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This collection of articles is based on presentations and discussions at the 2018 African Potentials Forum, held in Accra, Ghana. This forum was a part of the African Potentials Project, which aims to clarify the latent problem-solving abilities, ways of thinking, and institutions that have been created, accumulated, unified, and deployed in the everyday experiences of Africans. The notion of Africa’s latent power/potential is not related to romanticisation of the traditional knowledge of African society and its institutions as fixed, essentialised ‘magic wands’. This notion also raises objections against political dogmas that seek to smoke out and eliminate thought and values originat...
This book is the result of a research project, called African Potentials, that we have been conducting for 10 years. This project was aimed at overturning negative stereotypes the world has imposed on Africa, such as poverty, hunger and conflict, the achievement of which would help to decolonise and de-Westernise our world while creating a new, alternative future. This book explores how this can be achieved, focusing on the wealth of African knowledge and institutions that African people have created and practised throughout their history. While learning from these indigenous systems, this book reconsiders the subservience to Western values that have been assumed to be universally applicable. This volume aims to establish an ideology that radically transforms the dominant framework of knowledge, and that can relativise and pluralise the hegemonic centre.
As Julius Nyerere once noted, Africa has largely been the continent of peace, though this fact has not been widely publicised. In reality, Africa possesses dynamic potentials for resolving contradictions and violent ruptures that colonial authorities, post-colonial states and global actors have failed to capture and capitalise upon. Drawing on the everyday experience of rural and urban people in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia and Zambia, this book brings into conversation leading Japanese scholars of Southern Africa with their African colleagues. The result is an exploration in comparative perspective of the fascinating richness of bottom-up 'African potentials' for conflict resolution in Southern Africa, a region burdened with the legacy of settler capitalism and contemporary neoliberalism. The book is a pacesetter on how to think and research Africa in fruitful collaboration and with an ear to the nuances and complexities of the dynamic and lived realities of Africans.
This book focuses on two specific areas: wildlife conservation policies and projects, and the interaction between local societies and the surrounding environment in Africa. Against the internationally dominant approach that regards Africa as being a state of 'deficiency', this book demonstrates, based on fieldwork concerning various natural resources (e.g. wildlife, forests, fruit, fish and land) as well as many famous protected areas, that African people are collectively and actively trying to solve the environmental problems they are facing by strategically utilising both indigenous means and new extrinsic opportunities. Meanwhile, it also becomes clear that wildlife conservation still continues to cause local societies a multitude of problems, and the 'potentials' of local people and societies are existing but unnoticed and suppressed by powerful outsiders, and therefore, remaining informal and invisible.
This book focuses on two specific areas: wildlife conservation policies and projects, and the interaction between local societies and the surrounding environment in Africa. Against the internationally dominant approach that regards Africa as being a state of 'deficiency', this book demonstrates, based on fieldwork concerning various natural resources (e.g. wildlife, forests, fruit, fish and land) as well as many famous protected areas, that African people are collectively and actively trying to solve the environmental problems they are facing by strategically utilising both indigenous means and new extrinsic opportunities. Meanwhile, it also becomes clear that wildlife conservation still continues to cause local societies a multitude of problems, and the 'potentials' of local people and societies are existing but unnoticed and suppressed by powerful outsiders, and therefore, remaining informal and invisible.
The term 'African Potentials' refers to the knowledge, systems, practices, ideas and values created and implemented in African societies that are expected to contribute to overcoming various challenges and promoting people's wellbeing. This collection of articles, focused on African societies, is based on the idea that 'Africa is People'. In this book, African people are placed at the centre of the discussion. The book's contributors, all of whom believe in African people and their potentials, consider women, minors and young people, people with disabilities, entrepreneurs, herders, farmers, mine workers, refugees, migrants, traditional rulers, militiamen and members of the political elite, and examine their predicaments and potentials in detail. Africa is people, and African potentials can be found only in African people themselves.
This book challenges colonial and age-old Western academic views that have dominated and marginalised African indigenous knowledge system. It spreads further the wings of knowledge and endeavour about an African way of thinking on conflict resolution and co-existence, and analytically connects this to the pursuit of Africa's sustainable development frameworks. Ohta, Nyamnjoh and Matsuda are teachers you always wished for but never had. Together, they have made this book a path-breaking one, and essential reading for a broad based understanding of the African mindset.
Africa welcomes business investment and offers some of the world's highest returns and impacts Africa has tremendous economic potential and offers rewarding opportunities for global businesses looking for new markets and long-term investments with favorable returns. Africa has been one of the world's fastest-growing regions over the past decade, and by 2030 will be home to nearly 1.7 billion people and an estimated $6.7 trillion worth of consumer and business spending. Increased political stability in recent years and improving regional integration are making market access easier, and business expansion will generate jobs for women and youth, who represent the vast majority of the population...
This volume addresses two primary research concerns: first, considering extraversion (or extroversion) as a term for characterizing a region that is "mobilizing resources from their (possibly unequal) relationship with the external environment", a dynamic that constitutes a possible African potential; and, second, a survey of competing systems and strategies with a focus on relationships between formal and informal institutions in terms of their collaborations and conflicts. In addition, this volume contains three chapters examining very recent African responses to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic from a variety of perspectives. The final part of this volume contains an important contribution to the conceptualization of 'African Potentials'. This has proven to be a significant conceptual innovation, that allows intellectual access to alternative ways of thinking about latent ideas of universality.
African American schools in the segregated South faced enormous obstacles in educating their students. But some of these schools succeeded in providing nurturing educational environments in spite of the injustices of segregation. Vanessa Siddle Walker tells the story of one such school in rural North Carolina, the Caswell County Training School, which operated from 1934 to 1969. She focuses especially on the importance of dedicated teachers and the principal, who believed their jobs extended well beyond the classroom, and on the community's parents, who worked hard to support the school. According to Walker, the relationship between school and community was mutually dependent. Parents sacrif...