Africa's Civil Research Articles

Moratorium and reconciliation in a post‐missionary era

AbstractThe moratorium on Western missionary labour and financial resources has been a matter of lively interest over the past five decades. Postcolonial theologians and missiologists have blamed Western missionaries for introducing Christianity without paying attention to existing cultures of local people. Despite this, the work of Western missionaries has undeniably contributed to evangelization and the advancing of Western civilization in Africa. In this context, this paper considers Colin Morris’s views on the moratorium to prevent sending missionaries and financial resources from the West. Based on an examination of his views, it analyzes two elements that shape the discourse on the moratorium in the post‐missionary era: the impact of the moratorium on Christian mission and the need for reconciliation and partnership between the churches in the global North and the global South. This paper concludes that we must promote the interdependence and mutuality of churches in the global North and the global South if the Christian imperative of making disciples of all nations is to be fulfilled.

“We Refuse to be Silenced”: Writing a Fallist Politics into the Criminalization of Racist Hate Speech in South Africa

Recently, the South African Department of Justice and Constitutional Development opened the long-awaited Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill up for public commentary. The Bill introduces, amongst other legal novelties, the criminalization of racist hate speech. While South Africa's civil society has been preoccupied with the Bill's potential “chilling” effect on the constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression, few have critiqued the Bill for its bypassing of the complex matrix between race, racism, and power in a post-apartheid South Africa that continues to wrestle coloniality, as has been articulated by the Fallist Student Movement. In this paper, I borrow from the Fallist movement's dense archive to offer a problematization of the Bill for failing to provide a useful response to racist hate speech. I argue that the Bill ignores the political, historical, and structural dimensions of racism in post-apartheid South Africa. In doing so, I hope to offer a challenge to the drafters of the Bill to desert its apolitical ahistorical and acontextual response to racist hate and to be bold enough to construct a version that is more in sync with contemporary calls for decolonization.

Concomitants of Western Civilization and Modernity on African Cultural Practices

Many seek to understand the benefits derived from traditional festivals hence the conduction of the study which looks at the reasons for the low patronage of traditional festivals. Many are of the view that Christian religion is the only true and revealed religion and therefore do not pay any attention to the traditional festivals. The study reveals also that modern education and civilization also play a major role in the low patronage of traditional festivals when this could actually be used positively to change certain dislikes about traditional festivals other than looking down upon it. Colonialism in its own way distorted and retarded the pace and tempo of cultural growth and trend of civilization in Africa. The era of colonial pillage and plunder led to the relative stagnation and often precipitous decline of traditional cultural festivals in the colonies. The effects of western civilization and culture on Africa are in several phases: political effect, economic effect and social effect. Western civilization is a commitment to neoliberalism, commitment to liberal democracy, commitment to consumerism and commitment to Christian world view as the origin of western civilization. Although no major effort of industrialization took place during the colonial period, and there has been no significant development since, Western technology has long entered the lives of Africans through familiarity with manufactured products imported from the West. Modern medicine has largely taken the precedence over traditional methods in matters of health.

Branding: A Prosthesis of Identity

This article investigates the prosthesis of identity through the process of branding. It examines cross-cultural manifestations of this phenomena from sixth millennium BCE Syria to twelfth century Japan and Britain. From the Neolithic Era, humanity has sort to extend their identities using pictorial signs that were characteristically simple. Designed to be distinctive and instantly recognisable, the totemic symbols served to signal the origin of the bearer. Subsequently, the development of branding coincided with periods of increased in mobility both in respect to geography and social strata. This includes fifth millennium Mesopotamia, nineteenth century Britain, and America during the 1920s. There are fewer articles of greater influence on contemporary culture than A Theory of Human Motivation written by Abraham Maslow in 1943. Nearly seventy-five years later, his theories about the societal need for “belongingness” and “esteem” remain a mainstay of advertising campaigns (Maslow). Although the principles are used to sell a broad range of products from shampoo to breakfast cereal they are epitomised by apparel. This is with refence to garments and accessories bearing corporation logos. Whereas other purchased items, imbued with abstract products, are intended for personal consumption the public display of these symbols may be interpreted as a form of signalling. The intention of the wearers is to literally seek the fulfilment of the aforementioned social needs.

The Strategic Logic of Ethnoterritorial Competition: Violence against Civilians in Africa's Civil Wars

AbstractThis article develops and tests a new theory of violence against civilians during civil wars by combining geocoded data on African armed conflicts over the past two decades with a range of other geocoded information. The theory suggests a twofold logic of ethnic targeting aimed to enlarge the territory dominated by one's coethnics in the most effective way. First, rebels and government fighters kill civilians in areas populated in equal shares by their own and their adversary's coethnics because, in such areas, small amounts of violence suffice to tilt the local balance of power in their favor. Second, they target places close to the border between the settlement areas of their own and their adversary's coethnics as this will allow expanding the contiguous area under their control. We do not find empirical support for the three most prominent alternative theories, all of which assume that civilian victimization is independent of the political conflict over which the civil war is fought. Civilians are not more likely to be killed in areas where lootable natural resources can be found, in recently conquered territories where fighters are supposed to eliminate enemy collaborators, or where rebel forces who have established only weak control over their fighters operate.

Multiculturalism: A Critical Study of Chinua Achebe's Selected Novels

Reclaiming for one’s root doesn’t state that one has no root. As long as one has roots intact, one survives; and if one is uprooted or one’s roots are undiscovered, one dies. But they try their best to grow new roots amidst adverse circumstances to face reality. Cut off from cultural roots, they adopt a quest for self. In the contemporary literary criticism, roots and multiculturalism are the topics, dealt in by many novelists of repute in postcolonial literature. It can be observed that nowadays people are not only conscious of their own culture and tradition but claim superiority of their own over other’s culture. The present paper thus aims to present the cultural ambivalence that Chinua Achebe recorded in his novels Things Fall Apart and No Longer At Ease. When the Europeans came to colonize Africa, they bring with them their own culture. Achebe, in these two novels portrays the plight of the Nigerian people they face due to the mixing of the two different cultures. He draws both the pre colonial and colonial period with their both negative and positive sides. His No Longer at Ease is on corruption, which Achebe believes is brought by the Europeans to Africa. And his Things Fall Apart criticizes Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness where Conrad documented that civilization of Africa took place during the time of colonial period. Achebe’s protagonists were able to retain a sense of their pre-colonial glory, history considerably, however affected the culture and heritage in the ancient aroma. But in Africa, the ‘falcon could not hear the falconer and the center could not hold’ and eventually things did fall apart. Hence, the paper is also an attempt to examine the misrecognition of the Nigerian Culture by the dominating Europeans. DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2018.00004.3

Ehret, Christopher: The Civilizations of Africa - A History to 1800

Ehret, Christopher: The Civilizations of Africa - A History to 1800

The Legacy of David Livingstone: A Contribution to Sustainable Tourism

This article demonstrates the relevance of the legacy of David Livingstone for the promotion of sustainable tourism. The life and work of Livingstone as a missionary-explorer are analyzed with the aim of distilling those of his thoughts and actions that can contribute not only to the development of plans for sustainable tourism but also to increased ecological justice. The article furthermore shows that current international policies on trade and tourism are not based on principles of equal distribution of resources. A third aim of this article is to consider ways in which David Livingstone’s commitment to the promotion of Christianity, commerce, and civilization in Africa has thus far served to promote legitimate trade and tourism. Finally, the need for economic and developmental policies built on the equal distribution of resources is discussed. The contention of this article is that David Livingstone considered western civilization, Christianity, and commerce as building blocks for the development of Africans, promoting their human dignity and for opening possibilities to create a sustainable tourism industry.

Unleashing the power of Africa's civil society

A Liberian women’s peace movement led by 31-year-old Leymah Gbowee did something extraordinary in July 2003 to force Liberian warlords to sign a peace agreement that ended 10 years of a bloody civil war.

A comparison of death recording by health centres and civil registration in South Africans receiving antiretroviral treatment

IntroductionThere is uncertainty regarding the completeness of death recording by civil registration and by health centres in South Africa. This paper aims to compare death recording by the two systems, in cohorts of South African patients receiving antiretroviral treatment (ART).MethodsCompleteness of death recording was estimated using a capture–recapture approach. Six ART programmes linked their patient record systems to the vital registration system using civil identity document (ID) numbers and provided data comparing the outcomes recorded in patient files and in the vital registration. Patients were excluded if they had missing/invalid IDs or had transferred to other ART programmes.ResultsAfter exclusions, 91,548 patient records were included. Of deaths recorded in patients files after 2003, 94.0% (95% CI: 93.3–94.6%) were recorded by civil registration, with completeness being significantly higher in urban areas, older adults and females. Of deaths recorded by civil registration after 2003, only 35.0% (95% CI: 34.2–35.8%) were recorded in patient files, with this proportion dropping from 60% in 2004–2005 to 30% in 2010 and subsequent years. Recording of deaths in patient files was significantly higher in children and in locations within 50 km of the health centre. When the information from the two systems was combined, an estimated 96.2% of all deaths were recorded (93.5% in children and 96.2% in adults).ConclusionsSouth Africa's civil registration system has achieved a high level of completeness in the recording of mortality. However, the fraction of deaths recorded by health centres is low and information from patient records is insufficient by itself to evaluate levels and predictors of ART patient mortality. Previously documented improvements in ART mortality over time may be biased if based only on data from patient records.

Power and Agency in Precolonial African States

Precolonial African polities have emerged in recent years as fertile ground for the comparative archaeological study of social complexity and the state. For much of the twentieth century, precolonial African states were misinterpreted as the product of outside stimuli. Recent archaeological research on such polities, however, has revealed the autochthonous origins of social complexity and the state in Africa, providing valuable new insights for the comparative study of state formation in the past. This review outlines how archaeologists have tackled the precolonial state in Africa, beginning with an outline of colonial-era discourse on the nature of the state and civilization in Africa, followed by a discussion of how archaeological perspectives on power provide insights into political processes across the continent. Key examples are examined within four broadly defined subregions. Throughout this review, I highlight (a) the agency of indigenous political entrepreneurs in driving state formation across the continent, and (b) how alternative modes of power shaped the political contours of these precolonial African states.

Timbuktu Civilization and its Significance in Islamic History

Timbuktu civilization began as a seasonal settlement for trade caravans in the early 11th century. It later flourished in trade and as one of the early African centres of Islamic culture. This paper reviews the trend of Timbuktu civilization from prehistoric period up to the current state of its political impact of the region. The paper further focuses on the role Timbuktu played in African history by serving as academic and commercial centre. The significant of this paper is to reveal the fact that Africa has a long Islamic civilization. The paper provides evidences from reliable sources of the symbolic representation of the impact and influence of the early schools and universities between 11th and 15th century that existed in West Africa. The manuscript of Timbuktu serves as a living testimony of the highly advanced and refined civilization in Africa during the middle ages. The history of monuments, artefacts as well as architectural land marks that signifies the historical origin of this ancient city is presented. The early heroes that stood firm towards the development and civilisation of Timbuktu are outlined. Analysis of the development as well as the factors that led to the civilization is presented in this paper. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n11p696

Struggles for systems that nourish: southern Africa civil society contributions and challenges to the creation of flourishing societies

This paper discusses the concept, contexts, evolution, contributions, and challenges of civil society in the southern Africa based on three case studies of Malawi, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. It concludes by identifying common patterns and their implications for civil society and civil society organisations in southern Africa.Luttes pour des systèmes qui nourrissent : contributions de la société civile en Afrique australe et défis pour la création de sociétés prospères Ce document traite du concept, des contextes, de l’évolution, des contributions et des défis de la société civile en Afrique australe sur la base de trois études de cas menées au Malawi, en Afrique du Sud et au Zimbabwe. Il se conclut en identifiant des schémas communs et leurs implications pour la société civile et les organisations de la société civile en Afrique australe.Luchas a favor de sistemas de fomento: contribuciones y desafíos enfrentados por la sociedad civil de África del Sur para crear sociedades prósperasCentrándose en tres estudios de caso realizados en Malawi, Sudáfrica y Zimbabue, el presente artículo examina el concepto, los contextos, la evolución, las contribuciones y los retos que enfrenta la sociedad civil en el sur de África. Finaliza identificando los patrones en común y las implicaciones que éstos tienen tanto para la sociedad civil como para sus organizaciones en el sur de África.Lutas por sistemas que alimentam: contribuições da sociedade civil do sul da África e desafios para a criação de sociedades prósperasEste artigo discute o conceito, contextos, evolução, contribuições e desafios da sociedade civil no sul da África baseado em três estudos de caso de Malauí, África do Sul e Zimbábue. Ele conclui identificando modelos comuns e suas implicações para a sociedade civil e organizações da sociedade civil no sul da África.

Imagining Arab Communities: Colonialism, Islamic Reform, and Arab Identity in Mombasa, Kenya, 1897–1933

After the advent of British colonial rule, the epistemological prestige of Muslim culture, Arabic literacy, and qadi courts declined in Kenya. Coastal residents sought favorable court rulings outside qadi courts, which no longer had independent jurisdiction, and many sought education and jobs in a British colonial system less favorable to Islamic learning. Recognizing these challenges, Sheikh al-Amin Mazrui—Kenya’s most prominent Islamic scholar—founded a newspaper called al-Islah in 1932. He was inspired by the prominent Cairo journal al-Manar, by the Salafi reformers Rashid Rida and Muhammad Abduh. Although al-Islah’s themes were similar to al-Manar’s in advocating for Islamic reform, al-Islah addressed itself to Swahili-speaking Arabs in a milieu where Muslims were increasingly a demographic minority and culturally marginalized. Print technology (al-Islah was printed in both Kiswahili and Arabic) and Salafi ideas in al-Islah worked together to spread reform and encourage East African Muslims to value Arabic and the pursuit of sharîʾa. Although these ideas were products of a long Islamic tradition that privileged access to knowledge as the passport of the believer, they were also newly self-conscious reflections of Arab cultural and religious identity; al-Islah’s articles stressed the Arab role in creating Muslim civilization in Africa. Al-Islah critiqued the parochial nature of the British colonial project, urging a return to pre-colonial modes of Islamic hegemony and stressing the essential role of sharîʾa in constituting Islamic identity. Islamic reform in East Africa and the “reimagination” of transnational Arab identity within it depended on Arab Muslims understanding the importance of Islamic knowledge—particularly Arabic and sharîʾa—in constituting coastal communities.

Democracy, Liberty and Montesquieu: Constructing Accountable Order in African Conflict States

Without appropriate institutional checks multiparty democracy can rekindle violent conflicts rather than help to resolve them. The absolutism of 'imperial presidents' is at the root of many of Africa's civil wars and the restoration of this institution in post-conflict states will not help them find security for their citizens. Following Montesquieu, I argue that 'liberty', in the form of checks on executive power, must accompany or precede multiparty democracy in post-conflict reconstruction.

Seeking Emptiness:

ABSTRACT Theodor Herzl once contemptuously remarked that he regards Freiland as a joke. This statement surprises if one compares his novel Altneuland (Oldnewland) to Theodor Hertzka's Freiland. To say the least, both utopias share many themes and narratives structures. While Altneuland (1902) became the world-renowned manifesto of Zionism, Freiland (1890) cherished popularity only at the time of its publication. Both novels are products of Vienna's fin-de-siècle modernism. Herzl's utopia is set in Palestine, Hertzka places Freiland in the empty space of East Africa. His vision of a new civilization in Africa coincided with European colonialism, nationalism and the surge of anti-Semitism in Vienna. In the following, the essay investigates if Hertzka merely criticizes the culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna, or, if he produces a unique alternative?

Seeking Emptiness: Theodor Hertzka's Colonial Utopia Freiland (1890)

Theodor Herzl once contemptuously remarked that he regards Freiland as a joke. This statement surprises if one compares his novel Altneuland (Oldnewland) to Theodor Hertzka's Freiland. To say the least, both utopias share many themes and narratives structures. While Altneuland (1902) became the world-renowned manifesto of Zionism, Freiland (1890) cherished popularity only at the time of its publication. Both novels are products of Vienna's fin-de-siècle modernism. Herzl's utopia is set in Palestine, Hertzka places Freiland in the empty space of East Africa. His vision of a new civilization in Africa coincided with European colonialism, nationalism and the surge of anti-Semitism in Vienna. In the following, the essay investigates if Hertzka merely criticizes the culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna, or, if he produces a unique alternative?

Civil war in African states: the search for security

How do disputants in Africa's civil wars--rebel movements, ethnic groups, state leaders--find security in the midst of anarchic situations? Why do some rebel movements pursue a secessionist agenda while others seek to overthrow the existing government? Under what circumstances will insurgents agree to share power? Proposing answers to these questions, Ian Spears offers a fresh perspective on the possibilities for ending violent political conflict in Africa. Spears focuses on the security predicaments of the disputants themselves as he closely examines the roots and dynamics of civil wars in Angola, Ethiopia, and Somalia. His original analysis leads to conclusions that challenge prevailing assumptions about the nature both of conflict resolution and of peacebuilding in postconflict societies.

Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda Sverker Finnström Neil Kodesh , Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. 264 pp. In 1996, when I was accepted for the Ph.D. program in cultural anthropology at Uppsala University, my intention was to go to the northwestern shores of Lake Victoria and the Kampala area in central Uganda, to study the complex interplay between the cultural and political leadership as it played out in the famous Buganda kingdom. I eventually ended up in war-torn northern Uganda instead, but back in 1996, as I was trying to figure out a more specific research agenda, I found myself scanning the secondhand bookshops of Uppsala, in search for anything that I could find on Uganda. Among other books, I came across a torn first-edition copy of James Frederick Cunningham's Uganda and its Peoples (1905). It cost me some twelve US dollars. This coffee-table-kind-of-book covers most of the then British protectorate, although it focuses, as has been the historical and academic bias ever since, on central Uganda and the indigenous kingdoms under British rule. The so-called tribes of Uganda and their racial characteristics are listed in pseudo-anthropological chapters that turn [End Page 941] sketchier the more geographically peripheral to the capital Kampala they are. In a parallel development, the more geopolitically peripheral, the more primitive the people described are alleged to be. So when John Hanning Speke and James Augustus Grant famously crossed the Nile on their journey from Buganda to Khartoum, the Australian journalist Alan Moorehead (1960:68) proposes in The White Nile, one of his acclaimed books, " the tribes grew increasingly more primitive; they were back in a region of naked, painted men who carried bows and arrows and who knew nothing of the arts and crafts of Buganda." As I embarked on the reading of Kodesh's book, I was given the opportunity to return to Cunningham's old text. For the dust jacket to Beyond the Royal Gaze, Kodesh borrows a spellbinding photo from Cunningham's book, which turns out to be a beautiful and very smart illustration of his project to reanalyze the historiography of the precolonial Buganda kingdom. His ambition is to investigate healing and the creativity of power, to be able to understand clanship as an organizing tool for community building and collective health. More particularly, Kodesh wants to recognize "the importance of historical visions that lie outside official, courtly histories" (5). Indeed there is a long-lasting bias in the scholarship on what we today call Uganda, where the norm and starting point in the analysis is the royalist and courtly imagination of the politically centralized Buganda kingdom, in Kodesh's terms encapsulated as a " triumphant narrative of centralization and modernization" (5). This scholarly imagination—built on indigenous Ganda mythology, as well as colonial and racist imaginations such as the infamous Hamitic hypothesis—was integral to the creation of the Uganda protectorate. According to the Hamitic hypothesis, anything that resembled civilization in Africa must have been the result of ancient influence from Egypt, and in the prolongation, from Europe. The Buganda kingdom was an example of this. As Kodesh shows, the writing of the history of Buganda was a joint project that brought together in strange unity European missionaries, colonial administrators-cum-ethnographers, and indigenous Ganda intellectuals. The more of a periphery to this project, like the Acholi of northern Uganda where I have worked, the more primitive people were concluded to be. Pioneer colonial administrators of northern Uganda have described the effort to include the Acholi into the protectorate of Uganda as greatly discouraging, because the Acholi seemed to have nothing compared with the political sophistication of the Baganda. In leaving Kampala (and thus Buganda) for the provinces, to [End Page 942] their frustration the administrators found themselves dealing with people who seemed to have nothing that answered to the civilization they had encountered in Buganda. The conclusion was that these primitives in the north of the protectorate urgently needed leadership guidance not only from the British, but also from the protectorate's...

Media-Ting Africa's Civil Society: Hierarchical Linear Modeling of Individual and State-Level Effects on Support for Democracy

A number of studies have hypothesized a relationship between social capital and features of democracy. However, generalizations have been scarce; conclusive results, minimal. The best we can say at this point is that the effect of civil society is conditional, depending on a myriad of state and individual-level factors. While civil society is thought to encompass two primary components: associational life and public communication, few scholars have investigated these factors across levels of analysis. I use hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) and data from the third round of the Afrobarometer survey to investigate state-level media effects on individual attitudes toward democracy. Preliminary results indicate that an individual’s support for democracy is affected by involvement in formal associations which is itself conditioned by state-level media consumption and political knowledge.