Geography Of Africa Research Articles

South African tourism geographies: progress and prospects

Tourism geography has developed into a dynamic sub-discipline of contemporary South African geographical scholarship. The investigation provides an overview of the development of South African tourism geography since the early 1970s, and traces its subsequent development. Since the first investigations, tourism geographers had an interest in the developmental potential which the tourism system presents for South Africa. It is shown that recent tourism research is generally framed by concerns for responsible tourism, pro-poor tourism impacts, tourism as a vehicle for local economic development, and the role of small, medium and micro enterprise (SMME) development in the tourism sector. The main contribution of the paper is to propose a range of new investigatory avenues that can build on the current scholarship, and considers potential threats to the future development of South African tourism geography.

Seriously ill? Diagnosing the state of medical geography in South Africa

South African research in medical geography was described in the early 1990s as ‘meagre and unsatisfactory’. But there was optimism for the future. This paper gauges the extent to which this subdiscipline of geography has, over the past two decades, lived up to these expectations. Our impression is that it has not grown significantly in South Africa. This, despite a substantial increase in interdisciplinary health research which might include geographers among its contributors. This paper reviews completed postgraduate work in medical geography, describes trends in research approaches to the connection between urbanization and health over the past two decades, and discusses reasons for the dearth of research contributions by South African geographers.

Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen’s African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery, by David Lambert

Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen’s African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery, by David Lambert

Practice and inspiration: Schweitzer's road to medicine and his view of life ethics

Albert Schweitzer established the hospital in the African jungle and practiced medicine for over a half of century. He proposed"reverence for life"and became a thought and practice unifier. The Schweitzer's Hospital was not only a medical institution, but also a social institution for education. Later, the school, consulting office and medical institute were also set up in Africa. For over a century, the Schweitzer's Hospital always insisted on the ethics of respecting individual and reverence for life, which enlightened modern medical practice and medical education. The introduction of the ethics of"reverence for life"to clinical practice would exert very important effect for establishing the harmony and equality of doctor-patient relationship.

Book Review: The writings of Mauritania and the western Sahara

The writings of Mauritania and the western Sahara, compiled by Charles C. Stewart with Sidi Ahmed Wuld Ahmed Salim, Arabic Literature of Africa vol. 5, (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2016), 2 vols.This was worth the wait. It is like a vast and deep sea of scholars and texts holding a dynamic history of learned discourse and disputation over a 350-year period. It is a tradition of scholarship that continues and the two parts that make up this work have entries on scholars who wrote in the early seventeenth century through to scholars who wrote well into the twentieth century, and even a few in the present century. The Arabic Literature of Africa (ALA) series gave us its first volume in 1994, on eastern Sudanic Africa. The ALA volume 4 which appeared in 2003, on western Sudanic Africa, covers a space adjoining the area covered here. The two volumes together provide an impressive perspective on Islamic scholarship on a vast swath of West African geography and history. There are points of connection and 'conversation,' so to speak, between ALA 4 and this ALA 5. However, these two volumes (the work is divided into two parts and totals a staggering two thousand pages) have benefitted from arriving later because they have improved upon the earlier ones in the series, as a research tool. For instance, the indices are over three hundred pages long, giving the researcher an Index of Authors of Derivative Works, Authors, Subjects, and finally a General Index. The index of "Authors of Derivative Works" is the first of its kind for the region; it is an important indicator of the place of the classical works of Islamic learning within the scholarship of the western Sahara. It is a tremendously useful way to sample those classical texts which the writers of the region were reading and commenting on. For classical 'Islamic studies' philologists, it is also a valuable resource for it points to which works travelled into the Sahara and were closely studied and commented upon. Other features also distinguish it from the earlier works in the series. In its own terms, it is simply outstanding and an excellent instrument for advanced research. Teaching students about the region's intellectual history and practices is helped immeasurably by the appearance of this work.An introduction and a background essay set the political and intellectual context for the scholars and their works in the bibliography. It is a concise and informative statement covering numerous topics such as the earliest writings in the region, the rise of Arabophone literacy and scholarship, the wars or skirmishes known as "Shurr Bubba" in the sixteenseventies, a turning-point in the region's history, and the development of education in a nomadic society without a central authority or state. This is followed by a survey of the educational system, the Mahazra and its curriculum, in which generations of students were schooled and the tradition of learning captured in this bibliography was reproduced.The authors are referenced in most instances by their so-called "tribal" grouping, which makes the contents pages rather slim: three pages giving 77 groupings. It might be hard for scholars to access a title or scholar if they do not know this affiliation but it makes for a less unwieldy listing. Thus, the importance of the extensive indices that follow in part II. At one stage, I felt that those indices deserved their own volume and I became stuck on that tail-end for a long time. The work is thoroughly crossreferenced; thus, it cross-references within the work and also to other, previous catalogues and the AMMS (West African Arabic Manuscript Project) online database.In order to test the quality of a bibliography, one has to use it. I looked at a number of entries in some detail. For example, one finds Shaykh Sidiyya 'al-Kabir' (d.1867/68) under the 'tribal' name Abyayri where he is scholar number 70 in the work (pp. 133-145). Not knowing his 'tribal' grouping, I encountered him there as I worked through volume 1 alphabetically. …

Mapping Black Movement, Containing Black Laughter: Ralph Ellison’s New York Essays

This essay analyzes Ralph Ellison’s nonfiction about New York during the Harlem Renaissance—especially his essay “An Extravagance of Laughter” and its redacted version as Esquire magazine’s “New York, 1936”—as way to engage with larger questions of movement in and through what Houston Baker dubs “the American geography of race.” Ellison’s 1986 account of his mapping of the inscrutable spaces of the urban North fifty years earlier yields, I argue, important insights into the cultural geography of race, the problematic historiographies of the Great Migration, and the adaptive, if psychically treacherous, performativity of (African) American identity. I unpack Ellison’s figure of the laughing barrel as a trope for Jim Crow–era attempts to control the spectacle of Black bodies and the unsettling sonics of Black laughter / Black sound. I then track the trajectory of Ellison’s essay itself, from Going to the Territory ’s mapping of hypervisual/invisible Black bodies/spaces to Esquire ’s nostalgic travelogue as instantiations of ongoing (failed) strategies of containment of African American bodies and full expressive humanity. Ellison’s papers from the Library of Congress and a critical synthesis of African American studies, cultural geography, and cultural studies inform the argument.

Achieving “Total Sanitation” in Rural African Geographies: Poverty, Participation and Pit Latrines in Eastern Zambia

Over one billion of the poorest people on earth continue to practice open defecation. A complex assemblage of factors, embedded within prevailing inequities and inequalities, continue to betray efforts to improve this. Subsidy-based projects have had little impact in rural Africa where sanitation remains under-prioritised by the state and donors. Community-led total sanitation (CLTS) offers a new, people-centric approach conceptually grounded in participatory development. But despite its broad appeal, the CLTS policy narrative has become equated with quick results, low-cost, provocative language and the potential for community self-help. Drawing on research in Katete district, Eastern Zambia, this paper explores tensions between CLTS theory, policy, practice and local realities. Rapidly scaled-up by local government, poor management and stakeholder engagement effectively diluted the approach, and continued the “projectification” of the sanitation sector. Open defecation, both symbolically and practically, represented an embedded marginalisation from the modern Zambian state where multiple barriers to latrine construction coexisted in the context of fragile livelihoods. In such agrarian communities, CLTS cannot be conceptualised as a blanket approach quickly bringing total sanitation to the masses. For its strengths to be realised in contexts of rural poverty, a targeted strategy that builds local institutional capacity and iteratively scales-up over time is needed. But realising this in practice requires moving beyond a prevailing emphasis on “open defecators” to engage complex issues of power and politics in sanitation governance.

Reinterpreting the Atlantic World

Reinterpreting the Atlantic World Amy M. Johnson Biography and the Black Atlantic. Edited by Lisa Lindsay and John Wood Sweet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic world. Edited by Cécile Vidal. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the politics of the Atlantic slave trade. By William Pettigrew. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen’s African geography & the struggle over Atlantic slavery. By David Lambert. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Atlantic Studies is a multi-disciplinary field, as is exemplified by Lisa Lindsay and John Wood Sweet’s recent edited collection, Biography and the Black Atlantic; Cécile Vidal’s edited volume, Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic world; William Pettigrew’s Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the politics of the Atlantic slave trade; and David Lambert’s Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen’s African geography & the struggle over Atlantic slavery. This is a disparate set of books—two edited collections and two monographs, one political and one geographic. Each book offers unique contributions in content and methodology to the field of Atlantic studies. Together these texts enhance our social, geographic and temporal framework of the Atlantic world and reveal creative and exciting sources and methodologies. Biography and the Black Atlantic is an important response to the quantitative studies of the Atlantic slave trade that proliferated in the last forty years. While quantitative studies were necessary to underscore the scope and magnitude of the tragedy of the Atlantic slave trade, the very humanity of those people was often lost in these studies amid the presentations of numbers. This edited volume is also an integral part of the many texts written using the framework of and in response to Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic introduced in his 1993 seminal work, The Black Atlantic. Like Gilroy, the authors in Biography and the Black Atlantic seek to understand Black experiences unmoored from national identities and specific geographies. They convincingly place conversations about Black identity and experiences in a historically complex frame of analysis. Although discussions of culture that were central to Gilroy’s analysis do not feature prominently in this compilation, the biographies are an important tool for moving beyond Gilroy’s Britain–United States nexus. As an example of the geographical breadth of this compilation, the essays of Martin Klein, Lisa Lindsay and Roquinaldo Ferreira deal with West Africa; Jon Sensbach’s essay spans the Dutch Caribbean and Germany; and the people in Rebecca Scott and Jean-Michel Hébrard’s essay circulate between the French Caribbean, Spanish Caribbean, Louisiana and Europe. Biography and the Black Atlantic extends Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic in other important ways. First, the biographies are not just of elites. The lives of women, slaves and former slaves are recovered in these pages. Moreover, the text extends the temporal scope of analysis. Whereas Gilroy was predominantly concerned with the modernity of the early twentieth century, the biographies presented here are set in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black Atlantic. Finally, Gilroy placed a great deal of emphasis on the exile and domination in which Black culture emerged in the Atlantic world. The contributors to Biography and the Black Atlantic challenge the hegemonic power of the slave system in shaping Black identity and experience. For example, David Dorr saw his naysayers as “mere obstacles to bypass on the journey to manly independence” (171). Though in some ways the chapter about Dorr exemplifies Gilroy’s concern with the focus on Black masculinity in Atlantic studies, his narrative nevertheless offers a valuable critique of the limits of “slave” identity. The authors in the twelve-chapter edited collection dealt admirably with two important issues. Their first challenge was evidentiary. Blacks in the Atlantic world had limited ability to write and preserve their personal histories. Consequently, some of the contributors to Biography and the Black Atlantic used fragmentary primary documents to reconstruct the lives of Blacks in the Atlantic world. For instance, Jon Sensbach relied on Moravian church records to construct a narrative of eighteenth-century Dutch-speaking former slave Rebecca Protten. Cassandra Pybus did the same...

David Lambert. Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen's African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery. viii + 309 pp., illus., bibl., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2013. $50 (cloth).

David Lambert. <i>Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen's African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery</i>. viii + 309 pp., illus., bibl., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2013. $50 (cloth).

The ‘Autobiography’ of Tippu Tip

This essay takes as its starting point an autobiography written in Kiswahili by the nineteenth-century Zanzibari slave trader Tippu Tip, and the genealogy of how it was initially read according to existing understandings of African geography and western genres. That manner of reading and interpretation has as its core the idea that Africa and Africans operate according to a historical logic fundamentally separate from that of the rest of the world. This mode of engagement often (unconsciously) persists in contemporary scholarship about the continent, and thereby reinscribes the colonial exception of Africa. Through rereading Tippu Tip's autobiography in accordance with its style and form – rather than its content alone – I offer a reading of not only the text, but also the dialectical relationship between coastal and interior African geography, which enables us to see how knowledge and ignorance were strategically deployed about the continent; and thereby offer a paradigm for postcolonial reading and scholarship that accounts for and includes both the legacy of colonialism and the cultural possibilities of cultural and social difference on the continent.

David Lambert. Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen's African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery.

David Lambert. Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen's African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery.

The Black Mass as Play: Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out

The Black Mass as Play: Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out

Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen's African geography and the struggle over Atlantic slavery

In Mastering the Niger, David Lambert recalls Scotsman James MacQueen (1778-1870) and his publication of A New Map of Africa in 1841 to show that Atlantic slavery - as a practice of subjugation, a source of wealth, and a focus of political struggle - was entangled with the production, circulation, and reception of geographical knowledge. Without ever setting foot on the continent, MacQueen took on the task of solving the Niger problem, that is, to successfully map the course of the river and its tributaries, and thus breathe life into his scheme for the exploration, colonization, and commercial exploitation of West Africa. Lambert illustrates how MacQueen's geographical research began, four decades before the publication of the New Map, when he was managing a sugar estate on the West Indian colony of Grenada. There MacQueen encountered slaves with firsthand knowledge of West Africa, whose accounts would form the basis of his geographical claims. Lambert examines the inspirations and foundations for MacQueen's geographical theory as well as its reception, arguing that Atlantic slavery and ideas for alternatives to it helped produce geographical knowledge, while geographical discourse informed the struggle over slavery.

Migration, Urbanization, and Political Power in Sub-Saharan Africa

African political geographies have been overlooked in the discussion of internal migration and urbanization. Yet institutional changes since the early 1990s altered the practices of acquiring and keeping power across Africa, and it is now possible to address how rural and urban areas have changed as a result. In this article, the focus is on how political practices interact with circular internal migration flows. “Democratic” practices depend on the manipulation of rural spatial clustering and migration, but modern political institutions effectively disenfranchise urban and migrant voters, resulting in the continued reproduction and exacerbation of spatial inequalities. Further, these are responsible for the poor conditions of urban areas, the proliferation of rural bias across states, and limited support for urban political identities and programmatic change.

Toward Expanding Links Between Political Geography and African Studies

AbstractAfrica receives limited attention from political geographers, and African studies scholars pay too little attention to political geography. In reviewing the recent literature on African political geography, several themes emerge. This essay concentrates on three of these: the new scramble for Africa, political ecology, and electoral geography. The first two are areas in which a fair amount of political geography work has been done, but where more focus on particularly urban dimensions is warranted. The third arena of research is found to be highly under‐represented in recent scholarship, despite its palpable potential for yielding new insights and greater synergies between African studies and the sub‐field of political geography.

Crime takes place: spatial situation(s) in Margie Orford’s fiction

Building on the early interests of scholars such as Hausladen (1995), recent academic writing on crime fiction has begun to give more credence to the significant role of place in the genre (see Schmid 2012), granting the form a sociocritical impact beyond assumed escapism. This article uses several krimi novels by Margie Orford to illustrate the genre's potential to move beyond descriptive “setting” in order to offer informed, located responses to the ways in which space, in particular social contexts, is established and mediated. Orford's treatment of various locales in her fiction grounds narrative in recognisably South/southern African geographies. At the same time, however, her interest in the question of social relation entails moving a reader from the casual acceptance of separate spaces (whether of “race”, class or gender) into challenging, critical forms of spatial, conceptual and experiential interconnection. Additionally, she works in satisfying ways with patterns of spatial scale familiar to readers of crime fiction, a range that at once satisfies popular genre expectations of atmosphere and thrill, even as she disconcerts received assumptions about the nature of places such as “home”. She also moves beyond national boundaries, tackling crime's internationalising impetus. Overall, Orford's novels illustrate elements of Reijnders notion of “guilty landscape” (2009), creating intriguing links among place, history, memory and uncertain futures.

Are South African Geography education students ready for problem-based learning?

Problem-based learning (PBL) is one of the possible training strategies that could be more fully implemented in the South African formal education system. The intention to migrate from teacher-centred to learner-centred instructions in higher education institutions and schools makes PBL a plausible option. Geography education students might be exposed to PBL because their training implies the acquisition of abilities to solve real-world situations at various geographical scales. This paper explores the perception of second- and third-year students in a BEd programme in Potchefstroom, South Africa. The study uses a mixed-method research approach based on questionnaire application, students' learning journal entries and field notes. Findings from the study indicate that students show very positive perceptions of PBL as a training strategy for teaching and learning. A gender difference regarding general aspects of PBL, independent learning, workload, assessment rubrics and the different role-players in PBL indicates that female students hold more positive perceptions of the PBL experience. Overall, the results indicate that students with higher academic performances in most instances hold more positive perceptions of the PBL experience.

Post-Colonial Analysis of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness tells the journey of Marlow through the African jungle and his search for the European Kurtz who exploits the natives by imposing violence. It is mainly based upon Conrad’s own experience in Congo. Conrad learned how Europeans exploited and traded the natives for their own benefits during his own journey. The book is regarded as an attack on imperialism and criticizes immoral treatments of the European colonizers in Africa in the 19th century. Keith Booker states that the book deals with issues such as imperialism, capitalism, race, and gender that were very much at the forefront of the turn-of-the century European mind. Conrad’s ambivalent treatment of these issues is extremely representative of the way they were treated in any number of European discourses of the time (217). Besides, Chinua Achebe in his An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness comments that Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as 'the other world’, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality (338). Although Achebe puts forward that the novel is in favor of colonialism, I consider that Conrad does not intend to write it to appreciate colonialism and therefore the purpose of this study is to approach Conrad’s Heart of Darkness from post-colonial perspective by taking European imperialism and colonialism over Africa into consideration in order to clarify how Conrad has deconstructed binary oppositions of colonialism by subverting the general idea of the Europeans towards Africa in the 19th century.

The importance of everyday encounters: young scholars reflect on fieldwork in Africa

This edited series explores the experiences of conducting field-based geographic research in an African setting with a particular focus on the importance of everyday encounters and relationships. As graduate students preparing for fieldwork, we spend much time thinking about and planning our research methods, yet it is often only when we begin our work that we realize the ways in which seemingly mundane acts, encounters and events shape and influence the kinds of knowledge we produce. With this mini-special issue we aim firstly to make space for the rich and valuable methodological reflections of graduate students who have recently returned from the field, voices we less frequently hear in the pages of scholarly journals. Secondly, we aim to contribute to the well-established work on critical methodologies in Geography and to prompt wider debate, discussion and collaboration within African Geographies in particular. The series includes three pieces from young scholars working in a diverse range of geographic sub-fields, using varied methodological approaches, and writing on differing aspects of the research process. Through a focus on movement, mindfulness and the seemingly mundane, they each highlight the ways in which a thoughtful attention to the everyday has enriched their work on the African continent.

The Black Atlantic as Dystopia:

The Black Atlantic as Dystopia: