Love In Africa Research Articles

Decolonizing the Gospel of Love in Africa

The violence of missionary agents on Africans contradicted the gospel of Christ’s redemptive love, which they preached. In response to the contemporary manifestations of the violence and dehumanization of “colonial love”, this article proposes the decolonization of the gospel of love, both as theological hermeneutic and a moral imperative in the African Church. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus commands us to recognize every human being as a neighbor. Within a colonial context, this means rejecting the dualistic logic of colonial love, its segregation, dehumanization, and violence.

The geopolitics of a female Chinese migrant charity network in Zimbabwe: Insights from Love in Africa

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on Love in Africa, a female Chinese migrant charity network in Zimbabwe and examines its geopolitical influence. It makes two vital finding by drawing on the theories of critical geopolitics, feminist geopolitics and public diplomacy, as well as the criticism for the lack of attention to transnational geopolitics and insufficient conceptualization of the links between state and non-state actors in existing studies. First, this study shows that migrant organizations such as Love in Africa have dealt with many neglected details in China’s state-led economic development process, which explains that migrant groups do not always challenge the state geopolitical discourse but can also form synergy with it in a form that is different from state practices. Second, this study illustrates how Love in Africa as a feminized subjectivity carves out an alternative space of love, care and transnational solidarity in contrast to the masculinity demonstrated by the state power of China. Even being excluded from state practices, these Chinese females have formed a joint force with the state in shaping geopolitical discourse. These findings reinforce the link between state and non-state actors that is under-explored in existing critical geopolitical studies and prompt an agenda of transnational geopolitics.

Continental Collaboration: Consulting, Institution Building, and Mentoring Across Africa

Continental Collaboration: Consulting, Institution Building, and Mentoring Across Africa

“Colonial Botany”: Conservationists and Orchid Hunters in Popular Afrikaans Fiction Set in the Congo (D.R.C.) and Central Africa from 1949-1962

SummaryIn this article I focus on the use of botanical tropes in Die jagters van Bloedeiland (1958), a popular fiction text from the colonial era set in the Congo (D.R.C.). It forms part of the adventure series Die Swart Luiperd (1949-1962), whose titular hero is a white Afrikaner dressed in a black leopard costume. His mission is to guard the tropical jungle against “outsiders” who attempt to access the treasures of Africa. Amongst these are European botanists, whose feverish exploration of “undiscovered” plant species – reminiscent of the “orchid hunting” of the Victorian era – renders them vulnerable to abduction by hostile indigenous tribes. The Black Leopard is portrayed as a particular brand of conservationist figure: the white Afrikaner “insider” hero who has an intimate knowledge and love of Africa, and adheres to a strict moral code. While this series represents Africa as both rich (evoking the “Eldorado” trope), and “dark” in the Conradian sense, its hero is unambiguously noble. In his aversion for Western civilisation and love of the wild the Black Leopard may seem to embody the perfect balance between “whiteness and wildness” (see Leon de Kock 2006), but his idealised characterisation firmly roots him in the prevailing Afrikaner nationalism of the era.

Love and Sex in Islamic Africa: Introduction

Groundbreaking studies on the intersections and divergences between African understandings of gender and European understandings of gender in Africa emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and have expanded greatly during the past few decades. Collaborative works such as Love in Africa (Cole and Thomas 2009), Romanic Passion (Jankowiak 1995), and Love and Globalization (Padilla et al. 2008) laid the groundwork for questioning the universality of romantic love. Recent ethnographic inroads into African sexuality, such as Re-Thinking Sexualities in Africa (Arnfred 2004), Hungochani (Epprecht 2004), and Heterosexual Africa? (Epprecht 2008), have deconstructed historical and contemporary ideas about African sexuality by pointing to the colonial origin of heteronormative frameworks. Most work on love and sex in Africa, however, has focused on predominantly Christian areas of the continent and necessarily highlights the extent to which Western missionaries and colonial officials reshaped African notions of sexuality and gender. Missing from this emergent field is a deeper investigation into shifting concepts of love, sex, and sexuality in Islamic Africa, both historically and today. This observation prompted us to organize a workshop on love and sex in Islamic Africa, held at Tulane University in September 2012. Three important conclusions emerged from the event. First, whereas European colonial officials and missionaries often blamed social problems—such as homosexuality, premarital sex, and female promiscuity—on indigenous African cultures, Muslim Africans tended to associate these and other practices that challenged the prevailing social order with colonialism and Westernization, especially in areas affected by Western tourism. Second, from the precolonial era to the present, many Muslims in Africa have had more fluid ideas about love, sex, and sexuality than popular discourses associate with either Islam or Africa. And third, campaigns to promote the acceptance of nonheteronormative approaches to love and sex in Islamic Africa stress the need to reconcile personal experiences with local articulations of Islam and, in doing so, draw on both historical traditions and current global politics. Workshop participants explored love, sex, and sexuality within the context of Islamic Africa, which included studies of Muslims in predominantly non-Muslim regions of Africa and both Muslims and non-Muslims in predominantly Islamic regions. The workshop sparked a conversation among scholars whose work addresses these issues in historical and contemporary

How to talk about love in Africa: a view from Jennifer Cole

Professor Jennifer Cole is a Guggenheim Fellow in African Studies/Humanities at the University of Chicago in the United States. In her co-edited book Love in Africa (2009) Jennifer Cole with Lynn T...

Love and Marriage in the Public Sphere

Love and Marriage in the Public Sphere Rochona Majumdar (bio) Shannon McSheffrey . Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 304 p.; ISBN 978-0-8122-3938-6. Christina Simmons . Making Marriage Modern: Women's Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xii + 306 p.; ISBN 978-0-19-506411-7. Ginger S. Frost . Living in Sin: Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. 272 p.; ISBN 978-0-7190-7736-4. Maria Raquel Casas . Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820-1880. Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2007. xiv + 261 p.; ISBN 978-0-87417-697-1. Jennifer Cole and Lynn Thomas, eds. Love in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 280 p.; ISBN 978-0-226-11352-4. Kristin Celello . Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 248 p.; ill.; ISBN 978-0-8078-3252-3. The association of the modern "West" with ideas of romantic love, companionate marriage, and the nuclear family has a long and varied genealogy. Whether we look at the radically different philosophical expositions of John Locke, G.W.F. Hegel, or Friedrich Engels, or to twentieth-century historians like Philippe Ariès, George Duby, and Lawrence Stone, there remains little doubt that the emergence of the modern West has been seen as coterminous with consensual marriage and conjugal equality. In historian Luisa Passerini's eloquent formulation, the "myth" of Europe was associated with the idea of romantic love.1 The books under consideration in this review are all engaged in revealing the gaps between ideals of romance and conjugal equality and the actual lived experiences of men and women. They interrogate received ideas about love and marriage, primarily in the Anglophone west, from the late medieval period to the present. Of [End Page 182] course, romantic love was never the only reason people married. Love and money, familial security, and citizenship concerns were inextricably linked in making western marriages. Taken together, these books remind us of the labors involved in making a marriage work. While the labor of the couple is unquantifiable, the institution of modern marriage has boosted new professions and economic activity that constitute key features of contemporary Anglo-American capitalism. The majority of these works are engaged in the critical labor of historicizing the particular forms of romantic love, conjugal equality, and companionate marriage in England and America, demonstrating that love, marriage, divorce, and romantic partnerships were highly contested phenomena. The books collectively make it clear that any attempt to think of love, marriage, divorce, or companionship as homogenous or uniform is fundamentally flawed. Each study helps the reader navigate a particular archive and its vivid portrayal of how intimacy was lived by men and women, and how intimate practices shaped the public sphere in England and the United States. Love in Africa, the only book that focuses on the "non-West," offers a foil for comparison, giving insight into how these purportedly western ideas of romance and marriage get differently inflected in non-western settings. Since the publication of Georges Duby and Philippe Ariès's multivolume A History of Private Life, the ideology of separate spheres has persistently influenced historical imagination.2 Feminist scholarship has issued numerous challenges to these ideas by showing the porous nature of the public and private spheres, which in turn has bearing on our understanding of marriage. If marriage is not a singularly "private" practice, then under what rubric can we productively think about the place of marriage and sexual relations? Shannon McSheffrey's book, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London, marks an important addition to these debates. By demonstrating how marriage and sexual practices were formative of medieval English civic culture, McSheffrey shows how anachronistic it is to use categories such as private and public, personal and political for the medieval period. As she argues, ". . . some of those arenas of life that seem obviously 'private' to us were not so...

Love in Africa edited by Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas

Love in Africa edited by <i>Jennifer Cole</i> and <i>Lynn M. Thomas</i>

Love in Africa. Edited by Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 280 pp. $23.00)

With chapters representing diverse regions of the African continent – Madagascar, Niger, South Africa, Kenya, Zanzibar, and Nigeria – the collection Love in Africa is an important volume for at least two reasons. For Africanists, the very subject matter is a welcome introduction to new scholarship that places that complex of feelings, actions and imaginings called ‘love’ firmly at the heart of histories of our continent. For, as Cole and Thomas remind us in their erudite Introduction, “… emotions are embedded in historically situated words, cultural practices, and material conditions that constitute certain kinds of subjects and enable particular kinds of relationships.”[3] Love and its “affective practices and discourses emerge out of the particular convergence of political, economic, and cultural processes.”[29] In the African context as elsewhere, therefore, emotions such as love, hate, fear, anger, pride, and shame must be studied with a regard for the tension between universal human expressions of affect and historically constituted relationships. For the new generation of academic studies of emotion and modernity, on the other hand, these case studies offer much by way of introducing the modern history of Africa, and extending our understanding of the ways in which Christianity, capitalism, literacy, popular media and consumerism have reshaped ideas and practices of romantic love, gender, individuality, intimacy and respectability in a continent which has largely been typified as unchanging and uncivilized, and, perhaps particularly hostile to the experience of love.

Why We Can't Talk to You about Voodoo

We who are natives of this City and count ourselves among Faithful cannot talk with you, outsider, about Voodoo. And that is unfortunate. Because in this highly complex, deceptively simple set of principles, beliefs and what-have-you, is much that could heal you of whatever it is in your life that needs healing. Could heal your whole life, probably. Because that's what it really is all about. Your whole life. Not you personally, of course, but how wholeness anyone and everyone should have can be restored, can restore one to oneself. But very fact that you come asking after it means that you will never possess it, at least not in this lifetime. And certainly not from anything you might learn here. And besides, we honestly cannot talk with you about it anyhow. You, of course, will tell us about books you have read and research you have done. None of which has anything to do with us or our beliefs. We will smile sympathetically as we always do at such defenses, which we recognize as pleas for belonging that they are. Or perhaps you are a modern-day Latin--by which we mean that you are descended not from our oppressors of past centuries, but from same oppression wreaked throughout islands and inlands of what is now called Latin America. In other words, a cousin of sorts. In which case you will go on about Santeria, which you will not call by its name, Santeria, but, in hushed tones, the saints--as if pope might have his spies nearby. As if pope's spies had nothing better to do than loll about eavesdropping over iced coffees in New Orleans. You will go on about it and about your love of Africa; but what we will notice is your affection for things European. And how you use that word European as an adjective for all that is good not only about our City but about yourselves. You drop it like a compliment, without warning. We notice that although you come from race-less, class-less worlds just next door to us, you will go on, at length, about color and texture and shapes of skin and hair and lips and noses. We will note with not a little shame specific physical transformations you have foisted upon yourselves and freely recommend to us. By time you return to the saints, in other words, we will have begun to wonder if pope's spies might not be needing their coffees topped. (Perhaps, for sake of good manners, we ought to invite them to join us at club this evening to hear our favorite bassist and his new trio.) You will notice our attention waning and become defensive. another age we would say, why not?) You will attempt to lure us with comparisons. The drums! (your voice rising now) where are drums?! (In Congo Square, we might offer, every Sunday for last few centuries.) But we have heard all this before and so will offer more coffee--water? rum? sweets perhaps? Anything to take edge off your confusion. And shut door on that endless yammering. None of this, of course, will satisfy you. Still, we will do whatever we can to put you at ease. You are, after all, a not too distant relation, and we feel for your discomfort. In end, however, we will tell you nothing you care to hear. You will leave perhaps a little triumphant. But in a matter of hours, perhaps a day or two, some dis-ease will come over you and you will seek us out again. You will be calmer but no less unhappy. And we are sorry, truly sorry, for your distress. But we cannot help. We really cannot talk to you about it. Perhaps you should, finally, go home. And indeed, wouldn't that be very best thing for you, all of you, no matter who you are and how distantly or not so distantly related you might prove? Wouldn't it be better all around if you just turned about and went back home? We, for our part, would be quite content to see you go. We would like to imagine you, from time to time, lodged in some place as completely your own as this is ours. …

JENNIFER COLE and LYNN M. THOMAS, editors. Love in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2009. Pp. 265. Cloth $63.00, paper $23.00

Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas, editors. Love in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2009. Pp. 265. Cloth $63.00, paper $23.00 Get access Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas, editors. Love in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2009. Pp. 265. Cloth $63.00, paper $23.00. The American Historical Review, Volume 114, Issue 4, October 2009, Page 1207, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.114.4.1207-b Published: 01 October 2009

Robert Millner Shackleton. 30 December 1909 – 3 May 2001

Robert Millner Shackleton, who died peacefully in his sleep on 3 May 2001, was born on 30 December 1909 in Purley, Surrey, the son of John Millner Shackleton (an electrical engineer of Irish derivation who, at one time, worked for the Post Office telephones) and Agnes Mitford Shackleton (née Abraham). He was distantly related to the Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and was educated at the Quaker school of Sidcot, which profoundly influenced his subsequent life and career. He entered Liverpool University in January 1927 and graduated with a first–class honours BSc in geology in July 1930 under P. G. H. Boswell FRS, the first George Herdman Professor of Geology. He was only the fourth student in the history of the department to achieve a First. Shackleton's first visit to Africa was as an undergraduate in July to September 1929 to attend the 15th International Congress in Pretoria, South Africa. He always remembered Boswell's help and how he had persuaded him into going and even shared a cabin on the Union Castle ship to South Africa with him to reduce the cost at a time when most professors would not have done so. He saw the Karroo, the Kimberley diamond mine, the Witwatersrand mines, the Bushveld, Rhodesia, and the Drakensberg. This visit to Africa was to be the foundation of his love of Africa, its people and its geology. Shackleton went on to complete a PhD at Liverpool in December 1933 on the Moel Hebog area of North Wales, between Tremadoc and Nantlle, although some of the work was done while at Imperial College, London (IC), where he was Beit Research Fellow from 1932 to 1934, largely facilitated by Boswell, who was also an IC man and had moved back there to the Chair in 1930. The Moel Hebog mapping included examining some cliff faces never scaled by any geologist or, indeed, anyone before; it was part of a systematic re–survey of North Wales encouraged by Boswell, and followed the surveys of Snowdonia by David and Howell Williams. The Moel Hebog mapping was superb and, with his other field achievements, led to his receiving the Silver Medal of the Liverpool Geological Society in 1957. Shackleton was one of several Liverpool students, including one of us (B.E.L.), who from the 1920s onwards did part of their PhD work at IC. He had a petrological training, being taught silicate analysis by A. W. Groves at IC, but the petrological and palaeogeographic interpretation of his PhD area was hindered by the fact that ignimbrites had not yet been recognized and only a few chemical analyses could be completed. The published account (7) è did not appear until 1959 and then only because of the encouragement and devoted help given by Dr J. C. Harper.

Naasteliefde as uitdaging aan die Afrikaner

Afrikaners and their churches were accused of lovelessness during the apartheid years. The time has come for us not only to reflect on the commandments to love, but also to obey these commandments in our lives. The essence of neighbourly love is therefore highlighted in this article and Afrikaners are called upon to practise this love in Africa and South Africa where we live - no matter how difficult it may be.

Love Style: Comparison of African and American Attitudes

Through increasing research on love, information is being obtained about attitudes toward love among various American populations-what is termed American Style ( 2 ) . However, a review of the literature of cross-cultural psychology suggests an absence of data on attitudes toward love in African culture, African Style. The present study sought preliminary data on attitudes toward love in Africa and made crosscultural comparisons between the present data and those obtained in America. Recent reports (2, 3 ) provided validity and reliabiliry information on a new instrument, the Munro-Adarns Love Attitude Scale, and its three subscales; Romantic Idealism, Romantic Power, and Conjugal Love. Its psychometric properties made this scale the one of choice here; it was administered to 25 male and 25 female universiry students at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. The subjects, representing a diversity of tribal groups, had a mean age of 19.7 yr. and were enrolled in a variety of academic majors. Scores for the African sample ranged from 63 to 116, indicating a wide range of beliefs about love and its components. The mean was 93.34 and the SD ? 10.52, which closely approximates the reported mean for a comparable university group in America of 101.37, but no SD was reported ( 2 ) . On Romantic Idealism, our African sample obtained a mean of 33.28 (SD f 5.54) as compared to a mean of 36.45 ( S D f 9.54) for the American university group. Higher mean scores were obtained by African subjects on Romantic Power; Africans had a mean of 28.62 ( S D ? 5.72) and Americans a mean of 26.58 ( S D ? 10.53). The largest difference becween African and American samples was on Conjugal Love; Africans had a mean of 31.52 ( S D & 4.27) and Americans a mean of 38.34 ( S D & 5.72). Although slighrly lower than the Munro-Adams sample, our African group scored in the upper range of norms on attitudes toward love. These findings suggest a relatively strong endorsement of the notion of the Power of Love and of the belief in Conjugal Love, as well as a moderate endorsement of Romantic Idealism when results are compared with other norms ( 3 ) . It is remarkable that subjects from an African culture, which has been relatively free from the influence of Western notions of Romantic Love, tend to endorse so strongly so many of the attitudes essential to this phenomenon. Additional cross-cultural research on love attitudes is needed to ascertain how universal these components of Romantic Love are among other populations.

The Refiner's Fire

In this, the second article of a series entitled “Literacy–And Then?” on the mass media as tools of social change in Africa, the author outlines the historical background of the clash of races and cultures in southern Africa. One consequence of this clash is that masses of men, forced off the land and into the cities by deliberate economic pressures, have been detribalized, but have not been enculturated into the new urban setting. The author cites resulting social problems, and the responses of sensitive African writers. The major part of the article documents themes from African writing: Gruesomeness and sex, love of Africa, Negritude, and protest.

Love in Africa

Love in Africa