Institute of African Studies
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Item Maat and the Rebirth of Kmt 'Land of Black People': An Examination of Beatty's Djehuty Project(Filosofia Theoretica Journal of African Philosophy Culture and Religions, 2021) Aketema, J.; Kambon, O.B.In this paper, we examine Ɔbenfo Mario H. Beatty’s chapter, ‘Maat the Cultural and Intellectual Allegiance of a Concept’ in terms of its articulation of MꜢꜤt ‘Maat’. This examination sets out to delineate how a return to the principles inherent in MꜢꜤt ‘Maat’ can serve to bring about the Wḥm Mswt ‘Rebirth/Renaissance’ of Kmt ‘Land of Black People’ and Kmt(yw) ‘Black People’ economically and politically. This research is significant in that it points us away from the semantically vacuous and etymologically opaque terms “Africa” and “Africans” to terminology, principles, and practices that restore our original identity as Kmt(yw) ‘Black People’.Item Architecture and Politics In Africa(2022) Appeaning, I.A.In 2019, to considerable global fanfare, the new Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, opened the former palace of Emperor Menelik II to the public for the first time. Located in the heart of the capital, Addis Ababa, with sweeping views across the city, the buildings – used by successive Ethiopian regimes since the late nineteenth century – represent some of the most significant centres of political power in recent Ethiopian history. Breaking with centuries’ old traditions of secluding state buildings from popular view, the buildings now lie in a vast public complex called Unity Park alongside examples of indigenous architecture from each of Ethiopia’s nine ethnic regions. The Park is intended to be a symbolic national site that embodies and condenses Ethiopia’s cultural and material diversity. However, from the outset the purpose and official meaning of the Park as a symbol of unity have been contested by alternative narratives, reflecting how architecture and built spaces take on political meanings beyond the expressed intentions of their creators. In particular, the Park is accused of being a foreign-funded political vanity project which represents an oversimplification of the complex history of the country. The site has fuelled wider debates regarding Ethiopian history and politics in relation to where the country has come from, what constitutes its diversity and where it is going.Item Ghana: Country overview(Taylor and Francis, 2023) Amanor, K.; Denkabe, A.; Wellard, K.ABSTRACT Ghana achieved independence in 1957 – one of the pioneering African states to pass through decolonization. Upon independence Ghana had the highest income per head in Sub-Saharan Africa, but by the early 1970s it had been overtaken by many countries. The first Non-Governmental Organizations established in Ghana were church-based, carrying out social and educational work alongside their evangelical activities. Community development has been formalized into a system of elected district assemblies, in which local village-based assemblies are incorporated into district council administration. A main factor in decentralization has been the need to cut the costs of administration. At independence, agricultural policy focused on creating large-scale state-owned mechanized farms. The policy orientation of the state is reflected in the structure of agricultural research and development. The agricultural research system has four main components: the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, the Ministry of Agriculture, the universities and private agro-industrial companies.Item African mothers: A case study of northern Ghanaian women(Africa in the 21st Century: Toward a New Future, 2007-11) Dove, N.Like their ancestors before them and the generations to come, African Mothers including Diasporan sisters, wherever their location, will either help to betray or redeem Africa knowingly or unknowingly. The ability of Mothers to make any conscious decision in this regard is tempered by the impact of European and Arab cultural imperialism, materially, mentally and spiritually. Two significant groups of Mothers who hold allegiance to their ancestors are identified. One group includes sisters of the diaspora, living outside Africa, some of whose ancestors have not lived in Africa for centuries. Their consciousness has grown from the cultural remnants of their historical legacy as descendents who arrived in Europe and the Americas at different times for different reasons ranging from enslavement and refugeeism to finding work. The other group of Mothers are indigenous to Africa practicing Traditional values and beliefs that have been handed down for millennia under continuous unbroken assault.Item Doing gender work in Ghana(Africa After Gender?, 2007) Manuh, T.7 Doing Gender Work in Ghana Takyiwaa Manuh “What can we do for African women?” “What about micro-credit?”1 my new friends asked, as we sat sipping wine in the lounge of a beautiful residence hall of a small American college in mid-2005. As the interrogation progressed, I was amazed at the almost absolute lack of knowledge about Africa and its people in the twenty-¤rst century by these well-meaning, well-educated senior women college professors attending a women’s studies conference. The exception was one person who had her own West African ties and whose son or daughter had almost been caught in the cross-¤ghting in la Côte d’Ivoire. Where and how was I expected to start off as I was inundated by the barrage of questions and liberal good feeling? How much of Africa was I expected to cover, and which African women would be the object of our concern that evening? I had escaped from the dance and was making my way to my dorm room, when I was hailed to join the group. I had accepted but had not bargained for the “African Women 101” course I was being called upon to deliver. The old weariness set in as I watched these specialists of Latin America and Asia attempt to explain their lack of speci¤c or even general knowledge of African issues in our highly interconnected globalized world where CNN beams news of happenings even as they occur. What indeed can any woman anywhere do for African women that they cannot do for themselves? How did this thinly disguised unconcern, shallowness, and ignorance repackaged as mild interest intersect with the almost frenzied activities and contestations around gender in several African countries by women who might claim kinship at a certain level with some of my new friends? The disconnect I was experiencing sent me back many years in recollection of another event. It was the early 1980s and this was an arid time in Ghana. Books and reading material were, like soap and sugar, considered “essential commodities.”2 In response to this scarcity, the Cultural Affairs Of¤cer at the United States Information Service provided some academics in the arts and social sciences at my university access to articles in two or three journals they considered valuable for their work. Typically, one selected a few articles from the table of contents of the chosen journals, and copies of these articles arrived free of charge. Signs: The Journal of Women in Society and Culture had been one of my selections, and through this facility, I was able to share in a larger intellectual community located elsewhere. However, it became increasingly dif¤cult for me to make any selections when the Signs table of contents arrived because I found it harder and harder to relate to what I considered to be abstract, surreal, and narcissistic theorizings on dreams, bodies, and other individualistic projects that increasingly suffused the pages of the journal. This was especially so as I compared these writings with the very real issues of lack of rights and democratic space, Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and their privations, the increasing dictate of the international ¤nancial institutions in Ghana and several African countries, and the responsibilities and possibilities that faced me as a woman and scholar. My opinion of Signs persisted for much of the early to mid-1990s when I lived in the United States, and my disaffection was reinforced by what I experienced in women’s studies programs at the university where I was located. For someone who had been a scholar and an activist, these were very lonely times, as I found little to relate to in what was offered as women’s studies. Returning to Ghana in 1998, I was struck by the pace of work around democratization and political space, trade, economic policymaking, and gender, mostly by civil society activists. While both women and men worked on all the other issues, gender work was almost exclusively “women’s work,” even as it encompassed and extended beyond the issues civil society activists were engaged in. Thus, antiviolence projects and activities around women’s economic rights and political participation were mainly the domain of female gender activists, with the exception of a gender development “institute” whose executive director was male. How has gender become institutionalized around Africa and in Ghana? What issues have animated gender activism in Ghana? What forms have gender debates in Ghana taken and how...Item Introduction: When was gender?(Africa After Gender?, 2007) Miescher, S.F.; Manuh, T.; Cole, C.M.Introduction: When Was Gender? Stephan F. Miescher, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Catherine M. Cole In scholarship—as in real estate—location matters. This is especially true in the ¤eld of African gender studies. During the past two decades, the relationship between gender studies scholars based in Africa and those based in North America and Europe has been strained, even explosive. This is due in part to differences in political environments and experiences of racism, as well as interpretations of feminist ideologies and different political alliances and coalitions . North-South tensions erupted at a historic women’s studies conference in Nigeria in 1992, the ¤rst international conference on Women in Africa and the African Diaspora (WAAD). Convener Obioma Nnaemeka was driven by a concern about the commodi¤cation of African women in women’s studies and feminist scholarship and “their marginalization in the process of gathering, articulation , and disseminating knowledge” (1998a, 354). Nnaemeka brought together scholars and activists from inside and outside Africa. On the ¤rst day, three unanticipated controversies exploded: 1) a demand for the exclusion of white participants, 2) an objection to the presence of men, and 3) an ideological¤ght over different currents of feminism, such as (Northern/white) feminism, womanism, and Africana womanism. This episode serves as a revealing entry point into the themes and objectives of Africa After Gender? At the WAAD conference, identity politics drove much of the controversy: African-American and British-African participants¤rst raised the possibility of excluding the handful of whites who attended. Their concerns illustrated, as Nnaemeka describes it, “the complexity and heterogeneity of the category ‘woman’/‘black woman’”(1998a, 369). Most African participants, especially the Nigerian hosts, as well as some Diaspora Africans rejected the exclusion of whites. Participants from Southern Africa were, as one might expect,divided.The controversy revealed the powerful violence of racism that has affected people of African descent anywhere, from the Western hemisphere to Cape Town. However, as Nnaemeka argues, it also showed that in order for protests to be “strategically relevant,” they must be well chosen in terms of location and moment. Dialogues should not be abandoned for insurgency, “unless we have proven the inef¤cacy of the former” (ibid.). When, in her keynote address, Ama Ata Aidoo embraced the label “feminist,”she was urged by an African American to abandon the term and instead endorse “Africana woman- ism” (Aidoo 1998; Nnaemeka 1998a, 370). Generally, African participants were less interested in semantics, and they prioritized actions over the rhetoric of naming their struggles. Some foreign participants objected to the participation of male presenters. However, many African women responded that they had successfully collaborated with male scholars and activists in their joint endeavors for societal change. These divergent views on participation at the conference demonstrated how much location matters in the constitution of women’s studies and feminist scholarship. Sex-based and race-based exclusionary practices in the United States and Europe, such as the all-female classroom or the all-black organization, have a different meaning in most African settings. While separate gendered spaces including schools have a long history, political demands focus less on such gender divisions. Rather, activists struggle for improved health and education for African women. These were for many participants the main priority of the conference.1 The controversies that emerged at the WAAD conference provide an interesting case study that highlights the dif¤culty of forming coalitions around women’s and gender issues. One can see the arti¤ciality of any blanket statements about “women” in Africa which earlier generations of scholars were tempted to make in the face of an African studies discipline that had been overwhelmingly masculinist.2 Yet the WAAD conference also showed the strength of these alliances, for activists, bureaucrats, and scholars from all over the continent and, indeed, the world, attended the conference in droves. Their participation , however fraught, provided tangible evidence that something dramatic and palpable was happening with women’s and gender issues in Africa. Gender is one of the most dynamic areas of Africanist research today, as is evident by a host of new journals, articles, and books dedicated to the topic. Interest in gender is not just academic: the subject has gained widespread currency among the general populace in Africa, from taxi drivers and market traders to policymakers. Aided by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and foreign assistance programs that claim the concept in their mission statements, gender has come to mean something in Africa, even if there is little agreement about...Item 'Efie' or the meanings of 'home' among female and male Ghanaian migrants in Toronto, Canada and returned migrants to Ghana(New African Diasporas, 2003-09) Manuh, T.The extensive literature relating to the African diaspora has tended to concentrate on the descendants of those who left Africa as part of the slave trade to North America. This important new book gathers together work on more recent waves of African migration from some of the most exciting thinkers on the contemporary diaspora. Concentrating particularly on the last 20 years, the contributions look to the United States and beyond to diaspora settlement in the UK and Northern Europe. New African Diasporas looks at a range of different types of diaspora - legal and illegal, professional and low-skilled, asylum seekers and 'economic migrants' - and includes chapters on diasporic communities originating in Cote d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ghana, Senegal and Somalia. It also examines often neglected differences based on gender, class and generation in the process. This book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the African diaspora and provides the most wide-ranging picture of the new African diaspora yet.Item The folktale and its extensions(The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature: Volume 1, 2008-03) Yankah, K.The folktale is the most important strand within the prose narrative complex in Africa. It is also the most widely studied. The distinctiveness of the folktale as a genre, however, is questionable due to its close textual affinities with other expressive genres such as myth, epic, dilemma tale, legend and proverb. Even though local terminology often provides the best basis for resolving ambiguities in genre taxonomies (see Herskovits and Herskovits 1958), the folktale has sometimes posed a problem in Africa. In certain cultures, such as the Limba of Sierra Leone, the folktale and proverb do not have separate labels (Finnegan 1967: 28). Besides this, whenever the folktale has been cited in ongoing discourse for the purposes of persuasion, it has attracted the label “proverb” in certain cultures (see Yankah 1995: 88–93). The overlap between the proverb and tale should not be surprising, since they both convey moral lessons, and are mutually interactive in performance situations. Tales based on proverbs abound in Africa, and so do proverbs based on folktales. No doubt scholars who have compiled proverbs in Africa have often shown interest in the folktale (see Rattray 1916 and 1930; Dugaste 1975). © Cambridge University Press 2004 and Cambridge University Press, 2008.Item Africa after gender?(Indiana University Press, 2007-07) Miescher, S.F.; Manuh, T.; Cole, C.M.Gender is one of the most productive, dynamic, and vibrant areas of Africanist research today. But what is the meaning of gender in an African context? Why does gender usually connote women? Why has gender taken hold in Africa when feminism hasn't? Is gender yet another Western construct that has been applied to Africa however ill-suited and riddled with assumptions? Africa After Gender? looks at Africa now that gender has come into play to consider how the continent, its people, and the term itself have changed. Leading Africanist historians, anthropologists, literary critics, and political scientists move past simple dichotomies, entrenched debates, and polarizing identity politics to present an evolving discourse of gender. They show gender as an applied rather than theoretical tool and discuss themes such as the performance of sexuality, lesbianism, women's political mobilization, the work of gendered NGOs, and the role of masculinity in a gendered world. For activists, students, and scholars, this book reveals a rich and cross-disciplinary view of the status of gender in Africa today. © 2007 by Indiana University Press. All rights reserved.Item Natural assets and participatory forest management in West Africa(Reclaiming Nature: Environmental Justice and Ecological Restoration, 2007-01) Amanor, K.S.Introduction Participatory forest management in West Africa became institutionalized during the 1980s as part of the movement towards decentralization under structural adjustment programmes. Most nation states in the region have implemented forest-sector administrative reforms that give greater roles to communities in forest management, and that recognize the importance of building partnerships between communities and forest departments (Brown 1999). The idea that community participation is central to effective natural resource management has been endorsed in a number of international environmental conventions. It was given a prominent place in both the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the 1994 UN Convention to Combat Desertification. It was embraced again in 1997, in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Forests' Proposals for Action, which called for the establishment of participatory mechanisms to involve all interested parties, including local communities and indigenous people, in policy development as well as implementation. Although most West African forestry services now have moved beyond previous exclusionary approaches, participatory forest management still generally is situated within a technocentric, top-down framework. The goal is to get rural communities to participate in the programmes designed by global and national agencies, rather than to enable rural people to make their own inputs into natural resource policy. The main concerns, rooted in neo-liberal economic philosophy, are the need to make forestry management more efficient and to lower transaction costs by involving communities. © 2007 James K. Boyce, Sunita Narain, and Elizabeth A. Stanton editorial matter and selection and individual contributors.