being the original home of humanity. This calls for so many different approaches, but primary being the complete overhaul of the current curricula used to programme the minds of humanity, especially those emanating from European climes, to persist in negro-gaze: the objectification and exoticization of Africa and peoples of Africa globally, thereby derogating their humanities and agencies.

The book “African Studies Centres Around the World – A Network-Based Inventory” compiles a selection of contributions by the directors of eleven African Studies centres from four continents. They comprise Africa’s oldest centre on the continent, at the University of Cape Town, the European centres in Bordeaux, Lisbon and Hradec Králové and the two North American Universities of Florida and Indiana. Central and South America’s contributions to African Studies is represented by the centres in San José, Costa Rica, Santiago de Cuba and Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. The Asian centres are located at Jawaharlal University in Mumbai, India, and at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, South Korea. The eleven chapters show the very diverse history of the centres, explaining their different structures, underpinning the need for more exchange and collaborative research. The volume presents some aspects of the ongoing critical reflections on the historical and political development of African Studies in various parts of the world, disseminating first-hand knowledge while the chapters encourage to open the exchange and collaboration across regional, disciplinary and academic boundaries.

Music is often cited as a central artistic mode in African theatre and performance practices. However, little attention has been paid to music theatre on the continent in general, and to opera in particular, with the exceptions of a few noted genres, such as Concert Party or the Yorùbá "folk opera" of the 1960s, and the emerging research on opera culture in South Africa. This volume of African Theatre highlights the diversity across the continent from a variety of perspectives - including those of genre, media, and historiography. Above all, it raises questions and encourages debate: What does "opera" mean in African and African diasporic contexts? What are its practices and legacies - colonial, postcolonial and decolonial; what is its relation to the intersectionalities of race and class? How do opera and music theatre reflect, change or obscure social, political and economic realities? How are they connected to educational and cultural institutions, and non-profit organisations? And why is opera contradictorily, at various times, perceived as both "grand" and "elitist, "folk" and "quotidian", "Eurocentric" and "indigenous"? Contributors also address aesthetic transformation processes, the porousness of genre boundaries and the role of space and place, with examples ranging from Egypt to South Africa, from Uganda to West Africa and the USA. The playscript in this volume is We Take Care of Our Own by Zainabu Jallo

This contribution offers a critical engagement with Africapitalism, a concept popularized by Nigerian billionaire Tony Elumelu. It first contextualizes the concept and provides a brief history. It then moves on to discuss four questions that have hitherto received little discussion in the dedicated debate: How does Africapitalism square with other existing visions of Africa's economic future? Exactly what kind of critique of capitalism does Africapitalism offer? What kind of future does Africapitalism imagine, and what roles does it assign to the state, the citizenry and the private sector? How well positioned is the idea of Africapitalism to tackle Africa's most pressing problems?

In the coming decades, smallholder agriculture in the Global South will experience significant transformations due to environmental challenges, urbanization and demographic shifts. Although current research offers valuable perspectives on agrarian change, few studies have systematically tracked transitions in smallholder agriculture over time. Understanding long-term dynamics and integrating insights from diverse regions and sub-populations are essential for crafting effective and sustainable rural policies. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative longitudinal data from four time points (2010, 2014, 2019, and 2023) with qualitative insights from 10 villages within the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance System site in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. Through both quantitative modeling and qualitative analysis, we explore agrarian trajectories, revealing trends, determinants, and transitions among various agrarian strategies. The findings emphasize the significant role of migrant and local off-farm employment in influencing the likelihood and level of subsistence farming, highlighting the dynamic nature of agrarian livelihoods. The impact of demographic factors, such as household size and gender, vary across different agrarian strategies. These insights offer valuable guidance for policy and intervention strategies aimed at enhancing rural livelihoods.

This response addresses several of the issues raised by the commentaries on my book Farming as Financial Asset – Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes (2020). Reflecting upon the intentions and limitations of the book, it makes a call for treating agri-investments to which scholars contribute from different geographical, theoretical, and methodological angles. In detail, it engages with the question of how farmland investments relate to other ‘asset classes’ in terms of the practical (and political) problem of institutional investibility, the material and human dimensions of institutional landscapes, the ownership question, as well as the challenge to write a book that has a global historical outlook and offers situated accounts at the same time. It also engages with questions of comparativism, methodology, and the political implications of an opening-the-black box approach.