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Angola
After more than twenty years of devastating civil war, Angola is slowly moving toward peace and reconciliation. In this accessible introduction to one of the most resource-rich countries in Africa, Inge Tvedten traces Angola's turbulent past, with a particular focus on the impacts that political and economic upheaval have had on the Angolan people.
Associational Life in African Cities
The book contains 17 chapters with material from 13 African countries, from Egypt to Swaziland and from Senegal to Kenya. Most of the authors are young African academics. The focus of the volume is the multitude of voluntary associations that has emerged in African cities in recent years. In many cases, they are a response to mounting poverty, failing infrastructure and services, and more generally, weak or abdicating urban governments. Some associations are new, in other cases, existing organizations are taking on new tasks. Associations may be neighbourhood-based, others may be city-wide and based on professional groupings or a shared ideology or religion. Still others have an ethnic base. Some of these organizations are engaged in both day-to-day matters of urban management and more long-term urban development. Urban associations challenge the monopoly of local and central government institutions.
Social Im/mobilities in Africa
Grounded in both theory and ethnography, this volume insists on taking social positionality seriously when accounting for Africa’s current age of polarizing wealth. To this end, the book advocates a multidimensional view of African societies, in which social positions consist of a variety of intersecting social powers - or ‘capitals’ – including wealth, education, social relationships, religion, ethnicity, and others. Accordingly, the notion of social im/mobilities emphasizes the complexities of current changes, taking us beyond the prism of a one-dimensional social ladder, for social moves cannot always be apprehended through the binaries of ‘gains’ and ‘losses’.
Civil Society and the Search for Development Alternatives in Cameroon
Recent developments have witnessed the emergence of civil society as a major development actor whose potentials and capacity, especially in Africa, are often taken for granted and treated as limitless. A critical assessment of some of these structures (NGOs, religious organisations, trade unions, home-based associations and the youth) and the legal and political context of the operation of civil society in Cameroon shows a popular effervescence that is visible in social development initiatives. Although this would complement the state and free enterprise, it is however often frustrated by the states suspicion in a context of rising social awareness and protest that is assimilated with political opposition or attempts at manipulation along partisan lines. This book is a call to reform the framework of civil society and assess its components and roles in shaping the future of Africa. Emmanuel Yenshu Vubo is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology. He obtained his Doctorate from the University of Yaounde in 1991 and has served in several capacities at the University of Buea.
Hard Work, Hard Times
Introduction / Anne-Maria Makhulu, Beth A. Buggenhagen, Stephen Jackson. - The search for economic sovereignty / Anne-Maria Makhulu. - "It seems to be going:" the genius of survival in wartime DR Congo / Stephen Jackson. - This is play : popular culture and politics in Côte d'Ivoire / Mike McGovern. - Self-sovereignty and creativity in Ghanian public culture / Jesse Weaver Shipley. - "May God let me share paradise with my fellow believers" : Islam's "female face" and the politics of religious devotion in Mali / Dorothea E. Schulz. - "Killer bargains" : global networks of Senegalese Muslims and the policing of unofficial economies in the war on terror / Beth A. Buggenhagen. - Border practices / Charles Piot.
Grassroots Politics and Oil Culture in Venezuela
This book is published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book presents an ethnographic study of how grassroots activism in Venezuela during the Chávez presidency can be understood in relation to the country's history as a petro-state. Taking the contested relationship between the popular sectors and the Venezuelan state as a point of departure, Iselin Åsedotter Strønen explores how notions such as class, race, state, bureaucracy, popular politics, capitalism, neoliberalism, consumption, oil wealth, and corruption gained salience in the Bolivarian process. A central argument is that the Bolivarian process was an attempt to challenge the practices, ideas, and values inherited from Venezuela's historical development as an oil-producing state. Drawing on rich ethnographic material from Caracas' shantytowns, state institutions, as well as everyday life and public culture, Strønen explores the complexities and challenges in fostering deep social and political change.
A Short History of Modern Angola
This history by celebrated Africanist David Birmingham begins in 1820 with the Portuguese attempt to create a third, African, empire after the virtual loss of Asia and America. In the nineteenth century the most valuable resource extracted from Angola was agricultural labor, first as privately owned slaves and later as conscript workers. The colony was managed by a few marine officers, by several hundred white political convicts, and by a couple of thousand black Angolans who had adopted Portuguese language and culture. The hub was the harbor city of Luanda which grew in the twentieth century to be a dynamic metropolis of several million people. The export of labor was gradually replaced whe...
Taming the Disorderly City
In postapartheid Johannesburg, tensions of race and class manifest themselves starkly in struggles over 'rights to the city'. Martin J. Murray brings together urban theory and local knowledge to draw a picture of this city, where real estate agents and the very poor fight for control of space.
The Middle Class in Mozambique
Introduction -- Origins -- Asendance -- Collapse -- Democracy -- Decay -- 2016, concluding thoughts
Infrastructures of Migrant Labour in Colonial Ovamboland, 1915 to 1954
Most research on the migrant labour system in Namibia under South African colonial rule emphasises its dehumanising aspects. In a complete contrast, this study highlights the social and ritual resources that contract workers and their families in colonial Ovamboland mobilised to provide forms of support and connection across great distances and absences. Based on extensive oral research, this study peels back the layers of intangible infrastructure that sustained migrant workers through all the stages of their contract, including observances around workplace deaths. This thesis vividly demonstrates the persistence of older practices that sustained the bonds of life, fellowship and family under stress, as well as adaptation to new colonial system, such as the postal system.
