African People Research Articles

Touched and Changed: Self-Reflexivity and Reciprocity in Fieldwork

Touched and Changed: Self-Reflexivity and Reciprocity in Fieldwork

Neglo celebramo, pa�olo burlamo: La negrilla en Espa�a y en Am�rica by Leonardo J. Waisman (review)

Reviewed by: Neglo celebramo, pañolo burlamo: La negrilla en España y en América by Leonardo J. Waisman Drew Edward Davies Neglo celebramo, pañolo burlamo: La negrilla en España y en América. By Leonardo J. Waisman. 3 vols. Published by the author, 2020. Available for download at https://conicet-ar.academia.edu/leonardowaisman (accessed 5 January 2023). In this three-volume work, possibly the most ambitious study ever undertaken of a villancico subgenre, Leonardo Waisman crafts a comprehensive yet nuanced overview of a distinct repertory of Hispanic baroque music: villancicos that feature stereotyped caricatures of Black men. Sometimes known as negrillas (among other terms) in Spanish, such villancicos tend to use racialized literary dialects and simplified musical language to depict Black Christian revelers heading to Bethlehem to adore the Christ child. A creative variant of the Adoration of the Shepherds episode in Luke, realized using popularizing elements from the Iberian theater traditions, the subgenre presents Black personages who play musical instruments and travel to Bethlehem to dance, often boisterously, to the Christ child who is sleeping in the manger. Well-known examples are "Ah siolo Flasiquiyo" by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla (ca. 1590–1664) and "Los coflades de la estleya" by Juan de Araujo (1646–1712), the first two works of Latin American early music to enter major English-language music history textbook anthologies. Waisman bravely navigates the many types of racism present in this problematic early modern subgenre, in which the Black caricatures behave as interchangeable simpletons, the poetry contains remarks that might be considered offensive today, and the main point requires the Black caricatures to be of low social status in order to portray the humility of the circumstances of Christ's birth. The presence of Blackness also serves to underscore the Catholic Church's official universality. Waisman retains as positive an approach as possible, noting the joyfulness (alegría) of how the Black personages are cast, and thus avoiding a judgment of early modern material according to the social norms of today. That said, I believe this book needed to be written in Spanish, as English-language terminology may underscore the racist material more directly. As such, English-language authors since Robert Stevenson, who can be credited with reviving interest in the subgenre, have tended to appropriate if not hide behind Spanish-language genre, theater, and linguistics terminology. Diminutives used in Spanishlanguage terms such as negrilla, which some native Spanish speakers will connote as endearing rather than as [End Page 631] offensive, have little positive connotation that I can perceive in English. Of course, Waisman, a leading scholar of Latin American music, is well aware of these issues, and in fact he has centered the problematic racial content of the material and the discourse about it as a challenge to the scholar: "the horror of slavery and the camaraderie of the 'villancico Blacks' (negros de villancico) are its inescapable references, its irreducible poles, its extreme images. For the author, it has meant navigating between the Scylla of political correctness and the Charybdis of rationalizing racism. I hope I have avoided both" (1:2, all trans. mine). The first volume of Waisman's trilogy contains the main study, while the second and third serve as extended appendixes—the second a compilation of musical editions and the third a compilation of villancico texts, both drawn from sources throughout the Iberian peninsula and Latin America. In the study, Waisman takes a pragmatic approach, setting up the presence of Black caricatures in villancicos with chapters about the presence of African people in early modern Spain and the Americas and the linguistic elements that define the literary dialect, sometimes known as the habla de negros, that most of these villancicos use. Early in the text, Waisman presents an interesting graph (cuadro 2, p. 8) showing the distribution over time of texts in printed chapbooks at the National Library of Spain (BNE) with villancicos featuring stereotyped Black caricatures. The graph shows a clear growth of the subgenre across the seventeenth century with a peak in the 1690s, followed by a rapid decline in the first half of the eighteenth century. Waisman excels at the factual presentation of...

A place for traditional and customary practices in funerals during and post COVID-19: Insights from South Africa.

President Cyril Ramaphosa and his government declared a National State of Disaster, and banned large gatherings to help contain the spread of coronavirus on March 21, 2020. Less than a week after he banned large gatherings to help contain the spread of coronavirus. Families were also encouraged to bury their deceased loved ones as soon as possible after they leave the mortuary. This left families with little to no time to grieve and execute certain expected customary rituals, some of which are performed on the deceased. Families were prohibited from handling the remains of their loved ones and assigned people by the government assumed that role. The bodies of deceased COVID-19 patients were carefully transported and covered in body bags, but in terms of custom, they should be wrapped in a cow skin or blanket according to customary rules. According to African customary law, close family members should be present in the same room as the deceased and perform rituals to ward off evil deeds performed by those who encounter the body. The worldviews of South African people towards conducting burials was thus disrupted by the COVID-19 regulations. Embalming was also discouraged to minimize interaction with the remains. This paper relied on secondary data from the relevant literature, such as official documentation, scholarly articles and news articles. The paper asserts that the COVID-19 regulations have altered the way people in South Africa perform their traditional funerals. It also describes the difficulties people faced while burying their loved ones according to the strict COVID-19 guidelines which compromised most of the traditional and customary practices. The paper further looks at the funeral processes post COVID-19 and emphasises that people have been led by the spirit of Ubuntu to continue with their traditional ways of conducting funerals that are centred in African spirituality.

The Rise and Fall of the Liberation Movements in Africa

Background: Liberation movements in Africa in the past 70 years began to campaign for the liberation of African countries. The liberation of Libya in 1951 gave hope to all liberation movements in the African countries. The liberation movements in all African countries were able to liberate African people from the colonial masters. Nevertheless, the history has shown that liberation movements has failed to sustain power.

Has the world survived the population bomb? A 10-year update.

Between 1960 and 2011, world population grew from 3 to 7 billion, an unprecedented rate of population growth that will never be seen again. In spite of the addition of 4 billion people in just 51years, the world experienced some of the biggest improvements in living standards in human history, with declines in poverty and improvements in food production per capita in all major regions. This paper looks at the period since 2011, during which the world added another billion people. Progress has continued in many areas, with food production continuing to grow faster than population and with continued declines in the proportion of the population in poverty in all regions. Not all trends are positive, however. Progress in food production has slowed, with recent declines in food production per capita in Africa. Prices of food and other commodities have recently hit historic highs. Climate change is a challenge to progress in combatting hunger and poverty, especially in Africa. While climate change will make it harder to meet the needs of Africa's continued population growth in this century, the paper shows that the countries with the highest population growth account for a very small share of global CO2 emissions. The record of the last six decades suggests that progress can be made to reduce poverty and hunger, even while world population continues to grow, but continued progress will require solutions to climate change that mainly target high-income and middle-income countries.

A non-invasive optical method for anaemia detection

The latest non-invasive biomedical electronic sensors are capable of providing continuous reliable information, for instance oxygenation level of blood, level of glucose etc. These biomedical sensors are in general based on the electro-chemical or spectral properties of the substances. The absorption of blood in infrared and visible range is prominently determined by haemoglobin. The coefficient of absorption for blood is different at different wavelengths. This optical absorption characteristic of the blood yields the vital information on the composition of the blood. Haemoglobin is primarily used to measure the status of anaemia, in developing countries like India and other African countries numerous people with greater health needs don’t have access to proper diagnostic facilities. Therefore, an introduction of portable, low cost and non-invasive Haemoglobin detector will give a vast opportunity for screening the population suffering with anaemia. The present article purposes a non-invasive method of haemoglobin detection comprising of an organic photovoltaic cell and three LED’s sources i.e., blue, green and red which are used with their respective radiation spectral range of 450–495 nm, 495–570 nm and 620–750 nm to illuminate an area of the skin on finger, this transmitted light after interacting with tissues is detected by an arrangement of Coumarin 30 : C60/NN′-QA/ZnPc active layer based organic solar cell. Thus, the approach provide in this article presents a simple, biocompatible and flexible means for assessing blood haemoglobin level by utilizing an multi spectral optical processing method. The method developed herein could further be integrated to wearable electronic devices.

The Road Not Travelled: Tracking Love in Frank Anthony’s The Journey: The Revolutionary Anguish of Comrade B

The Journey (1991) is a virtually unknown “struggle” novel by Frank Anthony (d. 1993), a senior member of the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA), who was incarcerated on Robben Island for six years. The novel and its author have been elided from South African history as a racialized literary establishment and the defensiveness of the resistance organization of which he was a member reinforced each other in tacit censorship. Anthony’s novel presents revealing insights into the repression of the personal in the anti-apartheid movement, which reflected the “liquidation” of love in leftist discourse of the period. The importance of love, especially romantic love– the highly volatile emotion which is often boundary-breaking and radically transformative–has been recognized in contemporary postMarxism and critical race theory. Blindness to the potential of love in dominant struggle politics is reflected in the protagonist of The Journey, whose passion for social justice leads, paradoxically, to repression of the empowerment and emancipation of self(lessness) through other(s), enabled by eros.

Increasing Visibility of Sickle Cell Disease in Indiana: Establishing Baseline Prevalence Using Integrated Data From Multiple Sources.

The Indiana Sickle Cell Data Collection (IN-SCDC) program aims to provide timely, reliable, and locally relevant information on the sickle cell disease (SCD) population in Indiana to inform public health interventions, research, and policy development. We describe the development of the IN-SCDC program and report the prevalence and geographic distribution of people with SCD in Indiana using an integrated data collection approach. Using multiple integrated data sources and case definitions established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we classified cases of SCD in Indiana during 2015-2019. We calculated the prevalence and incidence of SCD and described characteristics of people with SCD. We identified 1695 people living with SCD in Indiana during the study period. The median age of people living with SCD was 21 years, and 1474 (87.0%) were Black or African American. Most (n = 1596, 91%) resided in metropolitan counties. The age-adjusted prevalence of SCD was 24.7 cases per 100 000 people. The prevalence of SCD among Black or African American people was 209.3 per 100 000 people. The incidence was 1 in 2608 live births overall and 1 in 446 live births among Black or African American people. Eighty-six deaths were confirmed in this population during 2015-2019. Our results establish a baseline for the IN-SCDC program. Baseline and future surveillance program efforts will help accurately inform standards of care for treatments, identify gaps in coverage and access to care, and provide guidance for legislators and community-based organizations.

Tucupi: a review of uses, physical-chemical, nutritional properties and technologies

Tucupi is a beverage resulting from the fermentation process of manipueira, a by-product of cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz); it has sensory characteristics and eccentric composition, marked by yellowish color, acidic flavor, characteristic aroma, and numerous forms of culinary preparation, which range from sauces, risottos de tucupi with jambu, even tacacá, which is the combination of indigenous soup, mani poi, enriched with ingredients from colonizers and African peoples. This food has high levels of cyanogenic compounds, bacteria (BAL), and yeasts that participate in the symbiosis of its fermentation. In addition to its production generate income for the population. The objective of this work was to carry out a complete literature review on tucupi, exploring the literature to date about the physical-chemical, nutritional characteristics, toxic and beneficial properties, and even its origin and method of preparation. Highlighting the knowledge and technologies used to prepare this drink, as well as the pre-established safety parameters and standardization of the production of tucupi by the Agricultural Defense Agency of Pará.

Religion and educational mobility in Africa

The African people and leaders1,2 have long seen education as a driving force of development and liberation, a view shared by international institutions3,4, as schooling has large economic and non-economic returns, particularly in low-income settings5. In this study, we examine the educational progress across faiths throughout postcolonial Africa, home to some of the world’s largest Christian and Muslim communities. We construct comprehensive religion-specific measures of intergenerational mobility in education using census data from 2,286 districts in 21 countries and document the following. First, Christians have better mobility outcomes than Traditionalists and Muslims. Second, differences in intergenerational mobility between Christians and Muslims persist among those residing in the same district, in households with comparable economic and family backgrounds. Third, although Muslims benefit as much as Christians when they move early in life to high-mobility regions, they are less likely to do so. Their low internal mobility accentuates the educational deficit, as Muslims reside on average in areas that are less urbanized and more remote with limited infrastructure. Fourth, the Christian–Muslim gap is most prominent in areas with large Muslim communities, where the latter also register the lowest emigration rates. As African governments and international organizations invest heavily in educational programmes, our findings highlight the need to understand better the private and social returns to schooling across faiths in religiously segregated communities and to carefully think about religious inequalities in the take-up of educational policies6.

Advance Statements for Black African and Caribbean people (AdStAC): protocol for an implementation study

BackgroundThe UK government committed to legislating for Advance Choice Documents/Advance Statements (ACD/AS) following their recommendation by the Independent Review of the MHA (2018). ACDs/AS are yet to be implemented in routine practice despite evidence and high demand; they are associated with improved therapeutic relationships and a reduction (25%, RR 0.75, CI 0.61–0.93) in compulsory psychiatric admission. Barriers to their implementation are well documented, ranging from low knowledge levels to logistical challenges in accessing the content during episodes of acute care. In the UK this is an issue for Black people, who experience detention rates disproportionately (over three times) higher than those of White British people and have poorer care experiences and outcomes. ACDs/AS allow for Black people to have their concerns heard by mental health professionals in a care system where they often feel their views are ignored. AdStAC aims to improve Black service users’ experiences in mental health services in South London by co-producing and testing an ACD/AS implementation resource with Black service users, mental health professionals and carers/supporters of Black service users.Methods/designThe study will take place in South London, England over three phases: 1) formative work through stakeholder workshops; 2) co-production of resources through a consensus development exercise and working groups; and 3) testing of the resources using quality improvement (QI) methods. A lived experience advisory group, staff advisory group and project steering committee will support the study throughout. The implementation resources will comprise: advance choice document/advance statement (ACD/AS) documentation, stakeholder trainings, a manual for mental health professionals to facilitate the processes of creating and revising advance statements, and informatics development.DiscussionThe implementation resources will help increase the likelihood of the new mental health legislation in England being implemented effectively; through aligning evidence-based medicine, policy and law to effectively provide positive clinical, social and financial outcomes for Black people, the National Health Service (NHS) and wider society. This study will likely benefit a wider group of people with severe mental illness, as when marginalised groups who are least engaged, can be supported with these strategies, then the strategies are likely to work for others.

Defense Diplomacy: The role of the French military bases in the African continent

This research seeks to study the role of military bases in activating defense diplomacy, with a focus on studying the case of France in the African continent, which relied on its military bases as a tool to implement its foreign policy. The research explains the concept of defense diplomacy and its relationship to military bases as an effective tool to strengthening bilateral relations between the state's parties. The research focuses on studying the effectiveness of military bases as a tool for activating French defense diplomacy, and studying the goals that French foreign policy seeks to achieve through its intervention or presence in the African continent. In addition to the geopolitical reasons that prompted France to move towards the African continent and plant its military bases. In order to complete this study and achieve its objectives, it adopts the historical approach and the descriptive analytical approach to search documents and studies related to the interpretation of French political behavior in the African continent. The study concludes that France is keen to protect its interests and achieve its external goals by employing various tools, including defensive diplomacy represented in its military bases in the lands of other countries. It also concludes that the nature of the historical stage that France went through and the exploitation of its bases and military presence in implementing its higher interests at the expense of the African people led to the failure of French foreign policy in African countries

Victim identification through skeletal remains: A review

Investigative authorities use forensic anthropology to examine human skeletal remains in order to identify unidentified human remnants. Anthropology alone is the study of man, but also includes culture, language, and physical remains of humans. Forensic anthropology is used to help with the recovery of human remains and to interpret trauma. Asian, African, and European people, as well as the living and the dead, are all of interest to anthropologists. Anthropologists are also fascinated with a wide range of human characteristics, such as their technology, family dynamics, cultures, and linguistic. Forensic otology is a branch of forensic anthropology. The field began in the 19th century. Mathieu or fill published a textbook on measurements of arm bones in 1835. E.A Bertillon proposed an anthropometric system for personal identification in 1885. A branch of physical anthropology is forensic anthropology. In this analysis, criminal cases are solved using skeletal analysis and other archaeology methods. Experts in forensic anthropology focus on examining hard tissues like bones. They are also skilled at locating and recovering buried bodies. In this review we are going to discuss about the ways of identification of a victim by found skeletal remains

Re-imagining Moralities and Masculinities in the Context of Male Circumcision and Marriage in South-Western Kenya Communities

Male circumcision and marriage are significant cultural practices that mark a critical stage in a person’s life in many African societies. Many rites of passage that exist, circumcision and marriage are intertwined. Marriage and circumcision like other cultural themes have attracted wide scholarship of diverse depths. Such studies have underlined, among others, the nature, forms, types and even the place of the two initiation rites in society. What, however, has not received adequate attention are the (re)negotiations and contestations between morality and masculinities in the context of male circumcision and marriage. Based on this understanding, and drawing on the findings of a qualitative study conducted in Kisii, and Homa Bay counties in South-Western Kenya, the researchers in this paper argue that circumcision and initiation determine ones’s masculinity, which as well acts as a gateway to marriage and social wellbeing. Combined, the two cultural practices can be presented as central morality and cultural notions that inform, underpin, and serve as the dominant paradigms that direct the lives and activities of African people from birth to death. The study suggests that despite its significance over decades, the practice of circumcision has changed over time in relation to the importance people attach to it, how it is practiced, and the attention it attracts from the society. The study recommends the need for a critical interrogation of morality in relation to what fits individuals and the contemporary world as they practice the rites of passage, while at the same time maintaining what is morally acceptable in the society.

If I Ran the Zoo: Protecting the Rights of Black African Minorities

Abstract If I Ran a Zoo is a metaphoric trope for the normalisation of racism in European society for decades at a time when the contradiction of aspiring to the civilised world where human dignity, regardless of any distinctive status, would be respected. This article resolved the research question on how the rights of black African minorities can be protected while creating a safe space for the black people in Europe. Through content analysis, the article demonstrated the nature and origin of racism. It argued that racism and racial discrimination as it is rife against black African people, is a serious challenge for the realisation of human rights in Europe. It further considered the rights of black African minorities in the context of an Afrophobic Europe, and why international human rights law has failed to protect black African people. While it examined the risk posed to the lives of black minorities, it concluded that the elimination of racism and racial discrimination is within the capacity of European states, and consists in their showing greater responsibility towards their obligations in the European Convention on Human Rights.

A vision of coexistence-centred African culture: when the synagogue becomes a court

ABSTRACTThis article explores the meaning of coexistence-centred African culture, a world in which racial colonial violence does not interrupt our sense of how we value other African people. Accountability for conquest and the return of everything and everybody that has been stolen through slavery, colonialism, imprisonment, forced labour, land theft, rape, torture, and cruelty begins with the recognition of our many African selves as one. The author first began exploring this idea in the early days of the end of apartheid as a distinguished scholar of genocide studies in South Africa. In this article, he discusses the restoration of the Paul Kruger Street Synagogue in Pretoria as offering the potential to house and collectively explore new visions of coexistence-centred African futures.

COVID-19 Vaccine Willingness among African, Caribbean, and Black People in Ottawa, Ontario

Vaccines have been identified as a crucial strategy to control the spread of COVID-19 and reduce its impact. However, there are concerns about the acceptance of vaccines within African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) communities. Based on a community sample of ACB people in Ottawa, Ontario (n = 375), the current study aimed to use logistic regression analysis and identify factors associated with COVID-19 vaccine willingness. A multivariate analysis shows that ACB people who believed that the ACB population is at a higher risk for COVID-19 were more likely to be willing to receive the vaccine compared to those who did not (OR = 1.79, p < 0.05). ACB people who had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine were more likely to be willing to receive it in the future (OR = 2.75, p < 0.05), and trust in government COVID-19 information was also positively associated with vaccine willingness (OR = 3.73, p < 0.01). In addition, English-speaking respondents were more willing to receive the vaccine compared to French-speaking respondents (OR = 3.21, p < 0.01). In terms of socioeconomic status, ACB people with a post-graduate degree (OR = 2.21, p < 0.05) were more likely to report vaccine willingness compared to those without a bachelor’s degree. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for policymakers and directions for future research.

Waste lands: the lost infrastructure of Jean Rhys’s “Temps Perdi”

ABSTRACT This essay argues that Rhys’s “Temps Perdi” (1967) evokes modernist temporality – Proustian “lost time” – to connect the twentieth-century World Wars to the infrastructure of European imperialism. Set in England during World War II, Austria after World War I, and the “Carib Quarter” in Dominica in the 1930s, the story links the violence of the European wars to the violence of imperialism, and the “losses” of the twentieth century to the decayed Caribbean plantation, “Temps Perdi.” In the local patois, the phrase means not “lost time” but “wasted time, lost labor,” and recalls three hundred years of waste and ruin: the genocide of the indigenous “Caribs”; the devastation of African peoples enslaved in the Caribbean; and the “waste” of Europe itself – in the era of imperial collapse – in the destruction of the World Wars. All three of these historical realities are embedded in the story’s title, and though that title evokes the tradition of European modernism, it also marks a departure from it. Though structured, in its temporal shifting, by allusion to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, “Temps Perdi” also undertakes an excavation of the material structures of modernity: the infrastructure – variously concealed, ruined, lost, or missing – that marks the spot of European devastation in the Caribbean.

Navigating the journey of multiple sclerosis management in Africa, overcoming hurdles and harnessing opportunities: a review.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic, debilitating condition affecting many African people. However, the management of MS in Africa is often inadequate, and there is a need to improve the care and support provided to patients. This paper aims to identify the challenges and opportunities in navigating the journey of MS management in Africa. MS management's main challenges in Africa include a lack of awareness and education about the disease, limited access to diagnostic tools and treatments, and inadequate care coordination. However, by increasing awareness and education about MS, improving access to diagnostic tools and treatments, fostering multidisciplinary collaborations, encouraging and supporting research on MS in Africa, and collaborating with regional and international organizations to share knowledge and resources, it is possible to improve the management of the disease and improve the lives of those affected by MS in Africa. This paper concludes that improving the management of MS in Africa requires a concerted effort from all stakeholders, including healthcare professionals, policymakers, and international organizations. Collaboration and sharing of knowledge and resources are crucial to ensure that patients receive the best possible care and support.

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic