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African Communitarianism and the Misanthropic Argument for Anti-Natalism
by Kirk LougheedAnti-natalism is the provocative view that it is either always or almost always all-things-considered wrong to procreate. Philanthropic anti-natalist arguments say that procreation is always impermissible because of the harm done to individuals who are brought into existence. Misanthropic arguments, on the other hand, hold that procreation is usually impermissible given the harm that individuals will do once brought into existence. The main purpose of this short monograph is to demonstrate that David Benatar’s misanthropic argument for anti-natalism ought to be endorsed by any version of African Communitarianism. Not only that, but there are also resources in the African philosophical tradition that offer unique support for the argument. Given the emphasis that indigenous African worldviews place on the importance of procreation and the immediate family unit this result is highly surprising. This book marks the first attempt to bring anti-natalism into conversation with contemporary African ethics.
The African Continental Free Trade Area: Prospects, Problems and Challenges
by Benjamin Ofori-AmoahIn March of 2018, 44 African countries signed the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement (AfCFTA) to launch what is considered as the largest free trade area in the world. The signing of the agreement has been hailed as a major breakthrough for African development by African countries and organizations as well as external observers of African affairs. This is not the first time African countries have proposed a new organizational and institutional structure for development. African countries have signed at least 13 regional trade agreements (RTAs) for intraregional trade since 1959. However, the track record of these groups has been relatively mediocre compared to RTAs elsewhere. Thus, Africa has the lowest percentage of intracontinental trade in the world. This volume evaluates the prospects and challenges for the AfCFTA through a deep-dive assessment of previous trade blocs on the African continent and of regional free trade areas in other parts of the world. The central question of the book is this: If pre-AfCFTA trade blocs in Africa did not encourage more intracontinental trade, what guarantees that the AfCTA will? The formation of the AfCFTA will definitely remove overlapping membership that existed with previous trading blocs on the continent, but what is different about the AfCFTA that will get rid of cumbersome regulation, boost manufacturing, and create jobs? This book argues that the dreams of AfCFTA will not be realized unless African countries make efforts to address the industry mix of their economies and to enforce the rules and regulations they set down on paper.
African Cultural Values: Igbo Political Leadership in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1996 (African Studies)
by Raphael Chijoke NjokuAlthough numerous studies have been made of the Western educated political elite of colonial Nigeria in particular, and of Africa in general, very few have approached the study from a perspective that analyzes the impacts of indigenous institutions on the lives, values, and ideas of these individuals. This book is about the diachronic impact of indigenous and Western agencies in the upbringing, socialization, and careers of the colonial Igbo political elite of southeastern Nigeria. The thesis argues that the new elite manifests the continuity of traditions and culture and therefore their leadership values and the impact they brought on African society cannot be fully understood without looking closely at their lived experiences in those indigenous institutions where African life coheres. The key has been to explore this question at the level of biography, set in the context of a carefully reconstructed social history of the particular local communities surrounding the elite figures. It starts from an understanding of their family and village life, and moves forward striving to balance the familiar account of these individuals in public life, with an account of the ongoing influences from family, kinship, age grades, marriage and gender roles, secret societies, the church, local leaders and others. The result is not only a model of a new approach to African elite history, but also an argument about how to understand these emergent leaders and their peers as individuals who shared with their fellow Africans a dynamic and complex set of values that evolved over the six decades of colonialism.
African Culture and Global Politics: Language, Philosophies, and Expressive Culture in Africa and the Diaspora (Routledge African Studies)
by Toyin Falola Danielle Porter SanchezThis volume attempts to insert itself within the larger discussion of Africa in the twenty-first century, especially within the realm of world politics. Despite the underwhelming amount of attention given to Africa's role in international politics in popular news sources, it is evident that Africa has a consistent record of participating in world politics- one that pre-dates colonization and continues today. In continuance of this legacy of active participation in global political exchanges, Africans today can be heard in dialogues that span the world and their roles are impossible to replace by other entities. It is evident that a vastly different Africa exists than ones that bolster images of starvation, corruption, and compliance. The essays in this volume center on Africa and Africans participating in international political discourses, but with an emphasis on various forms of expression and philosophies, as these factors heavily influence Africa's role as a participant in global politics. The reader will find a variety of essays that permeate surface discussions of politics and political activism by inserting African culture, rhetoric, philosophies into the larger discussion of international politics and Africa's role in worldwide political, social, and economic debates.
African Customary Justice: Living Law, Legal Pluralism, and Public Ethics (Cultural Diversity and Law)
by Pnina Werbner Richard WerbnerThis book presents an important ethnographic and theoretical advance in legal anthropological scholarship by interrogating customary law, customary courts and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa. It highlights the vitality and continued relevance of customary justice at a time when customary courts have waned or even disappeared in many postcolonial African nations. Taking Botswana as a casestudy from in-depth fieldwork over a fifty-year period, the book shows, the ‘customary’ is robustly enduring, central to settling interpersonal disputes and constitutive of the local as well as the national public ethics. Customary law continues to be constitutionally protected, authorised by the country’s past as an authentic, viable legacy, from the British colonial period of indirect rule to the postcolonial state’s present development as a highly bureaucratised democracy. Along with a theoretical overview of the underlying issues for the anthropology and sociology of law, the book documents customary law as living law in the context of legal pluralism. It takes a legal realist approach and highlights the need to pay close attention to the lived experience of justice and its role in the production of legal subjectivities. The book will be valuable to Africanists but also, more broadly, to social scientists, social historians and socio-legal scholars with interests in law and social change, public ethics and personal morality, and the intersection of politics and judicial decision making.
African Design Futures: Decolonising Minds, Education, Spaces, and Practices (Sustainable Development Goals Series)
by Yaw Ofosu-AsareThis book responds to the question "Is it time to reimagine design education in Africa and decolonise our creative future?" The proposed volume is designed to provide a source of inspiration to readers in imagining their own futures within fields of Creative industries such as performative art, architecture design, industrial design, media production, drawing and illustration, filmmaking, design, documentary, virtual reality, and others. With a focus on decolonising design education in Africa, this book will challenge the dominant capitalist narrative and centre on the needs of African communities. It will provide insights into the challenges and opportunities of decolonising design education and propose alternative models for design education that promote social and environmental sustainability, cultural preservation, and community empowerment. Collectively, the proposed book's accounts bring to life the career possibilities within a rapidly expanding global sector of creativity and innovation with immense cultural, social, political, and economic impact. By exploring new models of creative practice and education that centre on social impact, cultural relevance, and community empowerment, this book will inspire readers to think critically about their own futures in the Creative Industries in Africa.
The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture (Columbia Studies in International and Global History)
by Patrick ManningPatrick Manning refuses to divide the African diaspora into the experiences of separate regions and nations. Instead, he follows the multiple routes that brought Africans and people of African descent into contact with one another and with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In weaving these stories together, Manning shows how the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean fueled dynamic interactions among black communities and cultures and how these patterns resembled those of a number of connected diasporas concurrently taking shape across the globe. Manning begins in 1400 and traces five central themes: the connections that enabled Africans to mutually identify and hold together as a global community; discourses on race; changes in economic circumstance; the character of family life; and the evolution of popular culture. <P><P>His approach reveals links among seemingly disparate worlds. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, slavery came under attack in North America, South America, southern Africa, West Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and India, with former slaves rising to positions of political prominence. Yet at the beginning of the twentieth century, the near-elimination of slavery brought new forms of discrimination that removed almost all blacks from government for half a century. Manning underscores the profound influence that the African diaspora had on world history, demonstrating the inextricable link between black migration and the rise of modernity, especially in regards to the processes of industrialization and urbanization. A remarkably inclusive and far-reaching work, The African Diaspora proves that the advent of modernity cannot be imaginatively or comprehensively engaged without taking the African peoples and the African continent as a whole into account.
African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (Critical and Cultural Musicology)
by Ingrid MonsonThe African Diaspora presents musical case studies from various regions of the African diaspora, including Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe, that engage with broader interdisciplinary discussions about race, gender, politics, nationalism, and music.
African Diaspora and the Metropolis: Reading the African, African American and Caribbean Experience
by Fassil DemissieAt the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century, a number of African American and Caribbean intellectuals and immigrants of the African Diaspora with all their apprehensions set out in steamships en route and carried with them a certain presence to the metropoleis of Europe and North America. These individuals traversed the "middle passage" in the opposite direction from the forced journey undertaken by their enslaved ancestors. Later they began to arrive in large numbers as free men and women in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Brussels, Lisbon, New York, and other places in the metropolis by steam ships and later by planes, and were actors in the larger history of empire from which the imperatives of forced migration, uprooting, displacement, and exile had arisen.The texts selected offer critical examination of a broad range of African Diaspora experiences in the metropole drawn from Senegal, the Caribbean, United States, Britain, Nigeria and France. Bringing together comparative and diasporic perspectives, the book explores the complex roles that race, gender, sexuality and history have played in the formation of African Diaspora identities in the metropole since the 19th century.This book was published as a special issue of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.
The African Diaspora in India: Assimilation, Change and Cultural Survivals
by Purnima Mehta BhattThis book explores the understudied and often overlooked subject of African presence in India. It focuses on the so-called Sidis, Siddis or Habshis who occupy a unique place in Indian history. The Sidis comprise scattered communities of people of African descent who travelled and settled along the western coast of India, mainly in Gujarat, but also in Goa, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Sri Lanka and in Sindh (Pakistan) as a result of the Indian Ocean trade from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries. The work draws from extant scholarly research and documentary sources to provide a comprehensive study of people of African descent in India and sheds new light on their experiences. By employing an interdisciplinary approach across fields of history, art, anthropology, religion, literature and oral history, it provides an analysis of their negotiations with cultural resistance, survivals and collective memory. The author examines how the Sidi communities strived to construct a distinct identity in a new homeland in a polyglot Indian society, their present status, as well as their future prospects. The book will interest those working in the fields of history, sociology and social anthropology, cultural studies, international relations, and migration and diaspora studies.
The African Diaspora in the United States and Europe: The Ghanaian Experience (Research in Migration and Ethnic Relations Series)
by John A. ArthurThis book systematically documents the experiences of Ghanaian communities in North America as a case study of the new African migration. The rapid increase in the number of Ghanaians lawfully admitted as permanent residents since 1980 offers an opportunity to investigate their immigrant journeys, their membership in the larger society and the expression of their individual and collective social identities. Using original empirical data from the US and Canada as well as comparative material from the UK and the Netherlands, the author also investigates the relationship between these new African migrants and the native-born black diaspora in the US. This study balances theoretical insight with policy implications, using the case-study as a lens not just on African migration but also on significant conceptual themes in migration studies including transnationalism, identity, social networks, remittances, economic integration and citizenship.
The African Diaspora Population in Britain
by Peter J. Aspinall Martha Judith ChinouyaThis insightful book examines the Black African diaspora in Britain through an examination of its demography, recent patterns of migration, changing patterns of residence, and socio-economic position. It provides an analysis of the areas where Black Africans face disadvantage, including labour market participation, housing markets, health and social care, and residence in deprived neighbourhoods. This original and important research also deals with categories and identities, using data collected in the 2011 Census on national identity, and the resulting investigation of the social, cultural and civic life of Black Africans presents the substantial heterogeneity concealed in the label 'Black African', concluding by highlighting the policy implications of this vital research.
African Discourse in Islam, Oral Traditions, and Performance (African Studies)
by Abdul-Rasheed Na'AllahThrough an engaged analysis of writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Niyi Osundare, and Tanure Ojaide and of African traditional oral poets like Omoekee Amao Ilorin and Mamman Shata Katsina, Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah develops an African indigenous discourse paradigm for interpreting and understanding literary and cultural materials. Na'Allah argues for the need for cultural diversity in critical theorizing in the twenty-first century. He highlights the critical issues facing scholars and students involved in criticism and translation of marginalized texts. By returning the African knowledge system back to its roots and placing it side by side with Western paradigms, Na'Allah has produced a text that will be required reading for scholars and students of African culture and literature. It is an important contribution to scholarship in the domain of mobility of African oral tradition, and on African literary, cultural and performance discourse.
African Documentary Cinema: Beyond Representation (Routledge Advances in Film Studies)
by Alexie TcheuyapAfrican Documentary Cinema investigates the inception and trajectory of contemporary documentary filmmaking in sub-Saharan African countries and their diasporas. The book challenges critical paradigms that have long prevailed in African film criticism, shedding light on the diverse discourses and evolving aesthetic trends present within documentary films.Situating his analysis within the context of the significant transformation of the African film industry, the author focuses on the development, diversity, and shifting dynamics that have impacted contemporary documentary cinema. Examining the historical, political, sociological, economic, and cultural factors that have facilitated the rise of documentary films—especially those created by female documentarians—the book assesses the emergence of documentary filmmakers spanning different generations. Their training, practices, and innovative perspectives on social, political, and environmental issues ultimately give rise to new frameworks for understanding the bio-documentary genre, issues of gender discrimination, LGBTQIA+ identities, environmental trauma, genocide, and memory on the African continent.This ground-breaking study offers new insight into a rapidly expanding topic and will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of film studies, documentary film, media industry studies, African studies, French, postcolonial studies, politics, and cultural studies.
African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa
by Michael A. GomezA groundbreaking history that puts early and medieval West Africa in a global contextPick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book, the first on this period of the region’s history in a generation, tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, including Arabic manuscripts, oral histories, and recent archaeological findings, Michael Gomez unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history more generally. Scholars have long held that such distinctions arose during the colonial period, but Gomez shows they developed much earlier.Focusing on the Savannah and Sahel region, Gomez traces the exchange of ideas and influences with North Africa and the Central Islamic Lands by way of merchants, scholars, and pilgrims. Islam’s growth in West Africa, in tandem with intensifying commerce that included slaves, resulted in a series of political experiments unique to the region, culminating in the rise of empire. A major preoccupation was the question of who could be legally enslaved, which together with other factors led to the construction of new ideas about ethnicity, race, gender, and caste—long before colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.Telling a radically new story about early Africa in global history, African Dominion is set to be the standard work on the subject for many years to come.
African Dream Machines: Style, Identity and Meaning of African Headrests
by Anitra NettletonAfrican Dream Machines takes African headrests out of the category of functional objects and into the more rarefied category of ‘art’ objects. Styles in African headrests are usually defined in terms of western art and archaeological discourses, but this book interrogates these definitions of style and demonstrates the shortcomings of defining a single formal style model as exclusive to a single ethnic group. Among the artefacts made by southern African peoples, headrests were the best known. Anitra Nettleton’s study of the uses and forms of headrests opened up a number of art-historical methodologies in the attempt to gain an understanding of form, style and content in African art objects. Her drawings of each and every headrest encountered become a major part of the project.
African Ecology and Human Evolution
by F. Clark Howell François BourlièreThis pioneering volume summarizes the results of diverse research on Pleistocene environments and the cultural and biological evolution of man in Africa. The book includes chapters on Pleistocene stratigraphy and climatic changes throughout the African continent; on the ecology, biology and sociology of African primate and human populations. Contributors include: C. Arambourg, P. Biberson, W. W. Bishop, Geoffrey Bond, F. Bourlière, Karl W. Butzer, Desmond Clark, H. B. S. Cooke, Irven DeVore, John T. Emlen, A. T. Grove, J. de Heinzelin, J. Hiernaux, Clark Howell, L. S. B. Leakey, I. Liben, T. Monod, R. F. Moreau, R. A. pullan, J. T. Robinson, George B. Schaller, S. L. Washburn. Originally published in 1964.
African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics
by Cajetan IhekaIn African Ecomedia, Cajetan Iheka examines the ecological footprint of media in Africa alongside the representation of environmental issues in visual culture. Iheka shows how, through visual media such as film, photography, and sculpture, African artists deliver a unique perspective on the socioecological costs of media production, from mineral and oil extraction to the politics of animal conservation. Among other works, he examines Pieter Hugo's photography of electronic waste recycling in Ghana and Idrissou Mora-Kpai's documentary on the deleterious consequences of uranium mining in Niger. These works highlight not only the exploitation of African workers and the vast scope of environmental degradation but also the resourcefulness and creativity of African media makers. They point to the unsustainability of current practices while acknowledging our planet's finite natural resources. In foregrounding Africa's centrality to the production and disposal of media technology, Iheka shows the important place visual media has in raising awareness of and documenting ecological disaster even as it remains complicit in it.
African Environmental Crisis: A History of Science for Development (Routledge Studies in African Development)
by Gufu ObaThis book explores how and why the idea of the African environmental crisis developed and persisted through colonial and post-colonial periods, and why it has been so influential in development discourse. From the beginnings of imperial administration, the idea of the desiccation of African environments grew in popularity, but this crisis discourse was dominated by the imposition of imperial scientific knowledge, neglecting indigenous knowledge and experience. African Environmental Crisis provides a synthesis of more than one-and-a-half century’s research on peasant agriculture and pastoral rangeland development in terms of soil erosion control, animal husbandry, grazing schemes, large-scale agricultural schemes, social and administrative science research, and vector-disease and pest controls. Drawing on comparative socio-ecological perspectives of African peoples across the East African colonies and post-independent states, this book refutes the hypothesis that African peoples were responsible for environmental degradation. Instead, Gufu Oba argues that flawed imperial assumptions and short-term research projects generated an inaccurate view of the environment in Africa. This book’s discussion of the history of science for development provides researchers across environmental studies, agronomy, African history and development studies with a lens through which to understand the underlying assumptions behind development projects in Africa.
African Environmental Ethics: A Critical Reader (The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics #29)
by Munamato ChemhuruThis book focuses on under-explored and often neglected issues in contemporary African environmental philosophy and ethics. Critical issues such as the moral status of nature, African conceptions of animal moral status and rights, African conceptions of environmental justice, African relational Environmentalism, ubuntu, African theocentric and teleological environmentalism are addressed in this book. It is unique in so far as it goes beyond the generalized focus on African metaphysics and African ethics by exploring how these views might be understood differently in order to conceptualize African environmental ethics. Against the background where environmental problems such as pollution, climate change, extinction of flora and fauna, and global warming are plain to see, it becomes useful to examine how African conceptions of environmental ethics could be understood in order to confront some of these problems facing the whole world. This book will be of value to undergraduate students, graduate students and academics working in the area of African Philosophy, African Environmental Ethics and Global Ethics in general.
African Epistemologies in Higher Education Research (Routledge Research on Decoloniality and New Postcolonialisms)
by Kolawole Samuel AdeyemoBringing a needed perspective on African Epistemologies on the critical topics of higher education in relation to knowledge systems, this book highlights how knowledge creation processes influence higher education systems, society, and African development. This book uses an interdisciplinary approach to frame the connections between academic knowledge systems. Specifically, it seeks to answer questions on the trends in knowledge mobility, histories, and sociological dimensions in knowledge production in post-colonial Africa. The discussion explores how existing knowledge systems can better align with past and present narratives throughout African history and philosophies. The primary thought behind this book is to deconstruct the idea of a free market, the issue of corruption, racism and the neoliberalist approach to knowledge creation and transmission. Thus, it seeks to answer questions on the history and sociological dimensions of knowledge production in higher education. The book argues that African epistemologies can be better understood by investigating present sociologies and histories shaping African higher education research. Researchers and university students in the field of sociology of education, economics of education, higher education and policy will find this book very useful.
African Ethics and Death: Moral Status and Human Dignity in Ubuntu Thinking (Routledge Studies in African Philosophy)
by Motsamai Molefe Elphus MuadeThis book analyzes the concepts of moral status and human dignity in African philosophy and applies them to the moral problems associated with death. The book first challenges the criticism and rejection of moral status in African philosophy and then continues to consider how moral personhood is defined in African ethical theories, investigating which entities have full moral status or moral personhood and are therefore worthy of full ethical consideration. It then applies this theory to the problems associated with death. In the medical context, will an African theory of moral status permit or forbid euthanasia? Do we have moral obligations towards dead human bodies? Overall, the book provides an important African axiological contribution to debates on global ethics and moral philosophy. Providing an important overview of the ethical problems associated with the biological fact of death, this book will be of interest to researchers across the fields of philosophy and African studies.
African Experience in the Application of the Development Aid Effectiveness Principles: The Case of Kenya (African Histories and Modernities)
by Daniel Kipleel Borter Nadeem MalikThis book analyses the diffusion and implementation of Aid Effectiveness Principles in Kenya’s agricultural sector. Although Aid Effectiveness Principles represent a significant step in aid and development discourse, studies on its implementation remain inadequate, especially in the African context. This book combines the perspectives of the Kenyan government, donor representatives and small-scale farmers. The discussion on Kenya brings in comparative perspectives and, therefore, would have broader relevance to the African region, in general. It highlights a disconnect between the government and farmers concerning the ownership concept, where farmers lack a voice in important policy matters. The book shows that donors have exploited the weaknesses in government responses to interpret The Principles in ways that suit their strategic interests. Consequently, the book argues that the diffusion of Aid Effectiveness Principles has taken the form of symbolic imitation – a form of policy diffusion where the policymakers choose policies for their symbolic value rather than their effectiveness.
African Farmers in Rhodesia: Old and New Peasant Communities in Karangaland
by A K WeinrichOriginally published in 1975 this book analyses the factors making for success and failure in agricultural development among black Zimbabweans during the 20th century. A detailed analysis is given of 2 tribal trust lands, including government policies and administrative control of these areas, voluntary and forced adjustment to land shortage and the economic resources and productivity of peasant cultivators. Settlements under individual land tenure are examined, as are government policies to these, the internal transofrmation of these communities and their economic resources and productivity. There is also a section on irrigation schemes and the reaction of people to irrigation farming. This is an indispensable book in understanding the present-day situation of agriculture in Zimbabwe.
African Farmers, Value Chains and Agricultural Development: An Economic and Institutional Perspective (Palgrave Studies in Agricultural Economics and Food Policy)
by Alan de Brauw Erwin BulteThis book provides a thorough introduction to and examination of agricultural value chains in Sub-Saharan Africa. First, the authors introduce the economic theory of agri-food value chains and value chain governance, focusing on domestic and regional trade in (and consumption of) food crops in a low-income country context. In addition to mainstream and heterodox thinking about value chain development, the book pays attention to political economy considerations. The book also reviews the empirical evidence on value chain development and performance in Africa. It adopts multiple lenses to examine agricultural value chains, zooming out from the micro level (e.g., relational contracting in a context of market imperfections) to the meso level (e.g., distributional implications of various value chain interventions, inclusion of specific social groups) and the macro level (underlying income, population and urbanization trends, volumes and prices, etc.).Furthermore, this book places value chain development in the context of a process the authors refer to as structural transformation 2.0, which refers to a process where production factors (labor, land and capital) move from low-productivity agriculture to high-productivity agriculture. Finally, throughout the book the authors interpret the evidence in light of three important debates: (i) how competitive are rural factor and product markets, and what does this imply for distribution and innovation? (ii) what role do foreign investment and factor proportions play in the development of agri-food value chains in Africa? (iii) what complementary government policies can help facilitate a process of agricultural value chain transformation, towards high-productive activities and enhancing the capacity of value chains to generate employment opportunities and food security for a growing population.