ABSTRACT Urbanising Africa has produced congestion, deprivation and vulnerabilities that expand informal livelihoods and cause informal transportation to thrive. Existing multi-dimensional urban livelihood discourses are yet to adequately incorporate the insecurity perspective that women encounter. Studying urban livelihood insecurity from a gender viewpoint by examining why and how women migrate to male-dominated tricycle transport services in Ibadan metropolis, the inherent challenges and the extent of the livelihood’s sustainability, the article made use of qualitative ethnographic research methods adopting sustainable livelihood theory. Information was gathered from interviews, observations and secondary sources and content analysed. Owing to livelihood trends, the need for financial relief of domestic burden and socioeconomic coping strategies, women venture into the tricycle livelihood and can register their space by employing livelihood assets to address the associated livelihood risks and stress. Findings also reveal the gendered livelihood insecurity of time poverty and discrimination that women riders encounter. Though the aspect of sustainability is a crucial element of livelihood security, women riders’ perspectives vary on the sustainability of tricycle livelihood. Some women riders view tricycle livelihood as high-risk, some perceive it as a symbol of women’s emancipation and liberation from occupational stereotypes, and others assert that tricycle livelihood is sustainable because its benefits supersede the risk. This contention is therefore an indication that enhancing gender mainstreaming in male-dominated occupations is a work-in-progress, requiring gender-sensitive transformation and governmental intervention.

ABSTRACT The article attempts a philosophical exposition of the Oromo’s indigenous notion of Namummaa for the sake of conflict resolution/peacebuilding and common good in Ethiopia. As a relational philosophy, Namummaa explains the ontological conception of peace the Oromo people hold; it is embedded in their religious and communal sense of relationality and belonging. The study emphasizes whether this ontological ideal promotes nonviolence, renunciation of self-aggrandizement at the expense of the cosmos, community, or others, and bolsters mutual coexistence—all of which are essential for building peace and resolution of conflicts in contemporary Ethiopia. Thus, apart from the normative-philosophical theorisation of Namummaa, the article attempts to present a balanced and critical assessment of Oromo indigenous concepts and practices of human relation by making a qualitative reflection on their possible application as a conflict resolution and peacebuilding mechanism not only for the intra-Oromo but also for the inter-cultural relationships in Ethiopia today. After a thorough and systematic reading of available written and oral sources garnered from primary and secondary data, the study concludes that Namummaa, according to the Oromo perspective, is complex, connected to the strong quality of human beings and meaningful in terms of building intercultural dialogue for peacebuilding in Ethiopia.

ABSTRACT This study examined the British conquest of the Benin and Owa kingdoms, as depicted in Ola Rotimi’s Ovonramwen Nogbaisi and Sam Ukala’s Iredi War, with a view to teasing out both the vanquished and the victor’s perspectives. These books have been critically analysed, generating volumes of literature. However, this study focuses on the roles both Africans and British played during the invasions of both kingdoms. Historical and literary research methods were used to gather data from secondary sources. The study reveals that Britain’s disregard for African institutions of authority and the brutality inexperienced and overzealous officers displayed pushed Africans to confront them. This was contrary to the numerous victor’s reports detailing how African kings were dethroned and describing their kingdoms as hostile and barbaric in their traditional ceremonies. We also found that the British built their success not only with their power but also relied on internal and external African involvement and collaboration. These dramaturgical adaptations, like the victor’s reports, contain details on the vanquished the victor did not tell, and are therefore recommended for further study.

ABSTRACT In 2007, the Constitutional Court ordered that the South African government must enforce the principle of sustainable development in awarding environmental authorisation for developmental projects. This legal mandate, rooted in the Constitution, has been a powerful tool for environmentalists in their fight for sustainable development. Armed with appropriate legal apparatus, environmentalists continue to lodge protests against development initiatives. This article examines how environmentalists have shaped the discourse around the meanings of consultation and development since then. With more control and ligating leverage, they vehemently oppose undertakings that have potentially adverse impacts on the environment, the people and their heritage. Environmentalists have successfully persuaded courts to value the importance of sustainable development, climate crisis, customary rights and intangible cultural heritage, as well as consultation and public participation, making it difficult for the state and industry to implement any projects. While environmentalists have complicated state implementation of development projects, they have entrenched the protection of land rights and participatory democracy. The findings help us imagine the proper implementation of future development projects. The article underscores the importance of South Africa’s Constitution in ensuring the functioning of democracy, particularly in how it empowers communities to protect their land.

ABSTRACT Relying on accounts of some members of the Rastafari community, this paper advances a conversation on the Rastafari appreciation of and response to the Coronavirus pandemic in Ghana. Significant to the discussion is the question of how Rastafari social and political orientation, as well as their religious beliefs and spiritual imaginations both aided and frustrated the management of the Coronavirus pandemic in Ghana. We aver that framed as socially excluded members of society, the Rastafari community deploys a variety of resources to manage certain hard-to-believe events in life, including the Coronavirus pandemic. The paper provides an analytically stimulating account of the interrelationship between social exclusion, health and meaning-making.

ABSTRACT Using newly digitised colonial medical time-series data, this study makes a first attempt to provide an overview of the development of Western healthcare in Northern Rhodesia. The data is used to elaborate on the extent of the Christian missionary medical outreach to the African populace and the involvement of the African medical workers in establishing and expanding the Western healthcare system in Northern Rhodesia. The article details the colonial government’s contribution to fighting epidemics while accentuating how missionaries and trained Africans aided the colonial government. The findings show that with the help of indigenous auxiliaries, missionaries extended Western medicine to the African population. Missionary hospitals attended to a greater proportion of the local population than the African colonial government hospitals. With different agendas at times, the state cooperated with missionaries to provide healthcare to most of the local people in rural areas. With assistance from the missionaries and trained Africans, the British colonial government played a significant role in fighting outbreaks. However, interventions were sometimes racially segregative, especially in urban areas.

ABSTRACT The history of African philosophy often begins with the quest for legitimacy, by which I mean the desire for it to be recognised, accepted and considered as critical thinking in the real sense of the word. This starting point, on the part of many African philosophy scholars, was due to the historical epistemic violence that Africans experienced as a result of the encounter with the colonisers. The nature of this encounter resulted in the debasement, neglect, and marginalisation of African philosophical positions. Plunged in this epistemic doubt, uncertainty, and imposed decadence, for centuries, many African philosophers grappling with the question, ‘Is there an African philosophy?’ The question does two main things: on the one hand, it seeks to validate philosophical positions that are uniquely African, and on another hand, the question searches for prescriptive philosophical paradigms for addressing African problems and analysing issues. Most African philosophical engagements do the former. Shedding new light to the question, I argue that a disposition to African philosophy that stems from a need to validate its existence risks being a mere reaction and/or mimicry, and as such, further perpetrates epistemic violence by removing Africa from its lived realities.

ABSTRACT In 2023, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), later renamed the African Union, turned 60. Premised on the philosophy of Pan-Africanism, the organisation was formed to unite Africans into a single nation in order to combat colonialism and establish a monolithic United States of Africa. The OAU’s 60th anniversary coincided with the 30th anniversary of the adoption of South Africa’s 1993 Interim Constitution, which included the philosophical concept ‘ubuntu’. In the subsequent 1996 South African Constitution, however, ubuntu was excluded. In this article, I argue that the inclusion of ubuntu in the 1993 Interim Constitution offered Africans in South Africa an opportunity to raise their consciousness about the importance of self-re-humanisation after a period of violent colonial dehumanisation, and that the restoration of ubuntu to South Africa’s Constitution could help in reconnecting South Africans to other Africans in the ongoing and elusive struggle for Pan-Africanism. This is especially the case amid South Africans’ ‘xenophobic’ attacks against fellow Africans after South Africa became a democracy in 1994.

ABSTRACT Ubuntu in its essential outlook is committed to a humane and conciliatory interchange between moral agents and their environs. Yet the countries that have given ubuntu its name have had violence at the centre of their public spaces. This raises the question: what sort of engagement could there be between the violence inherent in these countries and ubuntu? And to what end would that engagement be? I examine ubuntu’s relationship with violence, looking at the enduring effects of the historical reality of the banality of the violence of oppression. In the second instance, I seek to demonstrate how ubuntu, which is characteristically postcolonial, has developed an identity that is antithetical to ubuntu. The routine production of these disasters, and the normalcy of the existence of absurdity that generates violence of all sorts, has become the sign and mode of modern postcolonial Africa. This identity appears intransigent. In the light of these two instances, I seek to explore what aspects of ubuntu render it unable to shape its home turf.