Anthropologist
Food and eating are central metaphors in all cultures. Importantly, they grace essential rituals in our lives, from birth to death. Halloween, and specifically the Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead), whose origins are traceable to Mexican society, offers us an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which humans construct world views and then naturalise them (by treating these views as if they are timeless and natural).
In this brief presentation, I offer a few reflections on what it entails to move beyond rhetoric with respect to decolonising publishing in Africa. As I see it, we are doing, not just talking about defiant scholarship and publishing. We understand decolonising within the context of our work as defying and dismantling the norms, assumptions and gate-keeping practices that have historically shaped who and what gets published.
In Cultivating Moral Citizenship, ethnographer, Jude Fokwang unpacks the meanings, mechanisms and processes through which young people in an inner city of the West African nation of Cameroon respond to local and global challenges as they seek to position themselves as social adults.
The subject of polygamy often evokes mixed sentiments and sometimes outright rage from opponents who hold that polygynous marriages are patriarchal schemes designed to gratify men at the expense of women.
In recent times, Africa’s cities and towns have experienced an explosion of Pentecostal fervour as more and more “men of God” invest in the business of saving souls or peddling the shibboleth that divine favour is best measured by the size of one’s material endowments.