African Head Research Articles

Black tronies in seventeenth-century Flemish art and the African presence

In this article I examine the production of tronies or head studies of people of African origin made by the Flemish artists Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Jan I Brueghel, Jacob Jordaens and Gaspar de Crayer in an attempt to uncover their use of Africans1 as models. In order to contextualise the research, the actual presence of Africans in Flanders is investigated. Although no documentation exists to calculate even an approximate number of Africans living in Flanders at that time, travel accounts of foreigners visiting the commercial city of Antwerp testify to its cosmopolitan character. A general perception of black people in those days can be extrapolated from the notebooks of Rubens and contemporary theological views. The examination of black tronies starts with the studies of Rubens, made after live models first in Italy and then in his workshop in Antwerp. By comparing various African head studies and considering them in the context of contemporary studio practices involving assistants (Van Dyck) and collaborators (Brueghel), a historically more accurate picture emerges regarding the production of such studies. Jordaens and De Crayer also made black tronies for use in history paintings, and by tracing their appearance in a select number of works it is possible to distinguish their respective models. Assumptions regarding the extent of the influence of Rubens are thus put in perspective while giving credit to contributions made by Van Dyck, Jordaens and De Crayer to the study of African people.

Political stability remains a challenge - Interview: Babacar Gaye, Special Representative of the Secretary-General in the Central African Republic and Head of the UN Multinational Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA)

In April 2014, the United Nations Security Council authorized the establishment of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA). The mission, led by Babacar Gaye, the special representative of the UN secretary-general in the country, is mandated to protect civilians and support peace efforts. Damian Cardona, a UN staffer, recently sat down with Mr. Gaye, a Senegalese national, in the capital Bangui for an interview for Africa Renewal. Following are the excerpts:

Detection of Bartonella quintana in African body and head lice.

Currently, the body louse is the only recognized vector of Bartonella quintana, an organism that causes trench fever. In this work, we investigated the prevalence of this bacterium in human lice in different African countries. We tested 616 head lice and 424 body lice from nine African countries using real-time polymerase chain reaction targeting intergenic spacer region 2 and specific B. quintana genes. Overall, B. quintana DNA was found in 54% and 2% of body and head lice, respectively. Our results also show that there are more body lice positive for B. quintana in poor countries, which was determined by the gross domestic product, than in wealthy areas (228/403 versus 0/21, P < 0.001). A similar finding was obtained for head lice (8/226 versus 2/390, P = 0.007). Our findings suggest that head lice in Africa may be infected by B. quintana when patients live in poor economic conditions and are also exposed to body lice.

The Failure of Categories: Haitians in the United Nations Organization in the Congo, 1960–64

The Failure of Categories: Haitians in the United Nations Organization in the Congo, 1960–64 Regine O. Jackson The 1960s was a tumultuous decade in world history, especially across the continent of Africa where almost thirty European colonies were dismantled. Although experiences and obstacles varied by country, colonial withdrawal opened up new opportunities for African nationalists as well as black expatriates.1 Activists and radicals from the United States and the Caribbean flocked to postcolonial Africa, along with businessmen and investors seeking to capitalize on promises of development. Kevin Gaines, whose work has become indispensable to the history of black internationalism, documents the experiences of African Americans in Ghana: Professionals, and technicians seeking refuge from constrained opportunities . . . were welcomed by Nkrumah, who, perhaps more than any other African head of state of his time, encouraged blacks from the Western world to emigrate and lend their skills to building the new nation.2 While Ghana stands out, according to Gaines, because Kwame Nkrumah made it a “destination of radical hope” for black expatriates,3 the Congo was also a significant site for different reasons. In what became known as the “Congo Crisis,” former colonial governments and international organizations played decisive roles in the transition to independence as well as in the experiences of the individuals whose diasporic subjectivities led them to Africa. The United Nations and its specialized agencies began recruitment efforts to replace European administrators of African bureaucracies as early as 1958. After the Democratic Republic of Congo achieved independence from Belgium in June 1960, the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld launched the most extensive and prominent among these efforts: the United Nations Organization in the Congo or ONUC (Organisation des National Unies au Congo).4 For four years, the Civilian Operations Program recruited [End Page 34] French-speaking professionals and technicians from all over the world to help establish the country’s infrastructure and to supplement the small Congolese leadership class. Hundreds of Haitians—teachers, professors, engineers, and doctors—went to Africa as part of the ONUC program. By 1962, Haitian émigrés constituted the second largest contingent of UN staff experts working in the Congo.5 Maurice Dartigue was Chief of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Africa Division. Dr. Athemas Bellerive directed the World Health Organization (WHO) medical team that included several Haitian doctors (see Figure 1). And in 1963, ONUC’s military force was commanded by Max H. Dorsinville.6 A relatively large number of Haitians participated in the UN programs in Benin and Cameroon, as well as in the Congo. Some Haitians spent career lifetimes with their families there. Yet what is known about the experiences of the estimated 7,500 Haitians in African countries amounts to undocumented fragments that have accumulated over time and are repeated in literature and various commentaries. The historiography of post–World War II pan-Africanism focuses primarily on Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa as sites of resistance and black internationalist activism. As Martin and West note, referring to Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and The Practice of Diaspora by Brent Hayes Edwards, “That literature, even in its more recent diasporic and Black Atlantic variations, displays a consistent Afro-Saxon bias.”7 When Haiti is mentioned at all, it is frozen in time in 1804; in popular and scholarly perception, Haiti’s impact on the world is effectively limited to the Haitian Revolution. The connections between Haiti and Africa—and the relationships between Haitian and African peoples—are imagined as largely symbolic, with no attention to the ways Haitian émigrés took tangible, self-determined action on behalf of African sovereignty.8 Equally troubling, Africa only enters the scholarship on Haitian migration in the work of epidemiologists. Here, the “Haitian hypothesis” proliferates, alleging that Haitian people brought AIDS to the United States in the 1970s after returning from Africa.9 The overall effect of these accounts is that Africa is written out of the Haitian diaspora and vice versa. More familiar narratives of migration to North America, Western Europe, and the nearby Caribbean dominate the scholarship, which naturalizes certain sites as destinations for Haitian migrants and for transnational political activity.10 The gaps in the...

On Robert Chrisman's poetry

Robert Chrisman did not feature himself as a poet, at least not to me during the years we did scholarly work together at the University of Michigan. I served as director of his PhD dissertation on Robert Hayden and then we coedited the volume Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry for the University of Michigan Press’s Under Discussion Series in 2001. I had read his slim volume Minor Casualties when it appeared in 1993, and occasionally remarked on some favorite poem, but he waved away any reference to the book and insisted that his best work would appear in his next volume—a customary gesture of modesty for all poets who always imagine that their achievement follows an upward trajectory. yet he never showed me these poems, perhaps worried that I would feel constrained by friendship to publish some in the journal I edited, Michigan Quarterly Review. He was right that I would have wanted to print them, but not from a sense of obligation. I would have felt privileged to circulate verse of such high quality. Though we never had a chance to talk about the poems eventually gathered into The Dirty Wars I at least had those precious months between publication and his death to correspond with him about the volume. It was such a significant advance over Minor Casualties, I wrote him, that it had the range and texture of a lifetime’s gathering, more like the capaciousness of Hayden’s Angle of Ascent than one of his chapbooks. He wrote me in response, “you are right on all counts regarding the composition of the volume—it has been slow work and cumulative, thus it took on the feel of a Selected Poems, as I sought to integrate its various strands.” from the stunning multicolor image on the cover—the sculpture of a female African head referred to in the poem “Olmecca”—to the final poem of blessing for a young child born “from the dawn of waters,” the book takes the entirety of time and space as its subject matter, though it focuses most intensively on the poet’s own journey through life. The cover image calls attention to “Olmecca” as a key poem within the volume’s overall purposes. The mysterious icon is blunt, “the jaws heavy,” but “the eyes global, gaze serene.” He writes of the body that suffered from decapitation, “its absence is an ache / for us”; the body carries a message to our epoch of the wounds undergone by Africans brought to this land as slaves, “born in a baptism of boats” with new names but no free choice of action. The loss of that an-

South Africa’s Future AIDS Governance: A focused elite survey

After Thabo Mbeki’s removal as South African head of state in September 2008 the country emerged from a period of AIDS denialism, and policymakers at last embraced a biomedical response model. Nearly six years hence, the authors interviewed key members of South Africa’s AIDS elite in government, civil society, as well as leading epidemiologists. This article presents this elite’s opinions of South Africa’s current response to the epidemic, and identifies critical decision points that will determine its future trajectory.

African Pastoral Development Policy Frame Work Principles and Strategies: Implication for National Development Policies and Research

Africa has nearly 270 million (FAO, 2012) people (41 percent percentages) living in dry lands. Pastoral systems in Africa’s are found in the vast arid and semi-arid areas. African pastoralists and pastoral culture is a core part of Africa’s culture, history and heritage. The livestock and natural resource management practices used by pastoralists require well organized collective action, especially in the harsh environments in which they live. Pastoralists organize themselves to split herds and move animals to distant grazing areas, to control access to communal grazing areas, to manage the watering of livestock, and to provide security. Partly for these reasons, pastoralists have very strong social organizations and leadership. The Policy Framework for Pastoralism in Africa arises from the need for a continent-wide platform to effectively address, in a holistic manner, the many challenges confronting pastoral communities. The framework defined the guidelines, principles and modalities for combining all the essential elements needed for a better understanding of pastoral issues, and for the development and implementation of interventions to address these issues. While facilitating engagement with regional and country-level planning processes, the policy framework can play a catalytic role in promoting development in pastoral communities by providing the African platform tool for harnessing the economic and technical resources needed to empower pastoral communities to better manage their resources, for their own long-term benefit. The Policy Framework for Pastoralism in Africa is the first continent-wide policy initiative Aims to secure, protect and improve the lives, livelihoods and rights of African pastoralists. The policy framework is taken as a platform for mobilizing and coordinating political commitment to pastoral development in Africa. This presentation is based on the review of African policy frame work recently indorsed by the African Head of States in Addis Ababa. (2010). Outcome of the consultative workshop by Ethiopian Pastoral Research and Development Network (EPRDN). The objective of the presentation is to familiarize the participants with the African policy frame work and indicate its implication to the higher education and research.

Parsing Pragmatics

Parsing Pragmatics

Home Literacy Environment of African American Head Start Children

Researchers have documented culturally specific family literacy practices in which low-income families engage, which are often a function of the context in which the family is currently embedded. These practices are well documented in ethnographic literature. Although this evidence exists, its utility is limited due to small sample sizes and lack of quantitative documentation on their contribution to children’s language and literacy development. This study attempted to quantify those culturally specific family literacy practices. 51 low-income African-American mother-child dyads participated. The contribution of multiple literacy practices was examined in relation to child language and literacy outcomes. Most low-income African-American families engaged in multiple literacy practices. Recommended areas for future research directions are discussed.

Isolating the Ethnic Effect on Political Behavior: A Survey Experiment Using Mixed Ethnicity Leaders in Benin

Do African voters favor co-ethnic candidates? African elections have been characterized as little more than ethnic head counts (Horowitz 1985), and electoral patterns often confirm this impression. But individual-level surveys of the African voter paint a more complex portrait, highlighting the role that performance evaluations play along- side ethnicity (Bratton et al. 2011). In fact, efforts to identify the independent ethnic effect on voting preferences meet a particularly formidable challenge. Insofar as ethnicity is an ascriptive characteristic of a person, not a variable we can randomly assign, and insofar as ethnicity is typically correlated with other characteristics such as class or partisanship, identifying its independent causal effect has proven difficult. This paper offers a new identification strategy that sheds light on whether African voters favor co-ethnic candidates because of ethnicity per se. Relying on mixed-ethnicity leaders and their plausible membership in more than one ethnic group, this paper proposes and shows that survey experiments can successfully measure the independent effect of ethnicity: holding the identity of an actual African head of State constant, the manipulation randomly assigns one ethnic cue versus the other. The method is applied and tested in Benin, a small West African democracy led by a mixed-identity leader. The results confirm that, in this context, ethnicity plays an independent, causal role on the African voter’s decision, and confirm the effectiveness of the identification strategy.

Reproductive biology, length-weight relationship and condition factor of the African snake head, Parachanna obscura , from River Oshun, South-west Nigeria

Aspects of the biology of the African snake head, Parachanna obscura, obtained from River Oshun, South-west Nigeria, from August 2006 to February 2007, were studied. Fish were captured with gill nets. The species attained a maximum total length of 36.4 cm and body weight of 389.36 g. The length/weight relationship indicated allometric growth for males and isometric growth for females. Gonado-somatic index ranged between 1.1 and 2.8% in the females. Values of condition factor were high for males. There were more females than males, and immature fish dominated the catch. Eggs ranged in size between 0.88 and 1.11 mm, while fecundity estimates ranged between 1711 and 4000 and were not related to length and body weight. P. obscura in this study did not show any distinct seasonal pattern of breeding. Key words: Parachanna obscura, River Oshun, Nigeria, reproductive biology.

At the Edge of the Modern? Diplomacy, Public Relations, and Media Practices During Houphouët-Boigny's 1962 Visit to the United States

Centred on the first post-independence state visit of Ivorian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny to the United States in May 1962, this article critically engages the recent scholarly attention that has focused on modernisation theory and international media scholarship as they apply to African diplomacy. Contrary to the pervasive post-war modernisation paradigm, it is argued that postcolonial African governments had appropriated a form of managing foreign public affairs that satisfied the logic of media performance of modern nations. If anything, the interwar and post-war nationalist upheavals in Africa provided a training ground for the likes of Houphouët-Boigny who readily appropriated Euro–American forms of political performance to advance their agenda in the public (transnational) sphere. Whereas Houphouët-Boigny and his envoys clearly displayed dexterity all along their American visit, the article demonstrates that mass communication outlets played an equally critical role in the performance of this singular moment in transnational statecraft. Analyzing the coverage of the media with historical hindsight, it appears that the Ivorian press particularly stood out because of its celebration of the African head of state and his visit. Bringing nuance to this seeming confirmation of the radical difference of African media practices and their complicity with the state, the article claims that journalists in all three countries subscribed to a “modernist” metaphysics that nurtured and was informed by the culturally chauvinistic logic of the nation-state. Thus, it concludes that the normative comparativism that has usually sustained the historiography of international media studies is more than problematic.

David and Goliath: The Polarised Media Portrayal of the Politicians in Egypt

President Hosni Mubarak is currently the 5th longest living African head of State, having been in power for 29 years since the assassination of Anwar Sadat. In the most recent elections in 2005, Mubarak won with 88% of the vote. However, if you asked Egyptians away from the prying eyes of police officers, army troops or presidential guards whether they support him or not, the overwhelming answer would be one of hatred, bitterness and resentment against a leader whom they feel has failed his people at every turn.Of course, the media has no small part in the falsification of the sentiments of the nation. In this paper I will address how the newspapers and television channels, many of which are under state-controlled, have built an image of Mubarak as defender, protector, peacemaker and economic saviour, which at best is untrue and at worst deliberately fabricated. I will also address how these same media outlets have vilified any opposition that might face him, from the state media’s endorsement of the imprisonment of Ayman Noor to the more recent return of former IAEA chief, Elbaradei.Over a quarter of the population aged 15 and above in Egypt are illiterate; there is, thus, a heavy reliance on the visual media in swaying the political opinions of Egyptians. I intend to support my argument by drawing upon photos of the billboards that line the streets of Egypt from the capital, Cairo, to smaller towns and on highways in between. Mubarak’s face in its various guises from the now tattered and dirty posters of his youthful 1980’s face through to more stern photos taken at the turn of the century provide an almost farcical storybook of a dictator who simply refuses to give up power.

Has the NFL’s Rooney Rule Efforts ‘‘Leveled the Field’’ for African American Head Coach Candidates?

Madden (2004) and Madden and Ruther (2009) provide evidence that African American National Football League (NFL) head coaches significantly out-performed their white counterparts between 1990 and 2002. They conclude that this evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that African Americans had to be better coaches than whites in order to be hired as a head coach in the NFL. In 2002, the NFL promulgated the Rooney Rule requiring NFL teams to interview a minority candidate when appointing new head coaches, as well as other affirmative efforts. This paper analyzes whether the performance advantage of African American head coaches has been eliminated in the time since the Rooney Rule's affirmative efforts have been in effect. The paper also examines racial differentials in performance in other NFL coaching positions that were less affected by Rooney Rule affirmative efforts, finding no similar time trends in performance differentials by race.

Coping Strategies of African American Head and Neck Cancer Survivors

A cross-sectional study was conducted with 50 African American head and neck cancer survivors. Common coping strategies were identified and examined in relation with quality of life and relationship well-being. Coping through support from God, seeking emotional support from family and friends, and helping others were the most commonly used strategies. Having emotional support, being strong and self-reliant, and engaging in distracting activities with family and friends had strongest associations with quality of life. Coping through emotional support, help from God, assistance from one's church family to maintain religious practices, helping others, and engaging in distracting activities with others was more strongly associated with relationship well-being. Future intervention studies should consider these strategies and their possible impact on the physical, psychological, and relationship well-being of this population.

I'm the King of the World?: Barry Bonds and the "Race" for the Record

It was inevitable--though not entirely welcomed--that as long as Barry Bonds remained healthy and pitchers threw pitches in the general vicinity of the strike zone, Bonds would break Hank Aaron's Major League Baseball all-time home run record. There were a few other certainties in the 2007 season: despite Bonds never failing a drug test, the issue of performance-enhancing drugs would dominate the discussion; the media response to Bonds breaking the record would range from benign indifference to outright hostility; and race would exist just below the surface of the discussion. As media continues to encroach into citizen's everyday lives through their television, radio, Internet, cell phone, and iPod, how an event is covered by media representatives becomes as important, if not more important, than the event itself. In a sports context, this means that sportswriters and commentators have tremendous power to influence the ways in which fans and the general public view persons and events. Anyone who has read a Spiderman comic book or seen the immensely popular films of the same name is familiar with the adage: with great power comes great responsibility. Unfortunately, sportswriters and commentators have not always framed sporting events and controversies in a fair and balanced manner, particularly when race and ethnicity intersect with sport (i.e., Duke Lacrosse case, NBA dress code issue, etc.). One possible explanation for the racial blind spot comes from Critical Race Theorist Charles R. Lawrence III, who argues Americans share a common historical and cultural heritage in which racism has played and still plays a dominant role. Because of this shared experience, we also inevitably share many ideas, attitudes, and beliefs that attach significance to an individual's race and induce negative feelings and opinions about nonwhites. To the extent that this cultural belief system has influenced all of us, we are all racists. At the same time, most of us are unaware of our racism. We do not recognize the ways in which our cultural experience has influenced our beliefs about race or the occasions on which those beliefs affect our actions. In other words, a large part of the behavior that produces racial discrimination is influenced by unconscious racial motivation. (1) If Lawrence is correct, then race permeates all of our actions whether we are conscious of it or not. It stands to reason that unconscious racial attitudes influence the ways in which sportswriters discuss sport issues involving race and ethnicity generally and the ways Bonds's home run chase has been framed more specifically. When MLB began the integration process and sportswriters began paying attention to athletes of color, racist attitudes were the norm and could be expressed freely. Since overt racism is no longer tolerated, the negative attitudes created by the shared racist history will find an outlet, and in this case, the ways in which Bonds's pursuit of Aaron's record has been framed provides such an outlet. Two thousand seven was a banner year for race in sport--in both positive and negative ways. The year began on a hopeful note when the Chicago Bears' Lovie Smith and the Indianapolis Colts' Tony Dungy became the first African American head coaches in the National Football League to reach the Super Bowl. (2) Unfortunately, it only took two months for the glow of Smith and Dungy's accomplishment to fade. On April 3, 2007, while the Rutgers women's basketball team was playing its first championship title game, radio talk show host Don Imus and his producer Bernard McGuirk referred to the team as nappy headed hos. (3) Less than two weeks later, MLB celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first regular-season game with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Many players, coaches, and managers opted to wear the number 42, including the entire Houston Astros team, which did not have any U.S.-born black players on its roster. …

Racial Integration of Coaching

Using National Football League (NFL) data from 1987 to 2007, we examine the hiring of African American head coaches. Our results partly support an innovation explanation in that integration proceeded more rapidly in larger population centers. In contrast, we find only mixed and weak evidence that winning organizations proceeded first in hiring Black managers as in the case of using Black players. This difference in the hiring process of management versus labor may reflect a difference in the relative importance of endowment versus training. Our evidence also indicates that individual owner preferences matter along with changes in social pressures over time. As with player integration, it appears that a full generation is needed for the process to work itself out.

How Leadership Development and Positive Mentorship of an African American Female Head Basketball Coach Have Had an Impact in the Lives of Her Players, Assistant Coaches, and Peers

The notion of whether athletics builds character among its student-athletes continues to be a strong debate among researchers, legislatures, and most particularly, coaches, athletics directors, student-athletes, and parents. Coaches at all levels and in all sports can, and many do, play a vital role in the character development of their players. This is done by setting high expectations, not only in how to play the game, but how to become good citizens (Cohen, 1993). This study examined how one African American female exemplary head coach has had an impact on the lives of her players, assistant coaches, and peers by means of leadership development and positive mentorship. Using a case study approach, this qualitative study focused on the character development and positive mentorship an African American female head basketball coach and the impact that she has had on her players, assistant coaches, and peers. This research centered on the leadership behaviors developed by Kouzes and Posner (1995), extracting common themes, and, on identifying factors that are aligned with the leadership behaviors and mentoring traits of an exemplary coach who has influenced the lives of her players, assistant coaches, and peers who are used as the secondary participants in the study.

Institutional Racism within the Print Media: A Content Analysis of Sports Illustrated's Media Coverage of Black NFL Head Coaches

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the prevalence of institutional racism in the coverage of African American and Caucasian National Football League (NFL) head coaches who have appeared in Sports Illustrated from 1998 through 2004; the resultant impact on interscholastic athletics and student athletes will be explored. This study applies institutional racism and framing theories to determine to what degree, if any, differences occur between African American and Caucasian NFL head coaches in terms of cover photographs, subheads, kickers, editorials/opinions, and sport blurbs in <i>Sports Illustrated.</i>

Kennedy and Touré: A Success in Personal Diplomacy

Entering the White House at the crest of the African independence movement, John F. Kennedy and many of his advisors believed that Africa had surpassed Asia as the most permeable battlefield in the East–West Cold War struggle. While the battle lines of the Cold War had already been clearly drawn in Europe and in much of Asia, newly independent Africa was wide open for superpower competition. The central component of Kennedy's approach to dealing with Africa was his use of personal diplomacy with the leaders of that continent. This article is a case study of Kennedy's first successful use of personal diplomacy with an African head of State—Guinea's Sékou Touré.