African Publics Research Articles

Wagner PMC’s Impact on Russia’s Public Image in Africa

Much has been made of Wagner Private Military Company’s (PMC) activities in Africa, and many have warned of Russia’s growing influence on the continent and the implications that this has for the West. But little work has been done to examine how African publics have reacted to these activities, even though one of the purposes of Wagner’s activities in Africa is to influence African public opinion. Have Wagner’s activities in Africa led to winning the battle for the “hearts and minds” of African publics on the continent, which appears to be, at least in part, the goal of such activities? Have they affected how Africans view Russia? Using data from a new report documenting Wagner political, military, and economic activities, coupled with recent Afrobarometer data from Wave 8 (2019–2021), I examine whether Wagner activities correlate with views on Russia. I find that rather than increasing positive evaluations of Russia, the presence of Wagner military activities is associated with a significant decrease in evaluations of Russia in the countries where Wagner is deployed. This suggests that Wagner activities may not be helping to improve Russia’s appeal in Africa.

Talking About Gene Drive in Uganda: The Need for Science Communication to Underpin Engagement.

Uganda may host the world's first field trials of gene drive mosquitoes for malaria control. Global North discourses pre-suppose African publics have access to information about gene drive and are ready to make decisions about its governance. We explore assumptions about the availability of this information in Uganda. We find a paucity of information available combined with a strong desire for information from lay publics. We discuss these findings in the context of Ugandan information infrastructures and political sensitivities to genetic technologies. If Ugandans are to decide about gene drive, they need independent information about the science to underpin engagement.

Government repression and citizen support for democratic rights in Africa

ABSTRACT Public opinion polls conducted over the past five years point to a downward trend in African citizens’ support for civil society and media freedoms. This is despite the flourishing of civil society and media actors as well as the expansion of democracy on the continent in the post-Cold War period. What explains this downward trend in public support? We use cross-national polling data from the Afrobarometer survey to examine the decline in public support for freedoms of association and media between 2011 and 2018 in the African context, a continent that has experienced decades of democratization waves and pressure. Using a multilevel statistical modelling approach, we analyse the influence of government repression of civil society and media actors on citizen support for enhanced government control over freedoms of association and the media. Our study shows that the government’s repressive actions against civil society and media actors increases the probability that citizens will support control over association and media freedoms. Concerningly, this suggests government clampdowns on democratic rights influences the African publics to support such clampdowns, potentially legitimizing them.

The quest for influence: Examining Russia’s public diplomacy mechanisms in Africa

ABSTRACT This article examines Russian public diplomacy mechanisms in Africa. These include the intentional use of historical ties, various aid programmes in education and health, the targeted use of international broadcasting and digital media, and the exploitation of anti-Western sentiments on the continent. Russia employs these to win the hearts and minds of African publics for its national interest. The article first explores Moscow’s public diplomacy in general and analyses the challenges Russia faces in Africa, which has become a ‘dumping ground’ for public diplomacy campaigns by the US, the EU and its members, the UK, and China. The article argues that Russia’s public diplomacy in Africa is state-centric with little or no civil society involvement. This makes its message appear incredible. The article concludes that Russian public diplomacy efforts in Africa have intensified anti-Western sentiments in African countries where Moscow’s presence is strong.

Scientific knowledge and sexual advocacy: African publics, choiceless citizens and potential confounders

AbstractThis article is concerned with science and sexuality, and the possibilities and pitfalls of using the former to change minds about the latter, taking as its main source of data a report released by the Academy of Science of South Africa in 2015, Diversity in Human Sexuality: implications for policy in Africa. I frame the report in terms of co-production – borrowed from science and technology studies – and a theory of publics – taken from literary criticism and queer theory. I first describe how science has played a role in recent queer politics before showing how the report intervenes by appealing to a particularly African public. Thereafter, I describe how the choosing agentive subject disappears in the report’s depiction of the legitimate sexual citizen. Such a framing of citizenship raises several possible problems, some of which I address in the final section. These are described as potential confounders inhibiting the success of the report, preventing effective co-production or the summoning of a public. The article’s goal is not to discredit the report; rather, in pointing out how the report might fall short of its goal, it is directed towards a more reflexive activism.

2 - Teacher Education, Common Purpose and the Forging of Multiple Publics in South Africa

In an important scholarly intervention on African publics, Raufu Mustapha argues that the multiplicity of publics is not an obstacle but instead a creative resource that can be used to forge common purpose through public deliberation. However, he does not elaborate how common purpose operates and to what effect. In this article, we examine the dynamics of common purpose among student teachers in South Africa. Teachers inculcate the dispositions and habits of public deliberation in young people. How teachers are trained and where they teach is therefore crucial to understanding the constitution of publics. We analyse data from a cohort of student teachers regarding their reasons for becoming teachers, their future plans and their anxieties about their profession. We find little evidence of race and class differences among student teachers. Instead, the evidence suggests that student teachers shared a common purpose informed by hyper-particularistic notions of the public, which was not only raced and classed, but also limited to a narrow understanding of their own community. In light of this, we seek to explain how policy contributes to the conditions under which common purpose leads to segregated publics, closing off the generative possibilities of multiple publics.

Chinese Television in Africa

On the basis of the results of an ongoing research project on the activities of the Chinese media company StarTimes in Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, this paper analyses the fluid and fragmentary dimension of the engagements between Chinese media and African publics, while equally emphasizing the power dynamics that underlie them. Focusing on a variety of ethnographic sources, it argues for an approach to the study of Chinese media expansion in Africa able to take into account, simultaneously, the macro-political and macro-economic factors which condition the nature of China–Africa media interactions, the political intentions behind them (as, for example, the Chinese soft power policies and their translation into specific media contents), and the micro dimension of the practices and uses of the media made by the actors (producers and consumers of media) in the field.

Human OMICs and Computational Biology Research in Africa: Current Challenges and Prospects.

Following the publication of the first human genome, OMICs research, including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metagenomics, has been on the rise. OMICs studies revealed the complex genetic diversity among human populations and challenged our understandings of genotype-phenotype correlations. Africa, being the cradle of the first modern humans, is distinguished by a large genetic diversity within its populations and rich ethnolinguistic history. However, the available human OMICs tools and databases are not representative of this diversity, therefore creating significant gaps in biomedical research. African scientists, students, and publics are among the key contributors to OMICs systems science. This expert review examines the pressing issues in human OMICs research, education, and development in Africa, as seen through a lens of computational biology, public health relevant technology innovation, critically-informed science governance, and how best to harness OMICs data to benefit health and societies in Africa and beyond. We underscore the disparities between North and Sub-Saharan Africa at different levels. A harmonized African ethnolinguistic classification would help address annotation challenges associated with population diversity. Finally, building on the existing strategic research initiatives, such as the H3Africa and H3ABioNet Consortia, we highly recommend addressing large-scale multidisciplinary research challenges, strengthening research collaborations and knowledge transfer, and enhancing the ability of African researchers to influence and shape national and international research, policy, and funding agendas. This article and analysis contribute to a deeper understanding of past and current challenges in the African OMICs innovation ecosystem, while also offering foresight on future innovation trajectories.

‘This land is not for sale’: Post-1994 resistance art and interventionism in Cape Town's precarious publics

Abstract The control, regulation and commodification of space has been fundamental in reinforcing structural racism and social identities. In a city such as Cape Town, where colonial architecture and heritage as well as apartheid racial zoning forms part of the spectacularisation of the city, racial conflict seems to have deepened. Through discussing public protest, artistic public interventions and live art, we argue that young black artists in South Africa are heralding a new phase of post-1994 resistance art which exposes conflictual cultural politics of public space in Cape Town rather than a healing democracy and multi-culturalism. As protesters and activists, artists deface the myth of a reconciled non-racial post-Apartheid society by targeting officially sanctioned art. Drawing from Faranak Miraftab's notion of ‘invited’ and ‘invented’ spaces as well as Chris Dixon and Angela Davis' concept of prefigurative politics, we argue that precarious South African publics are experienced as a ‘battleground’ rather than a space for liberal deliberation and democracy. New resistance art, therefore, tends to be protest-centred in engaging with the conflictual nature of the city.

The Brown Photo Album: An Archive of Feminist Futurity

This photo-essay considers the other lives of family photographs by offering an analysis of my mother's collection of professional studio portraits and other vernacular photographs shot between the mid 1950s and late 1960s. How do we read the photo-archive of an 'Indian' woman born in 1941 to parents who were wards of the colonial state? A woman who was one generation removed from the sugar-cane plantations and coal mines where Indians were indentured as a coercive labour force? Influenced by Santu Mofokeng's project The Black Photo Album and Tina Campt's method of 'listening to' rather than 'looking at' photos, I refigure the family photo-archive to produce The Brown Photo Album, which is an experiment in seeing and being seen. In a context where the institutional visual archives of colonialism and apartheid have trained South African publics to see and thus know the Indian in very specific ways, this article redirects us away from the violence of the visual to the relationship between race, aesthetics and affect. It positions the family photo album not only as an alternative archive of the Indian experience but also as an archive through which we can begin to comprehend the Indian experience otherwise. This project probes the making of Indianness in the Natal Midlands, shifting the lens from urban centres like Durban and Johannesburg. As a work in progress, I present The Brown Photo Album as an experiment, an iteration of a project, a praxis of refiguring family photos in order to understand what this archive can reveal about our past, presents and futures.

Re-Understanding Religion and Support for Gender Equality in Arab Countries

Much is said about Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) publics opposing gender equality, often referring to patriarchal Islam. However, nuanced large-scale studies addressing which specific aspects of religiosity affect support for gender equality across the MENA are conspicuously absent. This study develops and tests a gendered agentic socialization framework that proposes that MENA citizens are not only passively socialized by religion but also have agency (within their religiosity). This disaggregates the influence of religiosity, highlights its multifacetedness, and theorizes the moderating roles that gender and sociocognitive empowerment play via gendered processes of agentic dissociations. Using 15 World Values Surveys and multilevel models, our analyses show that most dimensions of religiosity fuel opposition to gender equality. However, the salience of religion in daily life is found to increase women’s support for gender equality and cushion the negative impact of religious service attendance. Also, gender and education moderate the impacts of several religiosity dimensions; for instance, women’s (initially greater) support for gender equality more sharply declines with increased service attendance than men’s. Altogether, this study finds that religious socialization is multifaceted and gendered, and that certain men and women are inclined and equipped to deviate from dominant patriarchal religious interpretations.

“Science is Everywhere, but No One Knows It”: Assessing the Cultural Distance to Science of Rural South African Publics

ABSTRACTIn science communication, a prerequisite for reaching different parts of a society is to find out how these publics experience and interpret science. Since rural South African publics are perceived to exhibit a large cultural distance to science, the present exploratory study aimed to know in more detail how rural South Africans perceive and understand science in their local and social contexts. Theoretical notions on cultural distance and the methodological approach of segmentation studies were considered. Semi-structured interviews with rural South Africans were carried out in four towns (n = 52) that differ with respect to having a large scientific installation in their vicinity, or not. Sensitively comparing local and social contexts helped identifying three different publics who differed regarding their perceptions of science; however, the large scientific installations only made a difference in perceptions for those publics who were generally less exposed to and less knowledgeable about science.

Promises and reservations towards science and technology among South African publics: A culture-sensitive approach.

Against the background that surveys measuring public perceptions of science and technology are often removed from cultural contexts and do not equally represent all regions of the world, this study investigated attitudes towards science and technology among different publics of the South African population. To apply a culture-sensitive approach, theoretical considerations of cultural distance were combined with methodological considerations of segmentation studies, and representative data (n = 3183) were reanalysed. The findings show that six South African publics can be distinguished, and that - despite the fact that all publics see more promises of science than reservations - there tend to be sensitive differences between these publics. In the long run, such findings might help to make science communication more effective.

The Chinese story: Historical narratives as a tool in China’s Africa policy

The rise of China as a key actor on the African continent not only challenges the Western dominance in economic and political terms, Beijing is increasingly also offering a challenge on a different level, by contesting the Eurocentric history that has underpinned the West’s policies towards African countries throughout the modern era. In order to bolster the Sino-African relationship, this article argues that Beijing is propagating towards African publics a range of historical narratives about African history and the Sino-African relationship. Developing and testing a theoretical framework for analysing these historical narratives, the research finds that this Chinese history of Africa represents China’s recent actions on the African continent as incarnations of a long historical tradition of friendship and anti-colonial support, thus serving the role of legitimizing Chinese policies as well as delegitimizing Western powers’ economic and political strategies.

Sputnik from Below

The global space race of the Cold War has largely been written as a drama between state bodies of the northern hemisphere. This essay decentres that narrative by considering the production of popular meanings and local responses of Southern African publics to the 1957 launching of the Sputnik satellites, as articulated in a selection of mostly South African newspapers targeting various linguistic and cultural readerships. Newspapers were the most important points of contact between experts and laypersons, but were also the primary medium through which the authority of expertise could be contested and appropriated. The circulation of space science news occasioned debates about modernity and progress in relation to the issues of rights and racial politics. Cold war science innovations, aligned to projects of state, presented opportunities for publics to challenge discriminatory practices, yet could also be leveraged in local practices of social differentiation, to mark out and delegitimize certain groups or ideas as ‘backward’.

Jean-Marie Teno’s Documentary Modernity: From Millennial Anxiety to Cinematic Kinship

Abstract:This article examines discourses and cinematic representations of modernity in two documentary films by the Cameroonian director Jean-Marie Teno. In the first of these films,A Trip to the Country(2000), Teno investigates how ideals and aspirations of modernity as a state-sponsored project in Cameroon have their roots in the colonial period, and his film is characterized by a strong sense of anxiety linked to the turn of the millennium. In the second,Sacred Places(2009), modernity is given a different affective resonance and is linked to the pleasure of cinematic consumption in Ouagadougou as Teno situates African cinema in relation to its “brother,” the djembe drum. I argue here that a shift occurs between these two films and their affective engagements with modernity; this is a transition from a sense of millennial anxiety to a thematics of what I call “cinematic kinship.” I ultimately suggest that this shift allows Teno to outline new social roles for the African filmmaker as well as new relationships between African cinema and local publics.

“Against the South”: The Mississippis of Black Writing in Canada

Building upon recent work by Zandria Robinson, which explores how African American publics are often constituted “[i]n and through the idea of the South” (35), as well as work by Jade Ferguson, which demonstrates how white Canadians, at key historical moments, have likewise exhibited strong social and psychological investments in an imagined black South, this essay analyzes fiction by black writers residing in Canada during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that black Canadian writers have represented the black US South for several distinct but overlapping reasons: to assert a broader or “unified” New World black experience; to distinguish the political, cultural, and affective landscapes of Canada; and, finally, to contest the myth of a color blind or “post-racial” Canada. In a robust yet still under-recognized current of black hemispheric thought, Canada stands polysemously “against” the South, exhibiting both opposition to and intimacy with the more prominent discursive space of blackness, while simultaneously illuminating the conflicting and mutually constitutive scripts of national identity and diasporic identification.

Anti Anti-Colonialism: Vernacular Press and Emergent Possibilities in Colonial Zambia

AbstractAfrican newspapers published in vernacular languages, particularly papers sponsored by colonial governments, have been understudied. A close reading of their contents and related archival sources provides insights into diverse ways in which the colonized framed and made claims. New kinds of claims were mediated by the government-sponsored vernacular press no less than by nationalists. Just as vernacularism was not nativism, African aspirations that posed no direct challenge to the colonial order did not necessarily entail mimicry. I show also how Europeans who debated a newspaper for Africans in the 1930s Zambia voiced diverse approaches to print culture, addressing a variety of objectives. The newspaper that emerged,Mutende, was replaced by provincial newspapers in the 1950s, and I focus on one of these: the Chinyanja-languageNkhani za kum'mawa, published under African editorship in Eastern Province between 1958 and 1965. Its modes of addressing African publics were neither nationalist nor colonial in any straightforward senses. Its editors and readers deliberated on what it meant to be from the province in an era of labor migration, how African advancement and dependence on Europeans were to be envisaged, and how relationships between women and men should be reconfigured. To hold divergent views on a world in flux, they had to keep something constant, and the order of governance itself remained beyond dispute. But this did not preclude emergent possibilities. The newspaper's columns and letters to the editor reveal claims on novel opportunities and constraints of a sort that mainstream nationalist historiography, with its meta-narrative of anti-colonialism, has rendered invisible.

Cultural Diplomacy, Language Planning, and the Case of the University of Nairobi Confucius Institute

As China’s economic and political presence in Africa increases, so does the need for its government to maintain a favorable image with African publics. Borrowing theories of soft power diplomacy and language planning, this paper analyzes, from the perspectives of African and Chinese policymakers, the impact of the Confucius Institutes on higher education in Africa and its intersections with language planning and cultural diplomacy. An empirical case study at the University of Nairobi Confucius Institute shows that policymakers and administrators anticipate that a competent group of Kenyans with Mandarin language skills will be able to engage with Chinese people and Chinese-owned companies on the ground in Kenya. However, Chinese diplomats are more concerned with China’s image and achieving its political and economic interests in Kenya than with effective cultural exchange and language instruction.

Improvising Medicine: An African Cancer Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic by Julie Livingston

Reviewed by: Improvising Medicine: An African Cancer Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic by Julie Livingston Johanna Crane Julie Livingston. Improvising Medicine: An African Cancer Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012. xvi + 228 pp. Map. Photos. Preface. Acknowledgments. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $84.95. Cloth. $23.95. Paper. Improvising Medicine is both a very easy and an extremely difficult book to read. As with any good ethnography, Julie Livingston’s deft and careful storytelling draws you in and holds you. But the stories she tells so well are often those of gangrenous tumors, unmedicated pain, and death. Thus it is all the more remarkable that her account of Botswana’s only cancer ward ultimately serves as a testament to the profoundly humanizing potential of public oncological care, even as it chronicles the burning, cutting, and poisoning that constitute the primary means of cancer treatment available to patients at Gabarone’s Princess Marina Hospital. Africa, Livingston argues, is facing a cancer crisis. In Botswana, increased cancer awareness plus the proliferation of AIDS-related cancers are giving rise to a growing epidemic. But cancer is not “new” to Africa. Contrary to the traditional global health imaginary of African publics as “biologically simple” (plagued mainly by infection, excess fertility, and malnutrition), Livingston’s careful historical work shows that cancer has long been a health problem in Africa. Fifty years ago, researchers in eastern and southern Africa were making significant contributions to oncological knowledge as they studied the relationship between cancer and infectious disease. But this work diminished as structural adjustment policies and political instability in the 1980s crippled some of the most promising African research sites and as the AIDS epidemic refocused global health priorities on HIV. Currently, Livingston argues, “Africans are living in a carcinogenic time and place” structured by a combination of infectious disease, environmental pollution, and the multinational tobacco industry (51). But African cancer has remained largely invisible. In Botswana this imbalance is apparent in the contrast between AIDS treatment, which is available nationwide and is supported by a transnational public–private partnership, and oncological care, which is funded solely by the government and limited to the single ward that is the subject of Livingston’s ethnography. In accordance with Botswana’s system of universal health care, the ward provides citizens with free cancer care—a characteristic that distinguishes Botswana from poorer African countries (and also the United States). The ward is staffed by Batswana nurses and a handful of foreign doctors (Botswana has no medical school), and led by “Dr. P”—an irascible and impassioned German oncologist whom Livingston portrays with both warmth and honesty. A fiercely dedicated but sometimes difficult man, he offers a welcome departure from the cliché of the heroic expatriate doctor in Africa. The care provided by Dr. P is “improvised” by necessity, as he must constantly adapt oncological knowledge and standards of care produced elsewhere to the “technical, biological, and social conditions of medical care in Botswana” (20). Cancer patients may be co-infected with [End Page 203] TB or HIV, many drugs and diagnostic technologies standard to Western care are unavailable or unreliable, and patients often arrive with late-stage tumors. Dr. P and his colleagues must also work to translate cancer from biomedical terms into the Setswana language and “vernacular forms of embodiment”(77) that make sense to patients under their care: an ontological project in which illness is localized into tumors that can then, they hope, be destroyed. In her focus on a single oncology ward, Livingston manages to convey both the specificity of cancer in a particular time and place—its “local biology,” to invoke Margaret Lock’s term—while at the same time speaking to much broader questions of human suffering, dignity, and care. In particular, her “interlude” (a sort of a mini-chapter) on amputation and the following chapter on the “moral intimacies of care” bring the reader face to face with the healing-through-harming that is perhaps universal to cancer treatment, but which the underfunded, “improvised” conditions at Princess Marina hospital throw into particularly sharp relief. Patients, families, and providers cry, yell, and—miraculously—laugh as they negotiate decisions (“You...