francis nyamnjoh | University of Cape Town (original) (raw)
Papers by francis nyamnjoh
South African Historical Journal, 2021
Journal of African Studies, 2015
This paper is a contribution to the unfinished business of transformation of colonial and aparthe... more This paper is a contribution to the unfinished business of transformation of colonial and apartheid ideologies on being human and being African that continue to shape how research is conceptualized, taught and practiced in universities across Africa. Endogenous epistemologies such as depicted by Amos Tutuola in his writings, despite their popularity with ordinary Africans and with elite Africans especially in settings away from the scrutinising prescriptive gaze of their western and westernised counterparts, are mainly dormant or invisible in scholarly circles where they are often ignored, caricatured or misrepresented through problematic categories that are actively and uncritically internalised and reproduced by a Eurocentric modern intellectual elite. Africans immersed in popular traditions of meaning-making are denied the right to think and represent their realities in accordance with the civilisations and universes they know best. Often, the ways of life they cherish are labell...
Situating globality: African agency in the appropriation of global culture, 2004
This chapter discusses the crystallization of resistance to the cultural homogenization favoured ... more This chapter discusses the crystallization of resistance to the cultural homogenization favoured by global consumer media and cultural production, stressing that in most of Africa, threats to a free, open and participatory media system and society come as much from repressive governments as from the interests of rich nations, international financial institutions and the global corporate media.
This is a significant and timely book on the politics of belonging. It captures, with fascinating... more This is a significant and timely book on the politics of belonging. It captures, with fascinating detail and insight, the current widespread disaffection with the sterile rhetoric of nation-building that has characterised much of postcolonial African politics. Until the liberation struggles of the ...
Journal of Contemporary African Studies
Modernising Traditions and Traditionalising Modernity in Africa
Africa Spectrum
This paper demonstrates the extent to which the media and belonging in Africa are torn between co... more This paper demonstrates the extent to which the media and belonging in Africa are torn between competing and often conflicting claims of bounded and flexible ideas of culture and identity. It draws on studies of xenophobia in Cameroon and South Africa, inspired by the resilience of the politicization of culture and identity, to discuss the hierarchies and inequalities that underpin political, economic and social citizenship in Africa and the world over, and the role of the media in the production, enforcement and contestation of these hierarchies and inequalities. In any country with liberal democratic aspirations or pretensions, the media are expected to promote national citizenship and its emphasis on large-scale, assimilationist and territorially bounded belonging, while turning a blind eye to those who fall through the cracks as a result of racism and/or ethnicity. Little wonder that such an exclusionary articulation of citizenship is facing formidable challenges from its inhere...
Africa Spectrum
Using the metaphor of the elephant and the three blind men, this paper discusses some elements of... more Using the metaphor of the elephant and the three blind men, this paper discusses some elements of the scholarly debate on the postcolonial turn in academia, in and of Africa, and in anthropology in particular. It is a part of the context in which anthropology remains unpopular among many African intellectuals. How do local knowledge practices take up existential issues and epistemological perspectives that may interrogate and enrich more global transcultural debates and scholarly reflexivity? Many an anthropologist still resists opening his or her mind up to life-worlds unfolding themselves through the interplay between everyday practice and the manifold actions and messages of humans, ancestors and non-human agents in sites of emerging meaning-production and innovative world-making. African anthropologists seeking recognition find themselves contested or dismissed by fellow anthropologists for doing “native”, “self or “insider” anthropology, and are sometimes accused of perpetuatin...
Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies
The concept of'information society'has been common currency since it was first ... more The concept of'information society'has been common currency since it was first used in the early 1960s by a Japanese scholar by the name of Umesao. According to Brarnan (1998: 69-71), information society has been conceptualised differently by different scholars. Some have used it to refer either to a society in which agriculture and industry have been replaced by information or to one where there is an increasing information-intensivity of all activities. Others have in mind the diffusion of information technologies in the service of capital, ...
Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies
Africa, the village belle: From crisis to opportunity As a 50-year-old African, I have become acc... more Africa, the village belle: From crisis to opportunity As a 50-year-old African, I have become accustomed to life as a continuous crisis, and to reading and writing books that perhaps portray Africa as a continent of crises and of unfulfilled expectations of renaissance and modernity. I grew up knowing Africa as a continent where exogenously generated ideas of social change dominated the attention of the fumbling, self-absorbed and contradictory power elite. It was a time when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, in conjunction with European and North American leaders, prescribed structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) and tough austerity measures to qualify African countries for loans that reduced ablebodied, hardworking citizens to human rubbish, instead of bringing about growth and poverty reduction. Today, the very same stringent measures are incurring the wrath of jobless and uncertain citizens across Europe – from Greece to Spain and beyond – as severe economic downturn threatens. Until the 1990s, for the few who could afford to make a telephone call, it was still the order of the day to have to dial through London, Paris, Brussels, Lisbon or Madrid to reach a neighbouring African country, and to fly through Europe to cross the continent. Today, with the proliferation of cell phones and related new technologies, this particular crisis is not as acute. Africans travelling by air were notoriously overburdened by excess luggage, as they contended with moving between disparate realms of accumulation, and sought to redistribute consumer items between countries, north and south, east and west. Today, with South African shopping malls sprouting up across the continent, and with more and more shops in Europe and North America selling foodstuffs and non-Western goods which mobile and diasporic Africans desire, there is less need to travel with bulky suitcases and ‘Ghana-must-go’ carrier bag.
Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2017
Botswana, a much vaunted African success story, turned 50 on the 30th of September 2016, amidst m... more Botswana, a much vaunted African success story, turned 50 on the 30th of September 2016, amidst much pomp and ceremony. The tagline for the occasion was Botswana50: United and Proud. So, are Batswana united and proud? Colonised by Britain in 1885, Botswana (then called Bechuanaland) seldom rose beyond the status of a labour reserve for South Africa throughout the colonial period (Parsons 1984). At independence in 1966, Botswana was listed among the world's poorest nations, and labelled as a 'hopeless basket case' (Colclough and McCarthy 1980). Despite more than 80 years of colonial rule, Botswana inherited very little in the form of infrastructure and was left with very few people with high levels of education, training or public service experience (Harvey and Lewis 1990; Good and Taylor 2008). As a protectorate, the country had been ruled indirectly, from Mafeking in South Africa, by a colonial power who aimed to do 'as little in the way of administration as possible and keep the cost of their involvement in Bechuanaland to a minimum' (British government official in Colclough and McCarthy 1980). When Britain handed over power at independence, it left the country with '7 km of tarred road and a capital that amounted to little more than a railway station' (Cropley 2016). Less than a year later, diamonds had been found at Orapa, and the county was on its way towards becoming one of the continent's most celebrated 'success stories'. At 50, looking back, it is hard to see a Botswana that would shower its colonial British parents with praise for good parenting. It feels more like an infancy at an orphanage, or being the child of an absentee parent. The ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) has won every election since independence, when it was shepherded into power by the British, who had built up the BDP as opposition to the more radical nationalist Botswana People's Party, which was linked to the African National Congress and seen as pro-communist (Mogalakwe 1997). In the absence of employment opportunities inside the country, the colonial system of Hut Tax had pushed more than 30% of Botswana's labour force to seek work in South Africa as migrant workers, where they generally worked in mines and factories, or as domestic servants. Since independence, Botswana's rate of domestic employment has grown (Harvey and Lewis 1990), but the job market still remains somewhat limited, with the state having done little to successfully promote diversification of the country's economy, which remains heavily diamond dependent (
Indigeneidades contemporáneas: cultura, política y globalización, 2000
The Social Life of Connectivity in Africa, 2012
Scholarship influenced by politics of exclusion has presented intra-African migrants in search of... more Scholarship influenced by politics of exclusion has presented intra-African migrants in search of a productive and meaningful existence as an unbearable burden on those fortunate enough to be recognized and represented as locals, nationals, or citizens (Peberdy 2009; Neocosmos 2010). Locals feel resentment toward African “Others,” whose presence is perceived as a threat, a danger, or an infection in need of urgent attention. Almost invariably, African migrants in African cities are perceived as epitomizing ...
Critique Internationale, 2001
Democracy Development Journal of West African Affairs, 2004
African Studies Review, 2002
This article argues that education in Africa, from colonial times to the postcolony, has been the... more This article argues that education in Africa, from colonial times to the postcolony, has been the victim of various forms of violence, the most devastating of which is the violence of cultural and political conversion: externally and internally driven initiatives and processes intended to domesticate, harness, transform, alter, remodel, adapt, or reconstruct Africa and Africans through schools and universities to suit new ways of being, seeing, doing, and thinking. As a result of such violence, educational systems have privileged mimicry and transformed epistemologies informed by partial theories to metanarratives of arrogance, superiority, and intolerance of creative differences. Even when clear alternatives are imagined to the current irrelevance in education, economic difficulties render their realization extremely difficult. Repressive states have perpetuated and capitalized upon this predicament by manipulating desperate academics into compliance and complicity with mediocrity. This article examines some epistemological consequences of such alienation and irrelevance and looks at their implications for theorizing Africa. It calls for a global conversation of universities and scholars in which Africa participates on its own terms, with the interests and concerns of ordinary Africans as its guiding principle.
Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2015
ABSTRACT If my experience of anthropology in and on Africa is anything to go by, there has been t... more ABSTRACT If my experience of anthropology in and on Africa is anything to go by, there has been too much of engaged or public anthropology and too little of anthropology as an intellectual pursuit animated by rigorous contemplation and practice on and around a set of shared curiosities. Distinguishing between academic anthropology and engaged or public anthropology requires a priori reflection on the scientific status of anthropology. This paper argues that anthropology's scientific potential has yet to be fully realised. Without a rigorous commitment to science, theory building, and an acknowledgement of associated epistemologies, as well as little patience for knowledge production as a collaborative endeavour, much anthropology today is little different from an evangelical and ideological commitment to saving souls, saving situations, winning converts and ‘giving back’. The paper challenges anthropologists to commit to the essential task of producing critical knowledge of critical value, and to re-embrace and fulfil anthropology's core mission and ambition as an evidence-based field science. The need for anthropology as a rigorous and collaborative field science, liberated from ‘western’ and ‘male’ dominance, calls for a negotiated, inclusive and accountable ethics, evidence-based thick description, an understanding of interconnections and interdependencies, and critical and comparative theory building as a permanent engagement and as a dynamic and constructive debate.
South African Historical Journal, 2021
Journal of African Studies, 2015
This paper is a contribution to the unfinished business of transformation of colonial and aparthe... more This paper is a contribution to the unfinished business of transformation of colonial and apartheid ideologies on being human and being African that continue to shape how research is conceptualized, taught and practiced in universities across Africa. Endogenous epistemologies such as depicted by Amos Tutuola in his writings, despite their popularity with ordinary Africans and with elite Africans especially in settings away from the scrutinising prescriptive gaze of their western and westernised counterparts, are mainly dormant or invisible in scholarly circles where they are often ignored, caricatured or misrepresented through problematic categories that are actively and uncritically internalised and reproduced by a Eurocentric modern intellectual elite. Africans immersed in popular traditions of meaning-making are denied the right to think and represent their realities in accordance with the civilisations and universes they know best. Often, the ways of life they cherish are labell...
Situating globality: African agency in the appropriation of global culture, 2004
This chapter discusses the crystallization of resistance to the cultural homogenization favoured ... more This chapter discusses the crystallization of resistance to the cultural homogenization favoured by global consumer media and cultural production, stressing that in most of Africa, threats to a free, open and participatory media system and society come as much from repressive governments as from the interests of rich nations, international financial institutions and the global corporate media.
This is a significant and timely book on the politics of belonging. It captures, with fascinating... more This is a significant and timely book on the politics of belonging. It captures, with fascinating detail and insight, the current widespread disaffection with the sterile rhetoric of nation-building that has characterised much of postcolonial African politics. Until the liberation struggles of the ...
Journal of Contemporary African Studies
Modernising Traditions and Traditionalising Modernity in Africa
Africa Spectrum
This paper demonstrates the extent to which the media and belonging in Africa are torn between co... more This paper demonstrates the extent to which the media and belonging in Africa are torn between competing and often conflicting claims of bounded and flexible ideas of culture and identity. It draws on studies of xenophobia in Cameroon and South Africa, inspired by the resilience of the politicization of culture and identity, to discuss the hierarchies and inequalities that underpin political, economic and social citizenship in Africa and the world over, and the role of the media in the production, enforcement and contestation of these hierarchies and inequalities. In any country with liberal democratic aspirations or pretensions, the media are expected to promote national citizenship and its emphasis on large-scale, assimilationist and territorially bounded belonging, while turning a blind eye to those who fall through the cracks as a result of racism and/or ethnicity. Little wonder that such an exclusionary articulation of citizenship is facing formidable challenges from its inhere...
Africa Spectrum
Using the metaphor of the elephant and the three blind men, this paper discusses some elements of... more Using the metaphor of the elephant and the three blind men, this paper discusses some elements of the scholarly debate on the postcolonial turn in academia, in and of Africa, and in anthropology in particular. It is a part of the context in which anthropology remains unpopular among many African intellectuals. How do local knowledge practices take up existential issues and epistemological perspectives that may interrogate and enrich more global transcultural debates and scholarly reflexivity? Many an anthropologist still resists opening his or her mind up to life-worlds unfolding themselves through the interplay between everyday practice and the manifold actions and messages of humans, ancestors and non-human agents in sites of emerging meaning-production and innovative world-making. African anthropologists seeking recognition find themselves contested or dismissed by fellow anthropologists for doing “native”, “self or “insider” anthropology, and are sometimes accused of perpetuatin...
Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies
The concept of'information society'has been common currency since it was first ... more The concept of'information society'has been common currency since it was first used in the early 1960s by a Japanese scholar by the name of Umesao. According to Brarnan (1998: 69-71), information society has been conceptualised differently by different scholars. Some have used it to refer either to a society in which agriculture and industry have been replaced by information or to one where there is an increasing information-intensivity of all activities. Others have in mind the diffusion of information technologies in the service of capital, ...
Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies
Africa, the village belle: From crisis to opportunity As a 50-year-old African, I have become acc... more Africa, the village belle: From crisis to opportunity As a 50-year-old African, I have become accustomed to life as a continuous crisis, and to reading and writing books that perhaps portray Africa as a continent of crises and of unfulfilled expectations of renaissance and modernity. I grew up knowing Africa as a continent where exogenously generated ideas of social change dominated the attention of the fumbling, self-absorbed and contradictory power elite. It was a time when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, in conjunction with European and North American leaders, prescribed structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) and tough austerity measures to qualify African countries for loans that reduced ablebodied, hardworking citizens to human rubbish, instead of bringing about growth and poverty reduction. Today, the very same stringent measures are incurring the wrath of jobless and uncertain citizens across Europe – from Greece to Spain and beyond – as severe economic downturn threatens. Until the 1990s, for the few who could afford to make a telephone call, it was still the order of the day to have to dial through London, Paris, Brussels, Lisbon or Madrid to reach a neighbouring African country, and to fly through Europe to cross the continent. Today, with the proliferation of cell phones and related new technologies, this particular crisis is not as acute. Africans travelling by air were notoriously overburdened by excess luggage, as they contended with moving between disparate realms of accumulation, and sought to redistribute consumer items between countries, north and south, east and west. Today, with South African shopping malls sprouting up across the continent, and with more and more shops in Europe and North America selling foodstuffs and non-Western goods which mobile and diasporic Africans desire, there is less need to travel with bulky suitcases and ‘Ghana-must-go’ carrier bag.
Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2017
Botswana, a much vaunted African success story, turned 50 on the 30th of September 2016, amidst m... more Botswana, a much vaunted African success story, turned 50 on the 30th of September 2016, amidst much pomp and ceremony. The tagline for the occasion was Botswana50: United and Proud. So, are Batswana united and proud? Colonised by Britain in 1885, Botswana (then called Bechuanaland) seldom rose beyond the status of a labour reserve for South Africa throughout the colonial period (Parsons 1984). At independence in 1966, Botswana was listed among the world's poorest nations, and labelled as a 'hopeless basket case' (Colclough and McCarthy 1980). Despite more than 80 years of colonial rule, Botswana inherited very little in the form of infrastructure and was left with very few people with high levels of education, training or public service experience (Harvey and Lewis 1990; Good and Taylor 2008). As a protectorate, the country had been ruled indirectly, from Mafeking in South Africa, by a colonial power who aimed to do 'as little in the way of administration as possible and keep the cost of their involvement in Bechuanaland to a minimum' (British government official in Colclough and McCarthy 1980). When Britain handed over power at independence, it left the country with '7 km of tarred road and a capital that amounted to little more than a railway station' (Cropley 2016). Less than a year later, diamonds had been found at Orapa, and the county was on its way towards becoming one of the continent's most celebrated 'success stories'. At 50, looking back, it is hard to see a Botswana that would shower its colonial British parents with praise for good parenting. It feels more like an infancy at an orphanage, or being the child of an absentee parent. The ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) has won every election since independence, when it was shepherded into power by the British, who had built up the BDP as opposition to the more radical nationalist Botswana People's Party, which was linked to the African National Congress and seen as pro-communist (Mogalakwe 1997). In the absence of employment opportunities inside the country, the colonial system of Hut Tax had pushed more than 30% of Botswana's labour force to seek work in South Africa as migrant workers, where they generally worked in mines and factories, or as domestic servants. Since independence, Botswana's rate of domestic employment has grown (Harvey and Lewis 1990), but the job market still remains somewhat limited, with the state having done little to successfully promote diversification of the country's economy, which remains heavily diamond dependent (
Indigeneidades contemporáneas: cultura, política y globalización, 2000
The Social Life of Connectivity in Africa, 2012
Scholarship influenced by politics of exclusion has presented intra-African migrants in search of... more Scholarship influenced by politics of exclusion has presented intra-African migrants in search of a productive and meaningful existence as an unbearable burden on those fortunate enough to be recognized and represented as locals, nationals, or citizens (Peberdy 2009; Neocosmos 2010). Locals feel resentment toward African “Others,” whose presence is perceived as a threat, a danger, or an infection in need of urgent attention. Almost invariably, African migrants in African cities are perceived as epitomizing ...
Critique Internationale, 2001
Democracy Development Journal of West African Affairs, 2004
African Studies Review, 2002
This article argues that education in Africa, from colonial times to the postcolony, has been the... more This article argues that education in Africa, from colonial times to the postcolony, has been the victim of various forms of violence, the most devastating of which is the violence of cultural and political conversion: externally and internally driven initiatives and processes intended to domesticate, harness, transform, alter, remodel, adapt, or reconstruct Africa and Africans through schools and universities to suit new ways of being, seeing, doing, and thinking. As a result of such violence, educational systems have privileged mimicry and transformed epistemologies informed by partial theories to metanarratives of arrogance, superiority, and intolerance of creative differences. Even when clear alternatives are imagined to the current irrelevance in education, economic difficulties render their realization extremely difficult. Repressive states have perpetuated and capitalized upon this predicament by manipulating desperate academics into compliance and complicity with mediocrity. This article examines some epistemological consequences of such alienation and irrelevance and looks at their implications for theorizing Africa. It calls for a global conversation of universities and scholars in which Africa participates on its own terms, with the interests and concerns of ordinary Africans as its guiding principle.
Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2015
ABSTRACT If my experience of anthropology in and on Africa is anything to go by, there has been t... more ABSTRACT If my experience of anthropology in and on Africa is anything to go by, there has been too much of engaged or public anthropology and too little of anthropology as an intellectual pursuit animated by rigorous contemplation and practice on and around a set of shared curiosities. Distinguishing between academic anthropology and engaged or public anthropology requires a priori reflection on the scientific status of anthropology. This paper argues that anthropology's scientific potential has yet to be fully realised. Without a rigorous commitment to science, theory building, and an acknowledgement of associated epistemologies, as well as little patience for knowledge production as a collaborative endeavour, much anthropology today is little different from an evangelical and ideological commitment to saving souls, saving situations, winning converts and ‘giving back’. The paper challenges anthropologists to commit to the essential task of producing critical knowledge of critical value, and to re-embrace and fulfil anthropology's core mission and ambition as an evidence-based field science. The need for anthropology as a rigorous and collaborative field science, liberated from ‘western’ and ‘male’ dominance, calls for a negotiated, inclusive and accountable ethics, evidence-based thick description, an understanding of interconnections and interdependencies, and critical and comparative theory building as a permanent engagement and as a dynamic and constructive debate.