ABSTRACT This study argues that belonging among Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa is multifaceted. Through qualitative research, it explores their experiences and attitudes towards return migration or permanent settlement. It demonstrates that belonging extends beyond subjectivity and is enacted through individual and collective practices, such as remittances and investment in their home country. The findings also highlight how the temporary and conditional nature of Zimbabwe Exemption Permits intensified migrants’ existential crisis and reinforced their diasporic experiences. Additionally, the study reveals the traumatic encounters associated with home, challenging the notion of home as a place of comfort and exposing the contradictions of safety and violence within it.

Trade unions are important social and political actors in Africa. Their role goes beyond the perimetry of the world of work or industrial relations to enter the political sphere. A large literature exists on these workers’ organizations. Trade unions have been studied from multiple angles and disciplines. To put some order to this body of academic and popularizing work, it is necessary to depart from the acknowledgment of the multidisciplinary nature of studies on African trade unions. Therefore, apart from a general overview, this article divides this body of literature into six main subgroups: trade unions in industrial relations in Africa, which means membership, collective bargaining, and collective action, including labor unrest and strikes; trade unions structure and governance, which includes legal aspects and labor rights; sector-specific literature, given the fact that trade unions are more prominent in some sectors than in others; literature on trade union internationalism and regional trade unions; the relationship of trade unions with politics, which includes country-specific studies; and, finally, life histories. As highlighted by the literature, two factors determined the birth and growth of unionism in Africa in the twentieth century: first, the capitalist transformation of African economies, especially but not exclusively during colonialism; and second, the expansion of a particular kind of labor relation, namely waged labor, which was exploited to profit capital. Hence literature on trade unions is often preoccupied with the role of trade unions within the capitalist transformation of African societies and with trade unions’ attitudes toward capital, capitalists or employers, and governments that are usually there to serve them. Many studies conceptualize trade unions in relation to the economic sector, including the role of trade unions in public services, education, public administration, transport, health, mining, manufacture, and other areas. To a lesser extent, studies exist on commercial agriculture. This is because trade union density is higher in these sectors, with higher capital investment, both private and public. This is not the same in all regions and countries in Africa. Trade unions play an important and historical role in African politics. Numerous studies exist on trade unions’ opposition to colonial vested economic interests that employed African labor. With the postcolonial formal recognition of trade unions came their involvement in national politics, but also their co-optation by both ideological camps opposing each other during the Cold War. In some cases, African trade unions have been subjected to repression and banning. In other instances, they have been co-opted by political power. There are, however, also cases of African trade unions that managed to retain their autonomy from political and economic power. Since the end of the Cold War, trade unions have generally enjoyed a relatively higher degree of freedom. New approaches to the study of labor—such as global labor studies and global labor history—have increasingly marginalized trade unions. This is because in Africa trade unions represent a minority of workers—i.e., the formal wage worker, often male. The idea that trade unions epitomize a “labor aristocracy” has been slow to die. Postmodern studies on African trade unions are based on an algebraic truth: unionized formal wage workers are a small minority in Africa. This quantitative reality does not take into account the qualitative role played by trade unions for African social progress. It is a fact that trade unions continue to be repressed and prohibited in many African realities by employers and governments. Literature on African trade union agency also examines the international dimension. In addition, African trade unions developed and continue to maintain international links with trade unions outside the continent and with the International Labour Organization (ILO) and other international organizations. African trade unions have also formed organizations at the continental and regional level.

ABSTRACT In the uneven publishing landscape between Africa and the global north publishing industry, almost all editorial rejections or requests for revision are initially narcissistically injurious. They compel one to pause, to revisit their views, and perhaps they make writers second guess themselves. In this paper, I focus on review feedback as a productive pause. I think with the affects and potentialities that follow the initial injury. I posit that if we look past the wounding, most revisions can be transformed into practices of care. I contemplate what it means for one’s work to be attended to by others and the generative possibilities that different lenses might enable. This thrust to focus on the positive is not to dismiss the epistemic violences that being revised and corrected might enact. Instead, I suggest that as writers committed to our craft and ideas, we might mine the review process for glimmers of care even if this entails rummaging through the dregs of callous feedback. Focusing on two writing projects, I think about iterative review as involving a wide network of readers that include formal reviewers and informal readers that are part of a reading community of practice. I suggest that conceived of broadly, reviewers might mediate the writing process in ways that nurse underdeveloped ideas, push us beyond parochial reading practices, and widen the resonance of our work beyond our initial imaginaries. To read the review and publication process through body politics and geopolitics as potentially inhibiting and enabling, propels us beyond binaries and broadens the scope of review to consider the roles of our informal readers. Conceived of this way, review is an important part of the practice of writing. It enhances our craft, ideas and political commitments.

ABSTRACT A regular response to scholarly submissions by Africa-based scholars to academic publications, research fellowships and funders, is that these submissions tend to be out of tune with current debates in their fields, or seemingly preoccupied with questions deemed dated in other scholarly contexts. This charge of belatedness is often framed in the diction of lack – lack of originality, lack of theoretical rigour, out of step with contemporary debates in the field of study, redundant, in a word, belated. This paper argues that this charge of belatedness is often misdiagnosed as resulting from lack of access to cutting edge scholarship from elsewhere, and therefore, addressed through temporary attempts to make these resources available. This diagnosis misrepresents deeper systemic problems in the African academy and the knowledge landscape, where academic vernaculars from the global north masquerade as normative frameworks of what quality scholarship should look like. The article proposes that rather than playing catch-up to these vernaculars-masquerading-as-norms, there is value in lingering on the specificities of African research contexts and the questions these contexts pose, as this creates scope for Africa-based scholars to produce work that turns the presumed belatedness of the questions provoked by our contexts into a generative catalyst for original scholarly interventions. I propose what I term a halafu ethic of hospitality to multiple lines of thought to demonstrate this promise of belatedness through three examples of scholarly work produced by Africa-based African scholars: Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele’s There was this Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile (2009), my book, A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder (2015) and Hugo Canham’s Riotous Deathscapes (2023). A halafu ethic, paired with intentionality about the double-addressivity of Africa-based scholars’ research, offers a modest, yet potentially ground-shifting strategy to counter the charge of belatedness and its co-optive power.

ABSTRACT Research on violence can be debilitating and traumatic. Research fields that explore obvious violence that is largely ignored, minimised or erased can induce epistemic effects that may look like failure or procrastination. That there is very little research on or support for researchers who do research on violence lays bare the ontological presuppositions of the ideal researcher. This article explores what it felt like to do research where ontological erasure was normalised, and places pressure on the presuppositions of the ideal researcher amid scholarship on obvious violence. Debilitation can be a response to epistemic gaslighting, epistemic violence and epistemic trauma and indicate affective refusals and ethical tussling. Being brought to a standstill by research on violence can offer critical epistemic insight that requires using and valuing failure as symptomatic of epistemic relations and refusing the hyper-ableist demands of the academy.

ABSTRACT There are experiences we know well owing to our location as Africans thinking from the Global South and being in relation to a publishing industrial complex anchored in the Global North. Among ourselves, we often reflect on our deeply frustrating experiences of working in the publish-or-perish cultures that have overtaken the academy while being hemmed in by the onto-epistemological gatekeeping cultures that characterise the capital-driven publishing industry, and feed off what Babalwa Magoqwana, Qawekazi Maqabuka and Malehoko Tshoaedi (2019) and Beatrice Akala (2021) characterise as the neoliberal academy. Here, we refer to the value chain that consists of who is invited to write, the spaces to think deeply that writing requires, the review and editing processes, and the citational politics that academic publishing is enmeshed in. As editors, writers and reviewers, we have spent years commiserating with one another about the pitfalls of academic publishing. In fact, this issue emerged out of a sustained conversation on these experiences. In the spirit of mapping the processes, experiences and insights into the academic publishing landscape, and specifically peer review and revision, we map the contours of the academic publishing landscape and its implications for African and other marginalised scholarly communities. This forms the backdrop against which the cluster of papers that follow sketch out in finer texture a range of perspectives on this landscape.

ABSTRACT When I was invited by the editors to submit a paper for their collection, I thought that what might be most helpful for readers would be for me to share some reflections on, and lessons from my own journey. This process also helps me to make sense of my experiences and the experiences of others; and to evaluate how I can continuously contribute to enabling processes of just knowledge production and disrupting unjust practices. Knowledge production should be a rewarding experience. It should also be a productive process as we contribute to a project for the good of humans and not (merely) for wealth production and the enhancement of personal egos. Furthermore, the process should not have academics merely survive, much less perish, as we work our craft. If we are to live our lives within the academy as writers and creatives, we should be able to practice our craft and our trade, as sister Maya says, with passion, compassion, humour and style. This, however, will not be possible so long as the process is driven by a culture of valorisation by publication numbers; unhealthy competition between universities, publishers and individual academics; and a drive for supernormal profits among publication houses. In this chapter I reflect on the complexities of these processes in the journal article production sector and suggest how we might make this a more human endeavour.

ABSTRACT The academic landscape is fraught with challenges, particularly for scholars whose identities intersect with marginalised backgrounds. This reflective paper explores the nuanced implications of revisions, corrections or rejections (RCRs) on the academic journey of a Black isiZulu-speaking African woman scholar in Audiology from South Africa. It contends that the effects of RCRs extend beyond the confines of a single manuscript, impacting the scholar’s sense of self, existence within the academic realm, and the deliberate ‘cancelling’ of one’s knowledge. Focusing on the unique challenges faced by African scholars, particularly the perceived emphasis on publishing as a measure of belonging, the paper employs a benefit-risk evaluation lens. This approach delves into the complex interaction between personal and environmental factors, shedding light on the multifaceted considerations that African scholars grapple with to establish their presence within the academic sphere. The paper outlines the well-known ‘publish or perish’ phenomenon, emphasising the hypercompetitive nature of the academic and research environment. Peer review, considered a critical component in the publication process, is explored for its role in quality assurance. However, the paper contends that the peer review process can inadvertently perpetuate inequalities, especially for scholars from underrepresented backgrounds. Thematic analysis of reviewer reports from papers I recently submitted forms the core of the paper. Seven emergent themes, such as the influence of proximity to native English speakers and the dominance of Western narratives, illustrate the challenges I faced in both local and international journals. Notably, the paper provides direct quotes exemplifying each theme, offering a very personalised perspective on the adversities encountered during the publication journey. The paper situates the field of audiology within the broader context of institutional and systemic racism, highlighting the underrepresentation of certain racial groups within the profession. It argues that this underrepresentation extends to knowledge generation and publishing, perpetuating the normalisation of Euro-American-centric norms and the exoticisation of Afrocentric standards. The reflective paper concludes by asserting that epistemological racism, intertwined with individual and institutional racism, stifles my pursuit of decolonisation and Africanisation of speech-language and hearing knowledge and practice. It contends that the peer review process, often Euro-American-centric, contributes to the silencing and exclusion of diverse knowledges, hindering local knowledge development and intellectual practices. In navigating the academic minefield, the paper calls for a re-evaluation of existing norms and practices within the peer review process to create a more inclusive and equitable academic environment for scholars with diverse backgrounds.

ABSTRACT In this article, the idea of revision is considered a useful moment in the writing phase to reflect on what it means to write from the Global South. Towards this, the article is contextualised within scholarship that highlights the lopsided publication terrains between the Global North and Global South and reflects on what it means to think about more considerate, generous, and productive ways of doing research as a more appropriate approach in the Global South. The argument maintained in the article is that by looking at the academic writer as an element in a larger process, it becomes possible to ponder on the role that interventions such as revision play in re-engaging and re-animating the writing process for purposes of productivity in contexts of global inequality. Examples are drawn from autobiographical accounts of the revision process as an opportunity to reflect on the care work that goes into publishing practices in the context of the Global South. I focus on my experiences working in the interdisciplinary field of African popular culture over a span of a decade, and what revision or being revised, has meant within the broader context of critical reflection.

ABSTRACT Writing on African subjects who do not enjoy significant research attention presents methodological problems when there are few or no archival resources from which to draw. This deficit of archive makes them appear to be devoid of epistemic value and illegible within conventional protocols of citation, theory building and publishing. If scholars continue to ignore them, that will further obscure their contribution to scholarship. In this article, I focus on my experience of writing on the Black actor Ken Gampu (1923–2003), whose success in Hollywood and in South Africa during apartheid makes him an extraordinary historical subject. Yet, Gampu’s life is largely unrecorded, traceable only in the films and television series he performed in, and significantly limited archival sources. The contradiction of his ‘celebrity’ during a politically repressive period, and the academic disregard of his life and work have birthed the methodological burden of presenting him to contemporary readership(s). In the light of these problems, I have begun to think about how undisciplined approaches can salvage the value of historical subjects – through disruptions of conventional methodologies. I argue that only by embarking on epistemic disobedience can we usefully reverse the erasure of academically disregarded and historically repressed subjects.