Heike A Becker | University of the Western Cape (original) (raw)
Papers by Heike A Becker
Peripherie, 2024
This essay investigates discourses of Israel’s war on Gaza, and on Palestine more broadly, in Sou... more This essay investigates discourses of Israel’s war on Gaza, and on Palestine more broadly, in South Africa and in Germany. I present political and creative solidarity-based practices in South Africa, before taking a critical look at the allegations of “left-wing antisemitism”, which have been directed at Palestine solidarity by German politics and mainstream media. The analysis focuses on how the narrative of “antisemitic postcolonialism”, which has been constructed in German politics and media since 2020, obstructs recent postcolonial theoretical and practical efforts. I conclude by asking whether the accusations of “left-wing antisemitism” should be understood, in part, as a conservative counter-reaction to the decolonial movements that have become increasingly active also in Germany. Do these allegations serve as an attempt to insulate the country from the challenges of decolonisation and the postcolonial world?
Troubling the Social, 2024
This paper is centred on a conversation which I conducted with the Cameroonian artist and restitu... more This paper is centred on a conversation which I conducted with the Cameroonian artist and restitution activist Sylvie Njobati for the 2022 summer/ spring school of the International Research and Training Group ‘Transformative religion’, Njobati speaks about how she started the campaign to bring back the Ngonnso statue looted under German colonialisation from Cameroon, the significance of spiritual revitalization, and her and her comrades’ hopes for the future. The conversation is contextualised with notes on related initiatives of restitution and repair.
SOCIOLOGUS, 2024
This article presents a set of arguments about decolonisation debates and practices in the South ... more This article presents a set of arguments about decolonisation debates and practices in the South African academy, and particularly efforts by anthropologists based at South African universities to reinvent their discipline from a 21 st century southern African perspective. I argue that the student movements of 2015-2016 were the primary cause of robust conversations about epistemological and pedagogical issues that had previously not been raised in the post-apartheid South African academy. Questions about the politics of knowledge and curriculum reform were forcefully put on the agenda by the massive movements and opened the space for intense debates about the decolonisation of academic institutions and knowledge production in teaching and research. The discussion starts with an appraisal of the student movements that called for decolonisation of teaching and research in South African universities. Debates and practical efforts of decolonising South African anthropology will be presented against the background of past and present anthropological practice in the country. Corresponding to my argument that while decolonisation is an indispensable response to colonialism and coloniality everywhere, the concepts of decolonisation have distinctive meaning in different contexts, I contend that in South Africa, as a grossly unequal society, social justice is inevitably a key element of any discussion of decolonisation. Inequalities likewise continue to manifest in and between post-apartheid universities, which I demonstrate through close descriptions of recent efforts to decolonise the production of anthropological knowledge in three South African institutions.
A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO's Exile Camps
From 1964, when it was first granted by the Tanzanian government to OAU recognized liberation mov... more From 1964, when it was first granted by the Tanzanian government to OAU recognized liberation movements, Kongwa camp has been a key site in southern Africa's exile history. First SWAPO and FRELIMO, and later the ANC, MPLA and ZAPU, inhabited neighbouring sites near the town of Kongwa in central Tanzania, where they trained their respective members in guerrilla tactics and prepared to infiltrate their countries of origin. Despite the importance of Kongwa for any history of southern Africa's liberation struggles, few secondary sources draw attention to Kongwa as a lived space, and none consider it beyond the historiography of a particular national movement. In contrast, this essay highlights the experiences of Namibians living in an international community at Kongwa during the 1960s. Drawing on taped interviews, published memoirs, the ANC's Morogoro Papers, and Tanzanian historiography and ethnography, it argues that Kongwa shaped a social hierarchy among exiled Namibians determined by their differing abilities to form relationships with non-Namibians around the camp. The essay traces the formation of this hierarchy through histories of how Kongwa camp formed; of how Namibians related to Tanzanian officials, other liberation movement members, and local farmers there; and of how such relationships shaped the form and resolution of conflicts within SWAPO. I emphasize that these histories are obscured by southern Africa's national historiographies and that they demand a regional approach to exile which attends to the particular sites and kinds of spaces in which exiles lived. 1 Kongwa has been a key site in southern Africa's exile history since 1964, when it was granted by the Tanzanian government to liberation movements recognized by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). The South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) and the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO)and later the African National Congress (ANC), the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) and other movements-first inhabited neighbouring camps near the town of Kongwa in central Tanzania, where they trained their respective members in guerrilla tactics and prepared to infiltrate their countries of origin. Some people passed through Kongwa only briefly as they moved between training courses and combat zones, 1 This article draws from research conducted with the support of the University of the Western Cape's Centre for Humanities Research and presented at 'Camps, Liberation Movements, Politics' , a conference which I convened at UWC in August 2011. Parts of the article also draw from my doctoral dissertation, 'Exile History: An Ethnography of the SWAPO Camps and the Namibian Nation' (University of Michigan, 2009), where I discuss Kongwa through the experiences of one of the camp's former inhabitants (222-239). I am grateful to all who contributed to this research, including research participants (whose names appear in the citations) and colleagues. Of these colleagues, I would especially like to acknowledge Sifiso Ndlovu and Paolo Israel who introduced me to several of the archival sources discussed below.
Nordic Journal of African Studies, 2023
This contribution to the special issue on rethinking gender and time in African history (co-edite... more This contribution to the special issue on rethinking gender and time in African history (co-edited by Jonna Katto and Heike Becker) develops an argument about time and gender in African history in relation to historical sound recordings. Revisiting a case study from the Namibian sound archive I demonstrate innovative methodological strategies that open up new avenues of conceptual and theoretical thinking about gender and time in African history. Using the example of Nekwaya Loide Shikongo, a prominent woman from Ondonga in northern Namibia (the colonial 'Ovamboland'), and an epic poem on the deposed King Iipumbu yaShilongo that she performed in 1953, I discuss how gender was constituted and mediated in relation to colonial temporalities. The article presents a historical ethnography of how both the Christian mission's cultural discourse and the South African colonial administration's efforts to masculinize the 'native' political authority produced a gendered perception of Owambo women during the first half of the 20th century. However, it also demonstrates the performer's powerful, creative reappropriation of these discourses, which we can gauge by approaching the historical sound archive with a methodological strategy of 'close listening'. The argument thus extends to a broader reflection on the potential of historical sound recordings for challenging Eurocentric teleological narratives of gender and modernity. It also looks into the inherent limitations, and thus the opportunities and challenges, which the colonial sound archive presents for the development of decolonial methodologies in fields such as historical ethnography, cultural studies, and historiography.
Nordic Journal of African Studies, 2023
This special issue seeks to problematize the way that time and gender-and their relationship to e... more This special issue seeks to problematize the way that time and gender-and their relationship to each other-is conceptualized in prevailing historical narratives about African pasts. Often we take these notions for granted in our practices of research and writing. Even today, histories about gender in Africa often continue to be framed by Eurocentric teleological narratives of modernity. In this special issue-that brings together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, focusing on different time periods, and using different methodological approaches-we ask what would happen if we brought the notions of time and gender into a more critical focus. How would this reshape the gendered histories we write?
Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2017
This paper looks into the aesthetics and politics of the 'hip-hopera' Afrikaaps. Afrikaaps was pr... more This paper looks into the aesthetics and politics of the 'hip-hopera' Afrikaaps. Afrikaaps was produced in 2010 by a group of musicians and spoken-word artists from Cape Town and the rural Western Cape Province of South Africa. The show premiered at an annual Afrikaans cultural festival; it then had a three week-run at a theatre, located in a predominantly white, English-speaking part of Cape Town, followed by different sets of performance in South Africa and abroad and the documentary by a Cape Town film maker. Dylan Valley's (2011) film follows this group of local artists creating the stage production as they trace the roots of Afrikaans to Khoi-San and slaves in the Cape. The production aimed to 'reclaim and liberate Afrikaans from its reputation as the language of the oppressor, taking it back for all who speak it.' (Valley 2011) The paper presents an analysis of how visual and musical aesthetics converge in the performed production of history, as creolization, and ethnically-specific 'heritage', and how the self-stylization is employed in attempts at authenticating a recently asserted linguistic and cultural 'identity'. 1 "Coloureds came from Khoisan knowledge." 2 Fashionable chain stores among young people 2 Wie is gjy? (Who Are you) the other performers ask Moenier. Moenier stands there not knowing what to say, dumbstruck not knowing who he is while the earthy music continues to play in the background. 'Make child but don't have paper geld (money)', 'Kwaai cell phone (cool), but no airtime';; the audience laugh while they all sing together, dancing around Moenier in the manner of langarm, considered both 'folksy' and formal ballroom style. Wie is ek wie is gjy? (Who am I, who are you?). Bliksemstraal, another one of the performers, starts singing: 'lawyers, doctors, moved out of the ghetto' to which Blaqpearl, the only woman among the cast, starts responding with her own: "Women with no straight hair daais n straat meit, no hair nou wat is ek dan?" (Woman with no straight hair, are nothing, no hair so what am I?). The diminutive young woman shows off her shaven head. Awe ('Wotsup' 3) Moenier greets the audience; the audience in their turn laugh at this 'slang' greeting. Moenier takes up this laughter and starts talking about how when one speaks 'like that' people always laugh. He gets serious, asking the audience 'Wiet julle dat die Khoisan was ook verantwoordelik vir die development van Afrikaans, baie vannie Afrikaans woorde ko van Khoisan woorde?' (Do you know that the Khoisan was also responsible for the development of Afrikaans, a lot of the Afrikaans words are from Khoisan words?). The performers, each taking their turn, proceed to speak about the historical development of Afrikaans especially in Cape Town as well as how during the colonial era the communication patterns between colonists and the indigenous people gave rise to the development of Afrikaans. They all start speaking Afrikaans in a 'Khoisan way', which they do by inserting 'clicks' 4 everywhere in Afrikaans words. It sounds at once exotic as well as familiar to the ear, to which the audience starts applauding in amazement. Maybe we need to re-appropriate the clicks back into Afrikaans, they say. As the audience applaud, Kyle Shepherd starts playing music on the piano and the performers start chanting Coloureds kom va Khoisan verstand'. When the song ends, I almost want to jump out of my seat in excitement. It feels like the performers have just sung a freedom song; that's how excited the atmosphere seems to be. This is how Oliphant, who was at the time doing research on Afrikaaps and the everyday reproclamation of Afrikaans for her BA Honours project experienced the visual and musical aspects of the stage production of Afrikaaps. On the 1st of April 2010, Afrikaaps, dubbed a 'hip-hopera', premiered at the KKNK (Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees 5), an annual Afrikaans cultural festival that takes place in Oudtshoorn in the eastern inland reaches of South Africa's Western Cape province. A week later, the show produced by a group of musicians and spoken word-artists from Cape Town and the rural Western Cape moved to the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town, where the production had a successful three week-run. Since then, Afrikaaps has been performed in the Netherlands in October 2011, and in different South African spaces, most recently during the 2012 December holidays in the Joule City studio space in Cape 3 The vernacular articulation of the all-South African expression 'What's up?' 4 Click sounds are considered typical for the KhoiSan languages.
Dialectical Anthropology
This article portrays a recent movement towards intersectional activism in urban Namibia. Since 2... more This article portrays a recent movement towards intersectional activism in urban Namibia. Since 2020, young Namibian activists have come together in campaigns to decolonize public space through removing colonial monuments and renaming streets. These have been linked to enduring structural violence and issues of gender and sexuality, especially queer and women's reproductive rights politics, which have been expressly framed as perpetuated by coloniality. I argue that the Namibian protests amount to new political forms of intersectional decoloniality that challenge the notion of decolonial activism as identity politics. The Namibian case demonstrates that decolonial movements may not only emphatically not be steeped in essentialist politics but also that activists may oppose an identity-based politics which postcolonial ruling elites have promoted. I show that, for the Namibian movements' ideology and practice, a fully intersectional approach has become central. They consciously juxtapose colonial memory with a living vision for the future to confront and situate colonial and apartheid history. Young Namibian activists challenge the intersectional inequalities and injustices, which, they argue, postcolonial Namibia inherited from its colonial-apartheid past: class inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, and gender-based violence.
Dialectical Anthropology, 2022
This article portrays a recent movement towards intersectional activism in urban Namibia. Since 2... more This article portrays a recent movement towards intersectional activism in urban Namibia. Since 2020, young Namibian activists have come together in campaigns to decolonize public space through removing colonial monuments and renaming streets. These have been linked to enduring structural violence and issues of gender and sexuality, especially queer and women's reproductive rights politics, which have been expressly framed as perpetuated by coloniality. I argue that the Namibian protests amount to new political forms of intersectional decoloniality that challenge the notion of decolonial activism as identity politics. The Namibian case demonstrates that decolonial movements may not only emphatically not be steeped in essentialist politics but also that activists may oppose an identity-based politics which postcolonial ruling elites have promoted. I show that, for the Namibian movements' ideology and practice, a fully intersectional approach has become central. They consciously juxtapose colonial memory with a living vision for the future to confront and situate colonial and apartheid history. Young Namibian activists challenge the intersectional inequalities and injustices, which, they argue, postcolonial Namibia inherited from its colonial-apartheid past: class inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, and gender-based violence.
A few months short of the 25th anniversary of independence from South Africa in March 1990 Namibi... more A few months short of the 25th anniversary of independence from South Africa in March 1990 Namibia reached her Fanonian moment. As Achille Mbembe has explained this term with regard to the South African student movements of 2015, a new generation has entered the country’s social and political scene and has forcefully asked penetrating new questions. In Namibia this has come in the shape of the Affirmative Repositioning (AR) movement.
Global and african: Exploring Hip-Hop Artists in Philippi Township, Cape Town. In this article we... more Global and african: Exploring Hip-Hop Artists in Philippi Township, Cape Town. In this article we explore a set of issues related to the contemporary hip-hop culture in Cape Town. Firstly, we demonstrate how hip-hop as a form of popular culture and the construction of identity are linked to the specifics of ‘space and place’. We discuss different forms that the performance of hip-hop takes in different spaces in greater Cape Town. The discussion of space and the politics of culture are linked to two interrelated aspects that are particularly significant for the discussion of cultural flows and identities. In contrast to the common perception that hip-hop in Cape Town was primarily of interest among ‘coloured’ youth, our presentation focuses on young performers living in an ‘African’ township. We pay special attention to the use of language and the performance of hip-hop lyrics in African languages. Our discussion explores how the use of hybridised African languages lends support to ...
Journal of Namibian Studies : History Politics Culture, 2015
Namibia’s postcolonial nationalist imaginary is by no means homogeneous. Overall, however, it is ... more Namibia’s postcolonial nationalist imaginary is by no means homogeneous. Overall, however, it is conspicuous that as Namibia celebrates her twenty-fifth anniversary of independence, national identity is no longer defined primarily through the common history of the liberation struggle but through the tolerant accommodation, even wholehearted celebration, of cultural difference. This article attempts to understand the shifting politics and aesthetics of Namibian nationalism from two interconnected angles. On the one hand, it takes a historical perspective; it looks into shifting discourses and practices of nationalism over the past century, starting from the anti-colonial resistance at the turn to the 20th century through to the twenty-fifth anniversary of Namibian independence. On the other hand, the article investigates the cultural redefinition of the bonds between the Namibian people(s), which has been a significant aspect of the constructions of postcolonial Namibian nationhood a...
The article shows how the discourses of trauma, victimhood and silence regarding local agency con... more The article shows how the discourses of trauma, victimhood and silence regarding local agency contributed to the production of the nationalist master narrative in post-colonial Namibia. However, I point out repositories of memory beyond the narratives of victimhood and trauma, which began to add different layers to the political economy of silence and remembrance in the mid-2000s. Through revisiting visual forms of remembrance in northern Namibia an argument is developed, which challenges the dichotomy between silence and confession. It raises critical questions about the prominent place that the trauma trope has attained in memory studies, with reference to work by international memory studies scholars such as Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (1996) and South African researchers of memory politics, particularly the strategies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The fresh Namibian material supports the key critique of the TRC, which suggests that the foregrounding of pain...
Anthropology Southern Africa
Social Dynamics
This article investigates the role played by cultural initiatives in urban struggles in South Afr... more This article investigates the role played by cultural initiatives in urban struggles in South Africa, and the emergence of public art to assert the right to the city. I explore how artistic-activist interventions engage an understanding of social justice and the right to the city in provocative visual and performance art. I demonstrate how such interventions reflect Lefebvre's conceptualisation of the city as a space to be inhabited in an active process, which critically includes its re-imagination. The paper focuses on creative interventions in Cape Town that confronted the city's genteel public space with the second and third anniversary of the shooting of 34 striking miners at Marikana on August 16 2012. I argue that bringing the commemoration of the massacre into the public urban spacewhere post-apartheid Cape Town exhibits its claim to cosmopolitanismchallenges the politics of space in South Africa. I asked, how these cultural initiatives articulate claims through reimagining the city how they engage with the intertwined politics of culture and class followed by both the city and the nation-state, and how the artistic practices contest urban citizenship in contemporary South Africa.
Anthropology Southern Africa, 2010
Many people have contributed to this publication and the research that went into it. The present ... more Many people have contributed to this publication and the research that went into it. The present study would not have been possible without the invaluable support and assistance which we received from friends and colleagues who provided information, directed us to oral, published and unpublished written sources, sent us material, commented on draft chapters and shared their knowledge with us in many different ways. All remaining errors are solely our own.
Peripherie, 2024
This essay investigates discourses of Israel’s war on Gaza, and on Palestine more broadly, in Sou... more This essay investigates discourses of Israel’s war on Gaza, and on Palestine more broadly, in South Africa and in Germany. I present political and creative solidarity-based practices in South Africa, before taking a critical look at the allegations of “left-wing antisemitism”, which have been directed at Palestine solidarity by German politics and mainstream media. The analysis focuses on how the narrative of “antisemitic postcolonialism”, which has been constructed in German politics and media since 2020, obstructs recent postcolonial theoretical and practical efforts. I conclude by asking whether the accusations of “left-wing antisemitism” should be understood, in part, as a conservative counter-reaction to the decolonial movements that have become increasingly active also in Germany. Do these allegations serve as an attempt to insulate the country from the challenges of decolonisation and the postcolonial world?
Troubling the Social, 2024
This paper is centred on a conversation which I conducted with the Cameroonian artist and restitu... more This paper is centred on a conversation which I conducted with the Cameroonian artist and restitution activist Sylvie Njobati for the 2022 summer/ spring school of the International Research and Training Group ‘Transformative religion’, Njobati speaks about how she started the campaign to bring back the Ngonnso statue looted under German colonialisation from Cameroon, the significance of spiritual revitalization, and her and her comrades’ hopes for the future. The conversation is contextualised with notes on related initiatives of restitution and repair.
SOCIOLOGUS, 2024
This article presents a set of arguments about decolonisation debates and practices in the South ... more This article presents a set of arguments about decolonisation debates and practices in the South African academy, and particularly efforts by anthropologists based at South African universities to reinvent their discipline from a 21 st century southern African perspective. I argue that the student movements of 2015-2016 were the primary cause of robust conversations about epistemological and pedagogical issues that had previously not been raised in the post-apartheid South African academy. Questions about the politics of knowledge and curriculum reform were forcefully put on the agenda by the massive movements and opened the space for intense debates about the decolonisation of academic institutions and knowledge production in teaching and research. The discussion starts with an appraisal of the student movements that called for decolonisation of teaching and research in South African universities. Debates and practical efforts of decolonising South African anthropology will be presented against the background of past and present anthropological practice in the country. Corresponding to my argument that while decolonisation is an indispensable response to colonialism and coloniality everywhere, the concepts of decolonisation have distinctive meaning in different contexts, I contend that in South Africa, as a grossly unequal society, social justice is inevitably a key element of any discussion of decolonisation. Inequalities likewise continue to manifest in and between post-apartheid universities, which I demonstrate through close descriptions of recent efforts to decolonise the production of anthropological knowledge in three South African institutions.
A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO's Exile Camps
From 1964, when it was first granted by the Tanzanian government to OAU recognized liberation mov... more From 1964, when it was first granted by the Tanzanian government to OAU recognized liberation movements, Kongwa camp has been a key site in southern Africa's exile history. First SWAPO and FRELIMO, and later the ANC, MPLA and ZAPU, inhabited neighbouring sites near the town of Kongwa in central Tanzania, where they trained their respective members in guerrilla tactics and prepared to infiltrate their countries of origin. Despite the importance of Kongwa for any history of southern Africa's liberation struggles, few secondary sources draw attention to Kongwa as a lived space, and none consider it beyond the historiography of a particular national movement. In contrast, this essay highlights the experiences of Namibians living in an international community at Kongwa during the 1960s. Drawing on taped interviews, published memoirs, the ANC's Morogoro Papers, and Tanzanian historiography and ethnography, it argues that Kongwa shaped a social hierarchy among exiled Namibians determined by their differing abilities to form relationships with non-Namibians around the camp. The essay traces the formation of this hierarchy through histories of how Kongwa camp formed; of how Namibians related to Tanzanian officials, other liberation movement members, and local farmers there; and of how such relationships shaped the form and resolution of conflicts within SWAPO. I emphasize that these histories are obscured by southern Africa's national historiographies and that they demand a regional approach to exile which attends to the particular sites and kinds of spaces in which exiles lived. 1 Kongwa has been a key site in southern Africa's exile history since 1964, when it was granted by the Tanzanian government to liberation movements recognized by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). The South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) and the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO)and later the African National Congress (ANC), the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) and other movements-first inhabited neighbouring camps near the town of Kongwa in central Tanzania, where they trained their respective members in guerrilla tactics and prepared to infiltrate their countries of origin. Some people passed through Kongwa only briefly as they moved between training courses and combat zones, 1 This article draws from research conducted with the support of the University of the Western Cape's Centre for Humanities Research and presented at 'Camps, Liberation Movements, Politics' , a conference which I convened at UWC in August 2011. Parts of the article also draw from my doctoral dissertation, 'Exile History: An Ethnography of the SWAPO Camps and the Namibian Nation' (University of Michigan, 2009), where I discuss Kongwa through the experiences of one of the camp's former inhabitants (222-239). I am grateful to all who contributed to this research, including research participants (whose names appear in the citations) and colleagues. Of these colleagues, I would especially like to acknowledge Sifiso Ndlovu and Paolo Israel who introduced me to several of the archival sources discussed below.
Nordic Journal of African Studies, 2023
This contribution to the special issue on rethinking gender and time in African history (co-edite... more This contribution to the special issue on rethinking gender and time in African history (co-edited by Jonna Katto and Heike Becker) develops an argument about time and gender in African history in relation to historical sound recordings. Revisiting a case study from the Namibian sound archive I demonstrate innovative methodological strategies that open up new avenues of conceptual and theoretical thinking about gender and time in African history. Using the example of Nekwaya Loide Shikongo, a prominent woman from Ondonga in northern Namibia (the colonial 'Ovamboland'), and an epic poem on the deposed King Iipumbu yaShilongo that she performed in 1953, I discuss how gender was constituted and mediated in relation to colonial temporalities. The article presents a historical ethnography of how both the Christian mission's cultural discourse and the South African colonial administration's efforts to masculinize the 'native' political authority produced a gendered perception of Owambo women during the first half of the 20th century. However, it also demonstrates the performer's powerful, creative reappropriation of these discourses, which we can gauge by approaching the historical sound archive with a methodological strategy of 'close listening'. The argument thus extends to a broader reflection on the potential of historical sound recordings for challenging Eurocentric teleological narratives of gender and modernity. It also looks into the inherent limitations, and thus the opportunities and challenges, which the colonial sound archive presents for the development of decolonial methodologies in fields such as historical ethnography, cultural studies, and historiography.
Nordic Journal of African Studies, 2023
This special issue seeks to problematize the way that time and gender-and their relationship to e... more This special issue seeks to problematize the way that time and gender-and their relationship to each other-is conceptualized in prevailing historical narratives about African pasts. Often we take these notions for granted in our practices of research and writing. Even today, histories about gender in Africa often continue to be framed by Eurocentric teleological narratives of modernity. In this special issue-that brings together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, focusing on different time periods, and using different methodological approaches-we ask what would happen if we brought the notions of time and gender into a more critical focus. How would this reshape the gendered histories we write?
Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2017
This paper looks into the aesthetics and politics of the 'hip-hopera' Afrikaaps. Afrikaaps was pr... more This paper looks into the aesthetics and politics of the 'hip-hopera' Afrikaaps. Afrikaaps was produced in 2010 by a group of musicians and spoken-word artists from Cape Town and the rural Western Cape Province of South Africa. The show premiered at an annual Afrikaans cultural festival; it then had a three week-run at a theatre, located in a predominantly white, English-speaking part of Cape Town, followed by different sets of performance in South Africa and abroad and the documentary by a Cape Town film maker. Dylan Valley's (2011) film follows this group of local artists creating the stage production as they trace the roots of Afrikaans to Khoi-San and slaves in the Cape. The production aimed to 'reclaim and liberate Afrikaans from its reputation as the language of the oppressor, taking it back for all who speak it.' (Valley 2011) The paper presents an analysis of how visual and musical aesthetics converge in the performed production of history, as creolization, and ethnically-specific 'heritage', and how the self-stylization is employed in attempts at authenticating a recently asserted linguistic and cultural 'identity'. 1 "Coloureds came from Khoisan knowledge." 2 Fashionable chain stores among young people 2 Wie is gjy? (Who Are you) the other performers ask Moenier. Moenier stands there not knowing what to say, dumbstruck not knowing who he is while the earthy music continues to play in the background. 'Make child but don't have paper geld (money)', 'Kwaai cell phone (cool), but no airtime';; the audience laugh while they all sing together, dancing around Moenier in the manner of langarm, considered both 'folksy' and formal ballroom style. Wie is ek wie is gjy? (Who am I, who are you?). Bliksemstraal, another one of the performers, starts singing: 'lawyers, doctors, moved out of the ghetto' to which Blaqpearl, the only woman among the cast, starts responding with her own: "Women with no straight hair daais n straat meit, no hair nou wat is ek dan?" (Woman with no straight hair, are nothing, no hair so what am I?). The diminutive young woman shows off her shaven head. Awe ('Wotsup' 3) Moenier greets the audience; the audience in their turn laugh at this 'slang' greeting. Moenier takes up this laughter and starts talking about how when one speaks 'like that' people always laugh. He gets serious, asking the audience 'Wiet julle dat die Khoisan was ook verantwoordelik vir die development van Afrikaans, baie vannie Afrikaans woorde ko van Khoisan woorde?' (Do you know that the Khoisan was also responsible for the development of Afrikaans, a lot of the Afrikaans words are from Khoisan words?). The performers, each taking their turn, proceed to speak about the historical development of Afrikaans especially in Cape Town as well as how during the colonial era the communication patterns between colonists and the indigenous people gave rise to the development of Afrikaans. They all start speaking Afrikaans in a 'Khoisan way', which they do by inserting 'clicks' 4 everywhere in Afrikaans words. It sounds at once exotic as well as familiar to the ear, to which the audience starts applauding in amazement. Maybe we need to re-appropriate the clicks back into Afrikaans, they say. As the audience applaud, Kyle Shepherd starts playing music on the piano and the performers start chanting Coloureds kom va Khoisan verstand'. When the song ends, I almost want to jump out of my seat in excitement. It feels like the performers have just sung a freedom song; that's how excited the atmosphere seems to be. This is how Oliphant, who was at the time doing research on Afrikaaps and the everyday reproclamation of Afrikaans for her BA Honours project experienced the visual and musical aspects of the stage production of Afrikaaps. On the 1st of April 2010, Afrikaaps, dubbed a 'hip-hopera', premiered at the KKNK (Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees 5), an annual Afrikaans cultural festival that takes place in Oudtshoorn in the eastern inland reaches of South Africa's Western Cape province. A week later, the show produced by a group of musicians and spoken word-artists from Cape Town and the rural Western Cape moved to the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town, where the production had a successful three week-run. Since then, Afrikaaps has been performed in the Netherlands in October 2011, and in different South African spaces, most recently during the 2012 December holidays in the Joule City studio space in Cape 3 The vernacular articulation of the all-South African expression 'What's up?' 4 Click sounds are considered typical for the KhoiSan languages.
Dialectical Anthropology
This article portrays a recent movement towards intersectional activism in urban Namibia. Since 2... more This article portrays a recent movement towards intersectional activism in urban Namibia. Since 2020, young Namibian activists have come together in campaigns to decolonize public space through removing colonial monuments and renaming streets. These have been linked to enduring structural violence and issues of gender and sexuality, especially queer and women's reproductive rights politics, which have been expressly framed as perpetuated by coloniality. I argue that the Namibian protests amount to new political forms of intersectional decoloniality that challenge the notion of decolonial activism as identity politics. The Namibian case demonstrates that decolonial movements may not only emphatically not be steeped in essentialist politics but also that activists may oppose an identity-based politics which postcolonial ruling elites have promoted. I show that, for the Namibian movements' ideology and practice, a fully intersectional approach has become central. They consciously juxtapose colonial memory with a living vision for the future to confront and situate colonial and apartheid history. Young Namibian activists challenge the intersectional inequalities and injustices, which, they argue, postcolonial Namibia inherited from its colonial-apartheid past: class inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, and gender-based violence.
Dialectical Anthropology, 2022
This article portrays a recent movement towards intersectional activism in urban Namibia. Since 2... more This article portrays a recent movement towards intersectional activism in urban Namibia. Since 2020, young Namibian activists have come together in campaigns to decolonize public space through removing colonial monuments and renaming streets. These have been linked to enduring structural violence and issues of gender and sexuality, especially queer and women's reproductive rights politics, which have been expressly framed as perpetuated by coloniality. I argue that the Namibian protests amount to new political forms of intersectional decoloniality that challenge the notion of decolonial activism as identity politics. The Namibian case demonstrates that decolonial movements may not only emphatically not be steeped in essentialist politics but also that activists may oppose an identity-based politics which postcolonial ruling elites have promoted. I show that, for the Namibian movements' ideology and practice, a fully intersectional approach has become central. They consciously juxtapose colonial memory with a living vision for the future to confront and situate colonial and apartheid history. Young Namibian activists challenge the intersectional inequalities and injustices, which, they argue, postcolonial Namibia inherited from its colonial-apartheid past: class inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, and gender-based violence.
A few months short of the 25th anniversary of independence from South Africa in March 1990 Namibi... more A few months short of the 25th anniversary of independence from South Africa in March 1990 Namibia reached her Fanonian moment. As Achille Mbembe has explained this term with regard to the South African student movements of 2015, a new generation has entered the country’s social and political scene and has forcefully asked penetrating new questions. In Namibia this has come in the shape of the Affirmative Repositioning (AR) movement.
Global and african: Exploring Hip-Hop Artists in Philippi Township, Cape Town. In this article we... more Global and african: Exploring Hip-Hop Artists in Philippi Township, Cape Town. In this article we explore a set of issues related to the contemporary hip-hop culture in Cape Town. Firstly, we demonstrate how hip-hop as a form of popular culture and the construction of identity are linked to the specifics of ‘space and place’. We discuss different forms that the performance of hip-hop takes in different spaces in greater Cape Town. The discussion of space and the politics of culture are linked to two interrelated aspects that are particularly significant for the discussion of cultural flows and identities. In contrast to the common perception that hip-hop in Cape Town was primarily of interest among ‘coloured’ youth, our presentation focuses on young performers living in an ‘African’ township. We pay special attention to the use of language and the performance of hip-hop lyrics in African languages. Our discussion explores how the use of hybridised African languages lends support to ...
Journal of Namibian Studies : History Politics Culture, 2015
Namibia’s postcolonial nationalist imaginary is by no means homogeneous. Overall, however, it is ... more Namibia’s postcolonial nationalist imaginary is by no means homogeneous. Overall, however, it is conspicuous that as Namibia celebrates her twenty-fifth anniversary of independence, national identity is no longer defined primarily through the common history of the liberation struggle but through the tolerant accommodation, even wholehearted celebration, of cultural difference. This article attempts to understand the shifting politics and aesthetics of Namibian nationalism from two interconnected angles. On the one hand, it takes a historical perspective; it looks into shifting discourses and practices of nationalism over the past century, starting from the anti-colonial resistance at the turn to the 20th century through to the twenty-fifth anniversary of Namibian independence. On the other hand, the article investigates the cultural redefinition of the bonds between the Namibian people(s), which has been a significant aspect of the constructions of postcolonial Namibian nationhood a...
The article shows how the discourses of trauma, victimhood and silence regarding local agency con... more The article shows how the discourses of trauma, victimhood and silence regarding local agency contributed to the production of the nationalist master narrative in post-colonial Namibia. However, I point out repositories of memory beyond the narratives of victimhood and trauma, which began to add different layers to the political economy of silence and remembrance in the mid-2000s. Through revisiting visual forms of remembrance in northern Namibia an argument is developed, which challenges the dichotomy between silence and confession. It raises critical questions about the prominent place that the trauma trope has attained in memory studies, with reference to work by international memory studies scholars such as Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (1996) and South African researchers of memory politics, particularly the strategies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The fresh Namibian material supports the key critique of the TRC, which suggests that the foregrounding of pain...
Anthropology Southern Africa
Social Dynamics
This article investigates the role played by cultural initiatives in urban struggles in South Afr... more This article investigates the role played by cultural initiatives in urban struggles in South Africa, and the emergence of public art to assert the right to the city. I explore how artistic-activist interventions engage an understanding of social justice and the right to the city in provocative visual and performance art. I demonstrate how such interventions reflect Lefebvre's conceptualisation of the city as a space to be inhabited in an active process, which critically includes its re-imagination. The paper focuses on creative interventions in Cape Town that confronted the city's genteel public space with the second and third anniversary of the shooting of 34 striking miners at Marikana on August 16 2012. I argue that bringing the commemoration of the massacre into the public urban spacewhere post-apartheid Cape Town exhibits its claim to cosmopolitanismchallenges the politics of space in South Africa. I asked, how these cultural initiatives articulate claims through reimagining the city how they engage with the intertwined politics of culture and class followed by both the city and the nation-state, and how the artistic practices contest urban citizenship in contemporary South Africa.
Anthropology Southern Africa, 2010
Many people have contributed to this publication and the research that went into it. The present ... more Many people have contributed to this publication and the research that went into it. The present study would not have been possible without the invaluable support and assistance which we received from friends and colleagues who provided information, directed us to oral, published and unpublished written sources, sent us material, commented on draft chapters and shared their knowledge with us in many different ways. All remaining errors are solely our own.
NAMIBIAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL JUSTICE, 2023
Namibia was South Africa’s testing ground for its ambitious apartheid dreams. South Africa’s colo... more Namibia was South Africa’s testing ground for its ambitious apartheid dreams. South Africa’s colonial connection with Namibia, then the mandated territory of South West Africa (SWA), is today often either ignored or dismissed, even by historians of apartheid. The Namibian-born and bred anthropologist Robert J. (Rob) Gordon’s latest book aims to redress this fault by demonstrating the significance of colonised Namibia for the development of apartheid. The narrative revolves around the role of so-called ‘native’ experts.
AFRICA - Journal of the International African Institute , 2020
Review of Elaine Salo's posthumously published monograph on personhood and gender in Manenberg t... more Review of Elaine Salo's posthumously published monograph on personhood and gender in Manenberg township
Africa, 2020
Reviewing Robert J. Gordon's biography of Max Gluckman, which points out the context and importan... more Reviewing Robert J. Gordon's biography of Max Gluckman, which points out the context and importance of early radical anthropology in South and Southern Africa
Anthropology Southern Africa, 2019
Review of the collection "Postcolonial African Anthropologies", ed. by Rose Boswell and Francis N... more Review of the collection "Postcolonial African Anthropologies", ed. by Rose Boswell and Francis Nyamnjoh
Review of "National liberation in postcolonial Southern Africa: a historical ethnography of SWAPO... more Review of "National liberation in postcolonial Southern Africa: a historical ethnography of SWAPO's exile camps" by Christian A Williams
Identity, Inc. :A critical review of publications in identity-talk and market research in South A... more Identity, Inc. :A critical review of publications in identity-talk and market research in South Africa
A substantive review of African Gender Studies; reviews a collection of iconic texts in African G... more A substantive review of African Gender Studies; reviews a collection of iconic texts in African Gender Studies, edited by Andrea Cornwall
Student Protests in the Global South: Annotated sources (1918-2018), 2019
A unique reader containing annotated sources on student protests in the Global South (1918-2018).... more A unique reader containing annotated sources on student protests in the Global South (1918-2018). The focus os on primary sources that voice and perform critique and protest in Latin America, Africa and South Asia. Also includes introductory articles on the question of how global was "1968", on university reform and student movements in Latin America, on Africa's 1968: Protests across the continent, and on South African student protests, 1968-2016.