African Studies

Abdul Hakim Ahmed

Harassments, Assaults and Murders: The Travails of Ghana’s Libertarian Press

骚扰、袭击和谋杀：加纳自由派媒体的困境

Most ethnographies still pay little attention to the subsistence experiences of older adult women heading household in Africa. Drawing from nineteen months of ethnographic research in Domboshava communal lands, this article addresses this gap in knowledge by discussing the position of older women heading households in rural Zimbabwe and the impact of historical and current challenges on their subsistence activities. In this article, I argue that there is no typical African widow. I further argue that these older adult women’s historical and present experiences have led to the visible reversals in the remittance flows, poor social networks, changing gender relations, ill health, the impact of HIV and AIDS, changing household structures, as well as multiple and competing responsibilities. All these factors are coalescing together to affect the older adult women’s subsistence activities and their capacity to take care of themselves, their immediate and extended families.

Ignatius Gutsa

Making Ends Meet: Experiences of Older Women Heading Households in Rural Domboshava, Zimbabwe

收支相抵：津巴布韦农村多姆博沙瓦地区老年女性户主的生活经历

Hugo ka Canham

The Providence of Review and Writing through Revision

通过修订进行审阅与写作的恩赐

In a context of rapid social change in post-conflict West Nile, Uganda, internationally funded non-governmental organisations and the state have joined efforts to reduce gender-based violence (GBV) amongst Lugbara people. That women rarely report GBV is often interpreted as an indicator that such interventions are failing because of flawed design or cultural recalcitrance. Seeking to understand women’s infrequent reporting of GBV, our research explored the relationship between a GBV intervention and local patriarchal modes of power. Focusing on ‘traditional’ modes of handling domestic violence cases, we argue that this biopolitical sphere provides a site for the reassertion of patriarchy in unexpected ways. To circumvent GBV interventions that threaten patriarchal norms male clan leaders reinvent kinship traditions. Using this case, we build upon Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s influential ‘invention of tradition’ frame to advance theoretical understandings of the fluidity of patriarchy. The men and women who participated in our research understood domestic violence as best handled through male-controlled kinship structures that centred on bride price and land rights. Our findings provide grounds for rethinking theories of patriarchy and offer insights for anti-GBV programmes that generally privilege police and legal involvement, envisage patriarchy as fixed, and focus on the nuclear household.

Jeroen Lorist

Mercy T. Mbabazi

Eileen Moyer

The Fluidity of Patriarchy: Kinship, Tradition and the Prevention of Gendered Violence in Lugbaraland, Uganda

父权制的流动性：乌干达卢格布拉兰地区的亲属关系、传统与性别暴力预防

The #EndSARS protests swept through Nigeria in October 2020 providing opportunities for Nigerian youths to demonstrate against police violence, poor governance and daunting socio-economic challenges plaguing their country. Drawing on the protesters’ collective sentiments on Twitter, this article interrogates youth agency, ethics of force in policing and collective action of #EndSARS protest actors against predatory policing. It examines the deployment of digital affordances in protest movements and discusses how #EndSARS protesters initiated frames of collective action, agency and injustice to identify problems, ventilate their grievances, attribute blame, mobilise themselves and articulate solutions. Using the cultural theory of social movements, it argues that the protesters enacted frames through discursive strategies to express ideological views and achieve specific purposes. The article further employs Ruth Wodak’s discursive paradigms to investigate the dynamics of in-group and out-group categorisations in #EndSARS protest movement. The discursive mechanisms are also employed to study the creation of stereotypes, legitimisation of protest acts and mobilisation of aggrieved Nigerians against police brutality.

Emmanuel Adeniyi

‘We're now the Walking Dead’: Predatory Policing, Youth Agency and Framing in Nigeria’s #EndSARS Social Activism

“我们现在是行尸走肉”：尼日利亚#EndSARS社会运动中的掠夺性警务、青年能动性与框架构建

Trade unions are important social and political actors in Africa. Their role goes beyond the perimetry of the world of work or industrial relations to enter the political sphere. A large literature exists on these workers’ organizations. Trade unions have been studied from multiple angles and disciplines. To put some order to this body of academic and popularizing work, it is necessary to depart from the acknowledgment of the multidisciplinary nature of studies on African trade unions. Therefore, apart from a general overview, this article divides this body of literature into six main subgroups: trade unions in industrial relations in Africa, which means membership, collective bargaining, and collective action, including labor unrest and strikes; trade unions structure and governance, which includes legal aspects and labor rights; sector-specific literature, given the fact that trade unions are more prominent in some sectors than in others; literature on trade union internationalism and regional trade unions; the relationship of trade unions with politics, which includes country-specific studies; and, finally, life histories. As highlighted by the literature, two factors determined the birth and growth of unionism in Africa in the twentieth century: first, the capitalist transformation of African economies, especially but not exclusively during colonialism; and second, the expansion of a particular kind of labor relation, namely waged labor, which was exploited to profit capital. Hence literature on trade unions is often preoccupied with the role of trade unions within the capitalist transformation of African societies and with trade unions’ attitudes toward capital, capitalists or employers, and governments that are usually there to serve them. Many studies conceptualize trade unions in relation to the economic sector, including the role of trade unions in public services, education, public administration, transport, health, mining, manufacture, and other areas. To a lesser extent, studies exist on commercial agriculture. This is because trade union density is higher in these sectors, with higher capital investment, both private and public. This is not the same in all regions and countries in Africa. Trade unions play an important and historical role in African politics. Numerous studies exist on trade unions’ opposition to colonial vested economic interests that employed African labor. With the postcolonial formal recognition of trade unions came their involvement in national politics, but also their co-optation by both ideological camps opposing each other during the Cold War. In some cases, African trade unions have been subjected to repression and banning. In other instances, they have been co-opted by political power. There are, however, also cases of African trade unions that managed to retain their autonomy from political and economic power. Since the end of the Cold War, trade unions have generally enjoyed a relatively higher degree of freedom. New approaches to the study of labor—such as global labor studies and global labor history—have increasingly marginalized trade unions. This is because in Africa trade unions represent a minority of workers—i.e., the formal wage worker, often male. The idea that trade unions epitomize a “labor aristocracy” has been slow to die. Postmodern studies on African trade unions are based on an algebraic truth: unionized formal wage workers are a small minority in Africa. This quantitative reality does not take into account the qualitative role played by trade unions for African social progress. It is a fact that trade unions continue to be repressed and prohibited in many African realities by employers and governments. Literature on African trade union agency also examines the international dimension. In addition, African trade unions developed and continue to maintain international links with trade unions outside the continent and with the International Labour Organization (ILO) and other international organizations. African trade unions have also formed organizations at the continental and regional level.

Stefano Bellucci

Trade Unions

工会

Waist beads are important cultural accessories with different layers of signification among young women in Calabar metropolis, Cross River State, south-eastern Nigeria. Drawing on ethnographic qualitative approaches involving focus group and semi-structured interviews with thirty participants who were purposively sampled, this article explores the social, symbolic and aesthetic values of waist beads based on subjective accounts and nuanced experiences of young women who have used them for varying length of time. The study is anchored on ethnosemiotic methods and anthropo-semiotic framework to foreground an investigation of indigenous system of signs in a particular cultural context. It aims to interrogate how young women make sense of body practices and representations through waist beads in shaping their social universe. Waist beads can be identified as social texts with enormous symbolic capital that is useful in beauty projects, fertility narratives, discourses of spirituality and the expression of femininity. The study concludes that waist beads are essential components of participants' material culture that provide new opportunities for self-expression, self-representation and personal identity construction. Waist beads, therefore, offer a prominent performance site through which the aesthetic of the female body is redefined, recreated and transformed.

Eyo Mensah

Nancy Nkansah

Eyamba Mensah

God’sgift Uwen

Offiong Ebong

They are Just for Making <i>Nyángá</i> : Ethnosemiotic Significance of Waist Beads Among Young Women in Nigeria

它们只是用来制作<i>Nyángá</i>：尼日利亚年轻女性腰珠的民族符号学意义

The business history of Africa has not been widely researched. As a subject area, it has seen engagement from different disciplines: business and economic history, African history, and imperial history. The general perception of Africa as a continent needing development may have contributed to a lack of interest in the role of business in African history. Nevertheless, from the 1970s onwards, the subject has had more engagement from scholars. Larger economies and regions with longer-standing intercontinental trade relationships have seen more research (e.g., South Africa, Nigeria). As both the private and higher education sectors are not consistently strongly developed across African countries, there are substantial differences in how much research has been conducted on a given country or industry. North African states are sometimes included in the historiography of the Middle East and only rarely included in the history of African business. As the subject area crosses disciplinary boundaries, research controversies and questions can be somewhat disconnected, and contributions to one field may not always be referenced by researchers from another. Research has also tended to differentiate between business actors, such as African and expatriate (with domestic ethnic minority trading diasporas such as the Lebanese in West Africa and the Indians in East Africa being included in this binary distinction or researched separately) and types of business, such as formal and informal enterprises, which usually require different methodological approaches as informal economic activities are more difficult to research archivally.

Stephanie Decker

Business History

商业史

短名	Afr. Stud.
Journal Impact	0.82
国际分区	AREA STUDIES(Q2)
期刊索引	SCI Q3中科院 4 区

ISSN	0002-0184, 1469-2872
h-index	30
国内分区	社会学(4区)社会学地域研究(4区)

涉及主题	历史政治学社会学地理哲学法学人类学古代史性别研究语言学考古
出版信息	出版商: Taylor and Francis Ltd.，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal，开源期刊: 否
基本数据	创刊年份: 1942，原创研究文献占比: 92.86%，自引率:0.00%， Gold OA占比: 9.68%

African Studies

期刊引文格式

有 1 位以上作者的期刊

有 2 位作者的期刊

有 3 位作者的期刊

有 5 位以上作者的期刊

书籍引用格式

学位论文引用格式

网页引用格式

专利引用格式

手工熬夜修改参考文献？研飞自动匹配期刊，一键轻松成稿，支持 Word/WPS

投稿经验分享

Harassments, Assaults and Murders: The Travails of Ghana’s Libertarian Press

Making Ends Meet: Experiences of Older Women Heading Households in Rural Domboshava, Zimbabwe

The Providence of Review and Writing through Revision

The Fluidity of Patriarchy: Kinship, Tradition and the Prevention of Gendered Violence in Lugbaraland, Uganda

‘We're now the Walking Dead’: Predatory Policing, Youth Agency and Framing in Nigeria’s #EndSARS Social Activism

Harassments, Assaults and Murders: The Travails of Ghana’s Libertarian Press

The Providence of Review and Writing through Revision

Trade Unions

They are Just for Making Nyángá : Ethnosemiotic Significance of Waist Beads Among Young Women in Nigeria

Business History