Africa Inside Out – an anthology of stories, tales and testimonies – challenges the global newscast, daily, nightly, of an Africa of dictatorships, starvation and disease.
Writers inside and outside the continent were invited by Time of the Writer Festival instead to respond to an Africa of the now: an Africa inescapably part of contemporary world culture.
In seeking to portray an Africa that goes against the stereotype, writers pushed boldly against literary expectation. Responses range from quirky interpretations of oral tradition, to explorations
of digital possibility, to experiential testimony and humorous renditions of old – and new – conundrums.
Africa Inside Out – as its title suggests – does not present the politicised version of Africa. It portrays an Africa in flux; still grappling with familiar problems, but caught up in the global drive towards reinvention and the possibilities of an unpredictable yet interconnected future.
Edited and introduced by Michael Chapman, the selection presents a cross-section of Time of the Writer Festival participants.
Five African Union heads of state, which include Jacob Zuma, have been asked to intervene and come up with a solution to Côte d’Ivoire’s current political contest, which has two “presidents” fighting for power over the country. Adekeye Adebajo says that Gbagbo has power without legitimacy, while his contender Quattara has legitimacy without power.
THE cocoa-rich West African state of Côte d’Ivoire currently has two “presidents” contesting for power, while five African Union (AU)-appointed heads of state (including Jacob Zuma ) have been asked to deliver a solution by the end of this month. The seeds of the Ivorian crisis were sown during the autocratic rule of Felix Houphouet-Boigny between 1960 and 1993. Though he adopted an enlightened policy towards the country’s large immigrant population, the economy declined from the 1980s.
Houphouet’s heirs — Henri Konan Bedie, Gen Robert Guei and Laurent Gbagbo — instituted a xenophobic policy of Ivoirite, which discriminated against Ivorians of mixed parentage.
UKZN Press is delighted to announce that the book, Peace vs Justice? The Dilemma of Transitional Justice in Africa edited by Chandra Lekha Sriram and Suren Pillay, which we co-published with James Currey, has just won a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year award. Choice, from the American Library Association, is a US reviewer of academic books, and the award is highly regarded.
Here is the letter that was sent to our co-publisher from Choice:
This is indeed an honour, and we are proud of this publishing distinction.
About the book
This book offers fresh insights on the so-called ‘justice versus peace’ dilemma, examining the challenges and prospects for promoting both peace and accountability, specifically in African countries affected by conflict or political violence. Peace versus Justice? draws on the expertise of many insiders analysts, individuals who are not only authorities on transitional accountability processes, but who have participated in them, whether as legal practitioners or commissioners. While the primary focus is on processes in Africa, many of the contributors also draw on lessons from earlier processes elsewhere in the world, particularly Latin America.
The chapters in this volume consider a wide range of approaches to accountability and peacebuilding. These include not only domestic courts and tribunals, hybrid tribunals, or the International Criminal Court, but also truth commissions and informal or non-state justice and conflict resolution processes. Taken together, they demonstrate the wealth of experiences and experimentation in transitional justice processes on the continent.
Contributors: Kenneth Agyemang Attafuah; Alex Boraine; Thelma Ekiyor; John L. Hirsch; Victor Igreja; Matthew Kukah; Abdul Rahman Lamin; Sheila Meintjes; Mireille Affa’a Mindzie; Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu; Nompumelelo Motlafi; Wambui Mwangi; Dumisa Buhle Ntsebeza; Suren Pillay; Helen Scanlon; Chandra Lekha Sriram; Yasmin Louise Sooka; Abdul Tejan-Cole; Charles Villa-Vicencio
About the editors
Chandra Lekha Sriram is Professor of Human Rights at the School of Law, University of East London, United Kingdom. She is also the Chair of the International Studies Association Human Rights Section and consults on issues of governance and conflict prevention for the United Nations Development Programme.
Author Adekeye Adebajo, mainly known for his acute analyses of world politics, switches gears for the 2010 FIFA World Cup and offers insight into the character of the “African at heart” soccer superstar Didier Drogba, a self-proclaimed “apostle of peace, a bond between the north and the south”. Can the Ivorian realise his dream of lifting the cup?
He then stepped up to drill a spectacular free-kick into the corner of the net. Always the man for the big occasion, Drogba had also scored the only goal in the defeat of Manchester United in the FA Cup final in 2007.
He then stepped up to drill a spectacular free-kick into the corner of the net. Always the man for the big occasion, Drogba had also scored the only goal in the defeat of Manchester United in the FA Cup final in 2007.
In a world of increasingly limited resources the focus has firmly turned to Africa – the “land of plenty” from a certain, industrialized point of view. A New Scramble for Africa? Imperialism, Investment and Development, edited by Roger Southall and Henning Melber, places the current rush in a historical context while exploring its future consequences.
The latest episode in the scramble might be titled “Oil”. Here, Ugandan ABK Kasozi – while mixing in some rather less than nuanced Darwinist theory about competition between nations – encourages Africans to use their resources as tools of negotiation, rather than simply allowing them to be plundered:
In a bid to stimulate the debate on Uganda’s newly discovered oil and the sharing of the oil wealth, Business Vision runs a series of articles by Professor Kasozi, the director of the National Council for Higher Education.
[...]
There is a 21st century scramble for Africa. This is a new scramble for Africa. This time, however, the focus is not on either territory or political control.
The 21st century scramble is entirely on resources, especially the black gold (oil). Unlike a number of historians, I do not hold strong resentments to those nations or countries that scramble and take over other nations and use their resources.
A New Scramble for Africa? Imperialism, Investment and Development in Africa edited by Roger Southall, Henning Melber Book homepage
EAN: 9781869141714 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
A double launch of two substantial books speaking to contemporary South African political issues drew an impressive crowd on Wednesday night of what UCT’s Harry Garuba termed “hardcore social scientists”. A broad sweep of academics, readers, authors, leaders of society and artists filled Cape Town’s The Book Lounge to hear the lineup of authors discuss a range of contemporary philosophical issues.
Compere David Bunn invited Harry Garuba to introduce From Revolution to Rights in South Africa by Steven Robins. Garuba confessed to a feeling of being “an impostor” at such gatherings, but said it was a position he was not unhappy to assume. Tracing an arc from Fanon to post liberation South Africa, he articulated the messy trajectory of the revolution to the middle class disconnect, re-examining orthodoxies and exploring the dichotomies of the present struggle.
Author Steven Robins responded, noting ruefully that his recent opinion piece in the Cape Times, posing the question of how best to achieve meaningful reform in the current millieu, had fallen victim to a regrettable headline. A sub-editor at 2a.m. had given it the dubious title “Class action, class struggle or a classy combo?”. Robins spoke about the various discomforts that the case he was presenting evoked for him.
The author offered much food for thought on the different ways of doing politics, as did Achille Mbembe, who continued in a similar deep, honest and funny vein. He addressed Ethnicity, Inc by Jean and John Comaroff. He said most people say, “Africa! Here we go again. Nobody wants to touch it.” But the Comaroffs had shown practically that if you want to understand anything about the contemporary moment and movement globally, where our world is going from, where it’s going to, you have to study Africa. This the dynamic academic duo then demonstrated with their penetrating insights on how the commodification of identity is playing out across the world.
A profound evening all round left much provocative philosophy to ponder.
African Ethics is the first comprehensive volume on African ethics, centred on Ubuntu and its relevance today. Important contemporary issues are explored, such as African bioethics, business ethics, traditional African attitudes to the environment and the possible development of a new form of democracy based on indigenous African political systems.
In a world that has become interconnected, this anthology demonstrates that African ethics can make valuable contributions to global ethics. It is not only African academics, students, organisations or those individuals committed to ethics that are envisaged as the beneficiaries of this book, but all humankind.
A number of topics presented here were inspired by a Shona proverb that says, Ndarira imwe hairiri (“One brass wire cannot produce a sound”). The chorus of voices in African Ethics demonstrates this proverbial truism.
Read a critical appraisal of the book
African Ethics – A Brief Motivation
This anthology marks the beginning of a new era precisely because it comes at a time when a more comprehensive source on African ethics is needed in Africa and the world as a whole. That is a bold statement but this is a bold book. It is the first comprehensive collection of views on African ethics to be published in Africa or elsewhere. The 16 scholars whose work the anthology represents come from within and beyond the continent. They are all progressive thinkers, questioning the accepted norms of contemporary African society and suggesting new directions to follow in pursuit of African values and their implications to all spheres of human existence. The fact that this book is an anthology of African ethics from a comparative and applied perspective comes as a recognition of the fact that African values have inherited moral values from the western philosophical tradition, Christianity and Islam. Hence African ethics is thus presented as in constant dialogue with other world ethical traditions.
These peaceful revolutionaries – for that is what they are although working through reason not force – here analyse the modern African world in all its aspects, from religious, economic, medical, ecological to political. Where they concur is in believing that our continent’s many complex contemporary problems lie largely in modern society’s failure to tap the mainspring of inspiration for the African spirit. Scrambled, ethically and emotionally, by long experience of colonialism – and, in its most extreme form in this southern tip of the continent, apartheid – Africans have lost touch with their traditional values that have been the source of identity.
The thinkers in this compilation are not naively proposing a return to traditional ways of life. That would not be possible in societies already partly, or even largely, adapted to globalised life experience. Instead they are proposing a broad realignment of existing structures and systems to better reflect the deep-seated beliefs and behaviour patterns integral to the continent. The blend that would be produced would, they feel, have a substance and suppleness that modern African society at this stage lacks.
The foundation of African ethics in sub-Saharan Africa is a humanistic worldview. This is exposed in detail in the first chapters of the anthology but can be simply explained here as a communalism that values above all the sum of the various components of a community as an entity in itself. Individuals are prized as representatives, or essential parts of, this supremely important whole. This whole, moreover, is seen to exist not just in the here and now but in the past, through those who have gone before, and in the future, through those who have yet to come. It is, in this way, three dimensional, with a past that has influenced the present and a present that is influencing the future, all equally important. (more…)
The contributions are from eminent pan-African scholars and policy intellectuals, most of whom have had practical first-hand experience with the world body. They examine ‘global apartheid’ – the inequitable power relations between the rich North and poor South – in three important areas: the politics within the UN’s principal organs; peacekeeping and human rights; and socio-economic development, centred on the efforts of sixteen UN specialised agencies, programmes and funds. This is a unique volume on the role of the world’s most important multilateral body on its most impoverished continent.
About the Editor
Adekeye Adebajo is Executive Director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution, Cape Town, South Africa. He has served on United Nations missions in South Africa, Western Sahara and Iraq.
What others say about From Global Apartheid to Global Village
‘This comprehensive collection, written by an eminent group of Pan-African scholars and practitioners, is of critical significance to Africa. No other such study exists on an organisation of immense importance to the continent . . . This book fills a crucial gap in the literature and should help encourage strong Southern voices to contribute to debates on the UN that are often dominated by the North.’
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, United Nations Secretary-General, 1992-1996
‘. . . A policy-savvy collection rich in both opinion and analysis – and the most comprehensive volume on the UN and Africa available.’
Sam Daws, Executive Director, United Nations Association of the United Kingdom (more…)
Alison Jones’ Iron Cages addresses the crisis of the postcolonial state by exploring the interaction between the “iron cages” of expert knowledge – of which social science paradigms are taken as emblematic – and lived worlds as experienced by “ordinary” Africans.
The book focuses on two paradigms in particular, modernisation theory and Marxism-Leninism, and argues that they were designed not so much to chart the mutable and permeable contours of local landscapes as to affirm the immutable, purportedly scientific reality tracks embedded in each paradigm.
A related investigative trajectory targets the interface between social science paradigms and political ideologies, and argues that the frontier between scientific observation and ideological conviction often is honoured more in the breach than in the observance. Jones concludes that by relegating lived worlds to shadowy and insubstantial landscapes of non-being, social science paradigms are implicated in the inability of political ideologies to make sufficient sense to African constituencies. (more…)
Please join us at the Cape Town Book Fair for these stimulating events!
SATURDAY 13 JUNE
11:00 am
DALRO Auditorium There Was This Goat Authors Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele in discussion with Duncan Brown about their journey together in probing and bringing to life, in There Was This Goat, the TRC testimony of a mother whose son was killed in the Guguletu Seven incident.
*
12:00 pm
Room 1.43-1.44 From Global Apartheid to Global Village In conjunction with the Centre for Conflict Resolution. Hear the author of From Global Apartheid to Global Village, Adekeye Adebajo, speak about his new book. (more…)
Africa Inside Out – an anthology of stories, tales and testimonies – challenges the global newscast, daily, nightly, of an Africa of dictatorships, starvation and disease. 
