AfricaPub Date : 2023-10-11DOI: 10.1017/s0001972023000633
Peter Lockwood
{"title":"Ironies of accomplishment: negative aspiration, economic resentment and the myth of the middle class on Nairobi’s new urban outskirts","authors":"Peter Lockwood","doi":"10.1017/s0001972023000633","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0001972023000633","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Exploring the ‘hollow’ character of middle-class status in contemporary Kenya, this article shows how upwardly mobile young Kenyans struggle to cope with the expectations for distribution that their displays of achievement create. Focusing on the urbanizing peripheries of Nairobi, it shows how accusations of envy ( wivu ) made about poorer friends and relatives reflect their anxieties about failing to act as the providers they are expected to be. Anticipation of the disappointment and resentment of their would-be dependants encourages them to withdraw from friendships and kinship relations in their home neighbourhoods, and seek instead an impersonal life in new urban enclaves closer to Nairobi. The avoidance of obligation is justified through discourses of individual effort and achievement, while poorer peers and relations are criticized for looking to rely on others. The article shows how such tensions over obligation and desires for withdrawal illuminate the fragility of Kenya’s emerging middle class and the ‘ironies of accomplishment’ – that their very precarity denies these Kenyans the respect and status they desire in their neighbourhood homes.","PeriodicalId":7464,"journal":{"name":"Africa","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136209271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfricaPub Date : 2023-10-11DOI: 10.1017/s0001972023000682
Peer Schouten
{"title":"Khalid Mustafa Medani, Black Markets and Militants: Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (pb £22.99 – 978 1 009 25772 5; open access – 978 1 108 96101 1). 2022, 426 pp.","authors":"Peer Schouten","doi":"10.1017/s0001972023000682","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0001972023000682","url":null,"abstract":"Khalid Mustafa Medani, Black Markets and Militants: Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (pb £22.99 – 978 1 009 25772 5; open access – 978 1 108 96101 1). 2022, 426 pp. - Volume 93 Issue 4","PeriodicalId":7464,"journal":{"name":"Africa","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136209275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfricaPub Date : 2023-10-11DOI: 10.1017/s000197202300061x
Ben Jones, Sarah Amongin
{"title":"‘Money looks for money’: managing financialization in eastern Uganda","authors":"Ben Jones, Sarah Amongin","doi":"10.1017/s000197202300061x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s000197202300061x","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Savings groups are an important feature of life in rural Uganda and elsewhere. They have been celebrated as an ‘alternative’, community-based approach to economic development with a particular focus on empowering women. In this article we offer a more critical perspective, showing how a savings group in a village in eastern Uganda informs more general experiences of financialization. Joining the group was not really an ‘alternative’ to other forms of finance and was often a first step to securing loans from moneylenders, microfinance institutions and commercial banks. We show how poorer members of the group, typically women, ‘rented out’ their membership to wealthier villagers. Members also used the Friday meetings to socialize and to build political careers, and to reflect critically on experiences of financialization. ‘Money looks for money’, a phrase new to the area, interrogates these socialities and inequalities, as part of the seemingly inexorable pull of loans, interest and financialized debt.","PeriodicalId":7464,"journal":{"name":"Africa","volume":"90 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136210169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfricaPub Date : 2023-10-11DOI: 10.1017/s0001972023000657
Mesrob Vartavarian
{"title":"Entangled oligarchies: structure, agency and rent seeking in South Africa","authors":"Mesrob Vartavarian","doi":"10.1017/s0001972023000657","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0001972023000657","url":null,"abstract":"An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.","PeriodicalId":7464,"journal":{"name":"Africa","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136209506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfricaPub Date : 2013-11-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972013000442
P Wenzel Geissler
{"title":"STUCK IN RUINS, OR UP AND COMING? THE SHIFTING GEOGRAPHY OF URBAN PUBLIC HEALTH RESEARCH IN KISUMU, KENYA.","authors":"P Wenzel Geissler","doi":"10.1017/S0001972013000442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972013000442","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Since the Second World War, the Kenyan city of Kisumu has been an important site of medical research and public health interventions - on malaria and other vector-borne diseases, and lately on HIV and related infections. This article compares the work and lives of two generations of local workers in public health research, each central to science in the city at their time: staff of the Ministry of Health's Division of Vector Borne Disease (DVBD) in the decades after independence, and temporary employees of the Kenyan Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) in its collaboration with the US government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the early twenty-first century. Against the backdrop of changes to the city, which stagnated during the 1970s and 1980s, became an epicentre of the East African AIDS epidemic, and underwent an economic boom of sorts from the late 1990s - at least partly driven by HIV research and intervention programmes - the article examines the spaces and movements of health research workers, and their experience of the city in time. The now elderly DVBD workers' accounts are pervaded by memories of anticipated progress and the convergence of life and work in the civic wholes of nation and city; by chagrin about decay; and by nostalgia for lost hopes. Today's young KEMRI/CDC workers' short-term contracts, and the fragmented city they inhabit and study, make for less bounded and predictable spaces and temporalities. Their urban lives and work take shape between remainders and remembrances of past projects, the exhaustion of everyday struggles to make a living and a meaningful life, and the search for new forms of urban order and civic purpose.</p>","PeriodicalId":7464,"journal":{"name":"Africa","volume":"83 4","pages":"539-560"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2013-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0001972013000442","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34134652","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfricaPub Date : 2013-11-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972013000430
P Wenzel Geissler, Ann H Kelly, John Manton, Ruth J Prince, Noémi Tousignant
{"title":"INTRODUCTION: SUSTAINING THE LIFE OF THE POLIS.","authors":"P Wenzel Geissler, Ann H Kelly, John Manton, Ruth J Prince, Noémi Tousignant","doi":"10.1017/S0001972013000430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972013000430","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How are publics of protection and care defined in African cities today? The effects of globalization and neo-liberal policies on urban space are well documented. From London to São Paulo, denationalization, privatization, offshoring and cuts in state expenditure are creating enclaves and exclusions, resulting in fragmented, stratified social geographies (see Caldeira 2000; Ong 2006; Harvey 2006; Murray 2011). 'Networked archipelagoes', islands connected by transnational circulations of capital, displace other spatial relations and imaginaries. Spaces of encompassment, especially, such as 'the nation' or simply 'society' as defined by inclusion within a whole, lose practical value and intellectual purchase as referents of citizenship (Gupta and Ferguson 2002; Ferguson 2005). In African cities, where humanitarian, experimental or market logics dominate the distribution of sanitation and healthcare, this fragmentation is particularly stark (see, for example, Redfield 2006, 2012; Fassin 2007; Bredeloup <i>et al</i>. 2008; Nguyen 2012). Privilege and crisis interrupt older contiguities, delineating spaces and times of exception. The 'public' of health is defined by survival or consumption, obscuring the human as bearer of civic rights and responsibilities, as inhabitants of 'objective' material worlds 'common to all of us' (Arendt 1958: 52). Is it possible, under these conditions, to enact and imagine public health as a project of citizens, animated in civic space?</p>","PeriodicalId":7464,"journal":{"name":"Africa","volume":"83 4","pages":"531-538"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2013-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0001972013000430","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34134650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfricaPub Date : 2013-11-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972013000454
Noémi Tousignant
{"title":"PHARMACY, MONEY AND PUBLIC HEALTH IN DAKAR.","authors":"Noémi Tousignant","doi":"10.1017/S0001972013000454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972013000454","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Pharmacy students at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar must research and write a thesis to graduate. <i>Thésards</i> who took topics in analytical chemistry and toxicology describe their thesis work as a temporary opportunity to perform 'street-level' public health research that they regard as 'relevant' to the quality of people's lives. Expecting futures in the private commercial sector, <i>thésards</i> regretfully leave the thesis behind. This article explores the parenthetical nature of this moment - its brief openings and more durable closures - as part of the history of ways of being a pharmacist in post-colonial Senegal. The thesis as an interlude in students' biographies, curtailed by narrowed horizons of expectation, evokes other contractions: in the range of professional roles open to Senegalese pharmacists, and in the circuits of public health with which they might engage. For <i>thésards,</i> fieldwork, government work and commercial work entail spatial practices and imaginations; different ways of moving around the city and of tracing urban space that define pharmacists' roles in terms of the modes through which they engage with broader collectivities. Mapping <i>thésards'</i> parenthesis in Dakar is a means of capturing both their urban experience of work and the intertwining spatial, temporal and affective dimensions associated with this work. The past, probable and possible trajectories of pharmacy work are imprinted and imagined in the space of the city as field, market and polis. Pharmacists' prospects and aspirations are caught up in broader shifts in how education, (un)employment and entrepreneurship animate relations of association and exchange in Senegal.</p>","PeriodicalId":7464,"journal":{"name":"Africa","volume":"83 4","pages":"561-581"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2013-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0001972013000454","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34134653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfricaPub Date : 2013-11-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972013000478
Ruth J Prince
{"title":"'TARMACKING' IN THE MILLENNIUM CITY: SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL TRAJECTORIES OF EMPOWERMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN KISUMU, KENYA.","authors":"Ruth J Prince","doi":"10.1017/S0001972013000478","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972013000478","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Over the past fifteen years, the city of Kisumu in western Kenya has emerged as an epicentre of 'global health' interventions, organized by non-governmental and transnational groups. These interventions involve concrete, practical engagements with the city's populations, but also imaginations and desires, as they intersect with residents' expectations of development. This article follows the hopes, aspirations and trajectories of people who attach themselves as volunteers to these interventions, or who hope to do so through a process they describe as 'tarmacking'. In exploring how volunteers orient themselves to ideas of 'empowerment' that are promoted by NGOs and also have influence outside institutional settings, it examines the relations between the landscapes of intervention, the spatial-temporal horizons, and the geographies of responsibility emergent in the city. Through its association with 'moving ahead' and with development, empowerment implies movement towards some kind of future. While there is a widely shared sense among volunteers that they are going somewhere, just where that might be is not clearly articulated. Rather than attempt to pinpoint this destination, this article follows their trajectories in an attempt to grasp why and how it remains obscure.</p>","PeriodicalId":7464,"journal":{"name":"Africa","volume":"83 4","pages":"582-605"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2013-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0001972013000478","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34134654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"The daughter she will eat Agousie in the world of the spirits\": witchcraft confessions in missionised Onitsha, Nigeria.","authors":"Misty L Bastian","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7464,"journal":{"name":"Africa","volume":"72 1","pages":"84-111"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2002-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"29436040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}