Category: Uncategorized

Kenyans vote today (in some places voting have already started). And somehow, as in any election in any African country, the cliches are not far behind. “Will Kenya fall into mayhem after the results of the general elections are announced?” “Will one of (East) Africa’s most politically stable countries see a return of post-election violence that swept through the country five years ago?” “Has tribalism been eradicated in Kenya?” We can’t count how often international reporters have asked these questions in the past days. Like French soldiers in the northern Mali, journalist of every major international broadcaster and some even of tiny national news organizations have parachute landed in Kenya ahead of the general elections. Some of them, even if they won’t admit it, secretly hope to see a bit violence, albeit skirmishes. Some American outlets have taken six month old political violence and presented these as happening…

Jemima Pierre, professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University, has written an ambitious book in The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (University of Chicago Press 2012). She engages Ghanaian and African diasporan constructions, perceptions, and performances of Blackness and Whiteness in contemporary Ghana. By doing so, she brings anthropology into an ongoing conversation on race within African studies dominated largely by historians and South Africanists from a variety of specializations. The book, she says in her preface, is an “ethnography of racialization that insists on shifting the ways we think about Africa and the history of modern identity” (xv). She argues that the process of racialization within the framework of global white supremacy links continental Africans and people of African descent in the diaspora. Race matters, to Pierre, and she culls ethnographic material from her two decades of research in Ghana that belies its irrelevance in…

Gather round children and hear “[all] Africans seem naturally networked to religion.” Bow thy heads in shame yea northern heathens for the “Catholic Church, the largest Christian denomination, is part of the fabric of all African societies.” Heaven forbid you should get on your high horse and talk of gross generalizations swathed in the tropes of noble savagery and whatnot, for the Lord hath spoken and he sayeth unto thee: “Over the decades that I have traveled in Africa I have met only four African atheists”; that “[in Africa] God is invoked on every occasion, private or public;” and, in a critical new insight, that “[the cause of] wars … in Africa… is usually a dispute over land rights involving two communities that happen to be of different faiths.” 

A week ago the Huffington Post published an article written by Melissa Jeltsen on an increasingly familiar name in women’s activism in the Arab world. The article, entitled “Mona Eltahawy, Egyptian-American Activist, On the Power of Protest,” has a rather misleading title. The focus of the article was not really Ms. Eltahawy’s thoughts on protest in the context of the Arab uprisings, nor the struggles faced by many women. Instead, the article is about Ms. Eltahawy; her history, her supporters, her detractors, and the controversy that surrounds her and her actions. 

Post by Percy Zvomuya

When I was an adolescent I thought I was going to be a footballer. Instead, when I turned 13 I became a preacher. I told people about the great love that the Nazarene, Jesus Christ, had shown for humanity. But for what seemed the longest time, my becoming part of God’s team was prevented by a simple and yet very troubling question: is there football in heaven? 

I have seen them, gravid
& walking with the honey heaviness
of mothers round as plums,
ripe & stretched over fullness
& eager to meet what kicks
beneath their hands

they have felt fluttering
in the domes of their bellies,
laughed with those turns
& learned new heartbeats
threading under their own,
a welcome otherness

but here, underneath scars
that tethered us
to our own mothers
a threat blooms alongside hope

this close to life death happens. obscene
how bodies break & empty easy as eggs
even in their fruiting

life is cheap
they say & it must be
if it spends so casually
each lost heartbeat
adds up
counted in pennies

& we keep adding
shiny words explaining loss:
religion, cultural context,
mismanagement

how do you tabulate tears
in actuarial tables

i have numbered the bones

ac-
count-
ability

measured in shoulder shrugs
& head shakes
while a woman
who cradled life
in the bowl…

Post by Palesa Mazamisa*

The heinous, brutal rape and subsequent slaughtering of Anene Booysen in South Africa’s Western Cape province has brought into the open, once again, the miry underbelly of our rainbow nation. At the heart of violence that Anene was subjected to, lies a bigger issue that South Africans wilfully shunt and ignore. This issue is our Achilles heel. It is what has our nation wondering at the gruesome nature of the violence committed against Anene with our mouths agape, spit dripping from our lips, trying to figure out what makes South Africa such a violent society.

disease has no morality
and antibodies
are blind to whom they protect
cellular insurance
bought with a wince
and a cry

that small pain, forgotten
in minutes
buys a lifetime without braces
and canes, free
of the hiss of ventilators

or rooms
still full of toys
echoing absence

but they say these shots
are poisoned
with western interest

and there is a politics
that prefers death
to sterility
though dead children
can’t make babies
and immunized ones can
eventually

sugar cubes and needles
were never the enemy
but ignorance and fear–

those things kill
and spread faster than any virus

In America, all men are believed to be created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. But Nigerians are brought up to believe that our society consists of higher and lesser beings. Some are born to own and enjoy, while others are born to toil and endure.

–        Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

The Nigerian writer, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani is at it again. Her February 9, 2013 op-ed piece in the New York Times (In Nigeria, You’re Either Somebody or Nobody) in which she referred to some Nigerian house helps as “smelly” and “feral” is living rent-free in my head. I wish it would just go away. Nwaubani’s piece, on the fate of “househelps” or “servants” in Nigeria, is a profound commentary on how the West continues to view much of Africa, with the active connivance of many African writers, who traipse the West, hawking tales of…