African Identity Research Articles

Hybrid ‘Authenticities’ in youth popular culture: performing costume and identity in the work of South Africa’s Sho Madjozi

The professional stage act of one of South Africa’s newest musical prodigies, Sho Madjozi, may be analysed as a quintessential Afropolitan example of the innovative and hybrid combination of music, costume, and dance in urban youth popular culture in Africa. This paper analyses the dynamic intersection between costume, music, and dance, presenting it as a crucial site where urban youth popular culture can reimagine tradition, while simultaneously demonstrating that contemporary African cultural identities exist in a constant state of flux. The paper borrows from scholarly insights on hybridity, identity, the Afropolitan and popular culture, as well as other writings in youth agency and popular culture, to argue that South Africa’s Sho Madjozi belongs with a tradition of contemporary urban youth performance culture that continuously resurrects and destabilizes elements of the past as it reimagines the future. Sho Madjozi’s unique style as a rap artist in Tsonga is presented as an illustration of the progressive role that contemporary urban youths in Africa can play as proponents of cultural preservation, even as they stand at the cross-roads between the old and the new.

West African Sufism and the matter of Black life

AbstractIn this article, I consider how migration practices around the Black Atlantic and discourses of repatriation mobilize Black African diasporic Muslim identities in present-day Senegal and in a mosque in South Carolina that is situated on land that was formerly a slave plantation. I use the term ‘reversion’ as a vocabulary of ‘diasporic becoming’ to signal how notions of Islamic piety are coupled with a politics of Black Atlantic Muslimness in the context of a West African Sufi tariqa – or ‘Black Atlantic Sufism’. Moreover, I consider how identity formation and African Muslim ancestry are impacted by discourses of geographic return and repatriation that are linked to spiritual tourism.

Consequences of Colonialism to the History and Lives of the Garifuna People of St. Vincent.

Garifuna people have lived on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent for over 300 years. Enslaved Africans who had survived the sinking of two Spanish ships in the 1600s became the first non-American group to settle on the island. Land ownership struggles, racism and discrimination and attempts at cultural erasure mark their history. This paper analyzes the relations and consequences of colonialism to the current status of the neglect of the Garifuna of St. Vincent. It argues that the arrival of Spanish, French, and British to St. Vincent influenced the genocide of Caribs, the creation of stereotypes associated with their people, and the spread of academic literature based on false narratives of their stories. These consequences led to the current struggles that the Garifuna face on the island and in their fight to rewrite historical memory and knowledge. Finally, it is essential to recognize their progress in rebuilding an identity of self-recognition by restoring historical memory and demanding governmental recognition. They have sought to situate themselves as people who live, fight, and exude their mixed culture of Arawak and black ancestry in a transnational territory. However, their case is complex. They carry indigenous and African identities, which insert them into movements and struggles on transnational networks and narratives of belonging around indigenous and black or Afro descendants' movements.

Pan-African solidarity in South Africa: An empirical public opinion analysis

Social cohesion issues, such as xenophobia and racism, are major societal challenges for South Africa. What can be put forward to address these challenges? By drawing together separate threads of literature from Pan-Africanism and common ingroup identities, the study puts forward the Pan-African Solidarity thesis: low levels of supranational identification with Africa undermines social cohesion in South Africa and low supranational identifications are caused by local ideational/socio-psychological factors as well as cluing from political elites. This thesis is unique, mass identifications with Africa are understudied and little is known about how people in the country identify with the continent. In order to validate this Pan-African Solidarity thesis, the article will answer three important questions: (i) are mass identifications with Africa in South Africa low?; (ii) are attachment to an African identity associated with anti-minority views?; and (iii) what is driving mass identifications with Africa? An IPSOS funded attitudinal dataset fielded in four of the country’s nine provinces was used to answer these questions. Results provide empirical support for the Pan-African Solidarity thesis and found that a continental identity was related to intolerance of different outgroups (e.g., racial minorities, refugees and cross-border migrants). This is consistent with the expectations of the Common Ingroup Identity Model. But the study also makes original contributions to the literature, finding that the formation of continental identifications is informed by South Africa’s history of white settler colonialism. Cross-border contact, retrospective sociotropic evaluations, pro-black sentiment and trust in national elites were identified as determinants of citizens' identification with Africa.

Identity formation at the dawn of liturgical inculturation in the Ethiopian Episcopal Church

This article reflects on the impact of the inculturation of liturgy in the Ethiopian Episcopal Church (EEC) on identity formation within the context of African Christianity. In the EEC, the quest for African Christian identity formation is essential in understanding the role of black culture at the advent of the inculturation of liturgy. Inculturation can be viewed as the meeting and interaction of the Christian gospel and local cultures where neither the liturgy nor the cultures are superior than the other. Thus, it is vital to understand the inculturation of liturgy and its implications for African Christian identity in the EEC. There is a need for an official guiding principle or doctrinal and theological position on use of language and instruments associated with ancestor veneration at all levels of the EEC. The aim of this article is to clarify how the transformation of the EEC liturgy shaped the African Christianity’s identity of its members. It also attempts to provide clarification on the use of language, symbols, and instruments associated with traditional healers in the liturgy and how it creates identity confusion within the EEC. Lastly, we discuss some of the limitations in the liturgical inculturation endeavour in the EEC.Contribution: This article contributes to a wider discourse of Christian identity formation from the perspective of the coming together of Christianity and African culture. It also contributes to the quest of EEC members for being authentic Christians while also being proud Africans. Specifically, it contributes to the EEC’s quest for African identity through the inculturation of liturgy.

Sustaining indigenous African choral music identity: A study on Ndwamaṱo George Mugovhani’s composition

Ndwamaṱo George Mugovhani is a distinguished scholar, emeritus professor, composer, and arranger of Venda choral music in South Africa. The researcher’s study uses the qualitative research method and the interview method grounded in autobiography theory to collect data about Mugovhani. As yet, Mugovhani’s contribution is undocumented. He is a well-recognised academic and NRF-rated professor. Mugovhani is an African music composer who played a significant role in establishing and preserving Venda choral music and African choral music identity in the twenty-first century. This study also provides an autobiography of Mugovhani that discusses his upbringing, schooling, and tertiary education, which shaped his career as a scholar and composer. Mugovhani’s notable compositions are Zwi Do Fhela Ngani, Zwi Do Fhela Ngani and Rendani Mapholisa, among many others. This article established that Mugovhani’s compositions use modality which is commonly used in African indigenous music. The article reveals that Mugovhani’s African compositions were largely influenced by Mzilikazi James Khumalo. The article affirms that Mugovhani’s compositions continue to sustain the South African Venda choral music identity. This article concludes by stating that the South African choral music genre has evolved as a unique genre that is rooted in indigenous African culture and identity.

Impact of Lagos Photo in Mainstreaming Photography as Visual Art in Nigeria

More than ever before, the medium of Photography has gained wider acceptance in Nigeria as a mainstream art form in exhibitions and in art festivals. Previously regarded as mere result of a mechanical process, products of Photography are now viewed as part of a wider image-making culture in the visual arts of the 21st Century which the artist uses as a tool, like other art forms to frame statements on relevant issues. Using Lagos Photo, a platform established by a Nigerian artist and entrepreneur in 2010, this paper examines the trends and developments that led to the status of photography as contemporary art medium in Nigeria. In its 8th year, the festival has contributed immensely in constructing a new identity for Photography as an authentic art medium in Nigeria. This paper situates the achievements of Lagos Photo within the wider matrix of what Silva (2018) calls “other successful precedents and lineages” in the history of the development of photography in Nigeria. Keywords: Lagos Photo, African Identity, Photography, Festivals, Exhibitions, Workshops DOI: 10.7176/ADS/104-02 Publication date: March 31 st 2023

Dilemmas of resistance: How concerns for cultural aspects of identity shape and constrain resistance among minority groups

ABSTRACT A major theme in social psychological models of collective action is that shared social identity is a critical foundation for resistance and collective action. In this review, we suggest that this foundational role of social identity can be double edged for many minority groups because material disadvantage is often coupled with the historical erosion of key aspects of ingroup culture and identity. Focusing on the role of ingroup language in Welsh national identity and history in relation to African identity, we present an integrative review of our research on five different dilemmas of resistance that can arise when perceived threats to socio-cultural aspects identity sit alongside threats to the material position (in terms of status and power) of the group. We conclude that the central role of social identity in collective action and resistance can itself present challenges for groups whose core sense of who they are has been eroded..

Political Identity as Temporal Collapse: Ethiopian Federalism and Contested Ogaden Histories

Abstract Since the 1980s, analyses of African political identities have emphasized identity manipulation as a governance tool. In the Somali Horn of Africa, however, politicians’ efforts to reinvent identities confront rigid understandings of genealogical clanship as a key component of identity and political mobilization. This article explores how government efforts to construct a new ‘Ethiopian–Somali’ identity within Ethiopia’s ethnic-federal system are entangled with attempts to reinterpret clan genealogies and histories. We focus on efforts to revise the history of clans within the broader Ogaden Somali clan group and trace the possibilities and limits of these revisions in relation to legacies of colonialism as well as popular understandings of Ogaden identity. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research, we show that political struggles over Somalis’ integration with Ethiopia orient around Somali clanship, but that clanship is not a mechanical tool of mobilization, as it is often portrayed. We suggest that genealogical relatedness does not equate to political loyalty, but genealogical discourse provides a framework by which various actors reinterpret contemporary events by collapsing history into the present to imbue clan, ethnic, and national identities with political significance.

Building concrete futures: materiality and urban lives in West Africa

AbstractIn West Africa, concrete is increasingly taking hold of physical landscapes, popular consciousness, and everyday conversations. Ubiquitous and pervasive, concrete is now an integral part of West African urban materiality and cultural identity. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory on the production of space, I consider this material as both a product and a producer of urban space. By tracing flows of building materials across the West African urban corridor linking the cities of Abidjan, Accra, Lomé, Cotonou, Porto-Novo and Lagos, this article proposes to understand how cement and concrete (re)shape African built environments, human lives and urban futures. It examines three dimensions of this concrete urban materiality: its links with capital, its social meanings for inhabitants-builders and its ecological impacts. I conclude by highlighting the potentials, limits and contradictions raised by this now contested material, thus shedding light on the complexity of the production of urban spaces in West Africa.

‘Conversational Decoloniality’: Re-Imagining Viable Guidelines for African Decolonial Agenda

This article identifies the agenda of decoloniality as a call to seek solutions to Africa’s problems from within herself (Africa). This call has its hold in colonial and post-independent attempts by African Nationalists, writers, freedom fighters and philosophers to defend Africa’s cultural heritages, even against its underestimation by scholars of other climes of the world. It further argues that, though justice done to this quest would afford Africa to regain her existential humanism in a global setting, the defence of African cultural heritages has not yielded much-desired efforts due largely to methodological error. This article observed that African scholars often, in the attempt to free their intellectual outputs from European ethnocentric postulations, overbears the indigenous idea in the decolonial projects. This error is noted to be a consequence of the tendency to deify African worldviews and thought processes. Employing the conversational method of philosophising Chimakonam (2015, 2017a, 2017b, and 2018), this article attempts to interrogate the agenda for decolonisation and re-Africanisation. It argues for the idea of conversational decolonisation. This article concludes that a conversational decolonised process would, among other things, be appropriate for a scholarly response to colonial denigrations and underestimations of African cultures and traditions. It would also be a framework for achieving African self-definition in the modern world without compromising African identity.

The Impact of Colonization on African Identity and Culture in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

This research paper aims to explore the profound impact of colonization on African identity and culture as portrayed in Chinua Achebe’s seminal novel Things Fall Apart. The research examines the pre-colonial Igbo society’s rich cultural traditions, values, and belief systems, emphasizing the vitality of these aspects in shaping African identity. It delves into the arrival of European colonizers and their disruptive influence, which upends established social structures and cultural practices. Through an analysis of key events and characters, the paper investigates the erosion of African identity and the erosion of cultural norms caused by colonization. The research explores the notion of cultural assimilation and hybridity as a response to colonial dominance. It examines how the Igbo community grapples with the intrusion of Western values and the consequent fragmentation of their cultural identity. This research paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the lasting impacts of colonization on African identity and culture as reflected in Things Fall Apart. It underscores the importance of recognizing and preserving African heritage and raises critical questions about the complex dynamics between colonizers and the colonized.

Constitutionalisation of Ethnicity and Decolonisation of African Constitutionalism: Towards an Authentic African Constitutional Identity?

In the aftermath of independence, African states for the most part opted for the nation-state model inspired by their colonial masters. Consequently, the constitutionalism of the newly independent African states emphasised national unity, an absolute obsession of state leaders, while demonising ethnicity, when it was not simply forgotten. Presented as one of the major causes of the state crisis in Africa, the liberal nation-state model has proven incompatible with African composite societies. Hence the imperative need for African states to reconcile the organisation and functioning of the state with their own values, and thus forge a typically African constitutional identity. The revival of constitutionalism integrates this tendency to appropriate African values, despite the criticisms of this option. The role given to ethnicity, a central element of African society, is symptomatic of this trend. The ethnic group is gradually emerging from its lethargy to occupy an increasingly important place and punctuate the political and institutional life of the state. The principle of equality is softened by the mechanisms tending to favour some people to ensure their representation in state institutions. The principle of the indivisibility of the state gives way to the formation of a ‘Republic of lands and territories’ with overlapping citizenships, where the sons and daughters of the soil enjoy comparatively more rights and privileges than any other nationals from other origins. Finally, as a vehicle carrying traditional values, customary law is gradually recognised and constitutionally protected.

Thematic analysis of in-group and out-group debates in an online right-wing extremist community

The resurgence of Right-Wing Extremism (RWE) has become a cause for concern in Western countries during the 21st century. An increase in white nationalist sentiment in recent years has provided impetus to understand the contemporary drivers of far-right ideology. This study examines in-group and out-group debates on Stormfront.org, which is the largest and oldest online community dedicated to white nationalism and extreme right-wing political views. It used a dataset of approximately 1m posts collected from the open Opposing Views forum on Stormfront from the period 2001 to 2020 to create a corpus of over 195m words for thematic analysis. A Natural Language Processing (NLP) model was used to analyze the corpus, and a supervised phrase mining algorithm was used to identify key topics in the debate. The study finds that key issues being debated between in-group and out-group members of the Stormfront online community relate to perceptions of white identity, African American identity, racial issues, conservative political issues, and the history and politics of the United States. These findings highlight the issues of mutual importance to in-group and out-group members and identify opportunities for further research into the ideology of online RWE communities.

Chronology of societal and Afro-American art evolution in pre (1619-1865) and post (1865-1965) civil war in the US

This study explores the relationship between the societal integration of African Americans and its influences on the group's art of painting in the pre-and-post-Civil War periods, i.e., from 1619-1865 and 1865-1965, in the United States of America. It seeks to explore a relationship between greater social integration and influences on the artwork of African Americans over time - themes and elements of art, i.e., lines and colours. It draws upon John Dewey’s theory of art as experience and Erwin Panofsky's Thematic analysis (Iconography). The study findings suggest the oppression and exclusion of African Americans in general (in the pre-Civil War period) and its influences on the constrained creativity of the group’s artwork (of painting). However, on the contrary, the findings indicate greater experimentation, uniqueness, and depiction of African identity in post-Civil War period artwork of painting. This coincides with the gradual but ominous social acceptance, educational attainments, and economic success of Afro-Americans in American society during this period. The findings and analysis validate a relationship between the societal transformation of marginalized groups (from exclusion to integration) and influences on groups’ artistic expressions.

Language Use in Alobwed’epie’s The Death Certificate: A Postmodernist Analysis

This paper addresses language use in Alobwed’epie’s the Death Certificate from a postmodernist perspective. It seeks to show that the author of the selected novel, like many postcolonial African writers, attempts to assert his culture through some sort of indigenisation and intentional flouting of old canons of literature. Given that the present paper is anchored on postmodernism, the postmodernist theory the author’s is used to explain Alobwed’Epie’s perception of life and literature to assert his cultural identity through some sort of linguistic revolution. As a matter of fact, language is used in a very carefree and innovative way in order to escape the idealistic dictum of literary norms. Indigenisation is then regarded as a postmodernist technique, which aims at valorising the African identity and rejecting all the metanarratives of how a work of art should be produced. Obviously, in the present article postmodernism are both a theoretical framework and an object of study. The use of local languages and other languages like Pidgin in the novel under study has demonstrated that the then marginalised languages have moved from the margin towards the Centre and become established languages of African literature. The paper briefly discusses the emergence of postmodernism and shows how the traditional conventions have been deconstructed and substituted for new ideologies that have revolutionised the African literary landscape. It equally reviews selected previous works on language in African novels as well as on postmodernism that came up in the late 1950s as revolutionary responses to preceding movements. The paper ends with an account of the linguistic features of postmodernism used in the novel.

The (Ab)Use of Empathy in Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain

Empathy and intimate exposure(s) that interweave micro relations with macro politics are literary tropes used in narrating and navigating postapartheid social formation and reimaging alternative ways of relationality that seek to normalise freedom(s). Bystrom and Coetzee use these reading practices to examine how contemporary artists yoke domesticity with national politics to discursively deconstruct narratives of (un)belonging that frame immigrant lived experiences in South Africa. This article seeks to extend the conversations further by examining how Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain (2017) interweaves female menstrual blood with precarity, intimate exposure and lack of empathy or intergroup biases to critique the (mis)use of narratives of black pain that deploy the language of apartheid to justify negrophobia and a growing anti-illegal foreigner sentiment in South Africa. This paper suggests that the use of anger, tropes of a South African black pain and its embodiment, and (anti)racist discourses impede the formation of an imagined, inclusive postapartheid South Africa. It concludes that Matlwa’s text suggests that a sense of a distinctly black South African identity which is limited to itself, yet hinged on a darker side of empathy, silences the Other’s modes of self-narration that seek to counter widely circulated narratives of queerness, lack and destitution that are used to cast the foreigner in the public imaginary. Consequently, the foreigner is coerced to mimic popularised discourses on race and gendered relations, thus recirculating and recycling discourses that embolden toxic masculinities and femininities in private and public cultures.

Language, Religion and Difference: North African and Turkish Jewish Identity Formation Vis-À-Vis Ashkenazim in Canada

Language, Religion and Difference: North African and Turkish Jewish Identity Formation Vis-À-Vis Ashkenazim in Canada

Are we still Shona? An AOTS framework approach to navigating immigration-related identity

Using the African Oral Traditional Storytelling (AOTS) Framework as a culturally centered and responsive storytelling approach to studying with African peoples, this article shares the experiences of a Shona family in the United States of America as they navigate the maintenance and/or retention of their native language and culture as well as transmitting these to their children. Thus, using storytelling as analysis and theory, this article contributes to the discourse on African immigrant identity conceptualization and reconceptualization through a decolonial lens with the aim of encouraging conversations on the gradual linguistic and cultural genocide that continues to plague Africans as we critically wrestle with the lingering effects of colonialism and the lure of global mobility.

Naija: The Cinderella for Nigerian and West African National Language, Unity and Identity

The perennial questions about the national language and the Nigerian Pidgin (Naija) status remain unresolved in Nigeria. Hence, this paper focuses on the national language question for Nigeria against the theoretical background of the national language, national identity, and linguistic relativism. The paper sets out to reevaluate the common arguments often articulated against adopting Naija as the national language and advance the reasons why it should be adopted as the national language. The paper adopted the qualitative approach to research. Primary data were generated from the interview, observation, and spontaneous speech recording, while secondary data were taken from library materials and the Internet. Educated and illiterate Nigerians constituted the study population, and mixed and purposive sampling methods were used to select informants. It is established in this paper that it is the de facto national language and the most undermined and neglected among the five major languages in Nigeria. The paper concludes that language, a critical factor of production, has been undermined. Adopting Naija as a national language will foster national unity and cohesion, accelerate scientific advancement, facilitate democratization and enhance teaching and learning in the long run.