Publications

This paper critically assesses the making of the modern timescape “the future” from an early modern historian’s and a postcolonial perspective. As a western invention, it was imposed on many societies in the historical contexts of colonialism and imperialism. “The future” is thus loaded with semantics such as ‘civilization versus primitive forms of life’, ‘progress versus backwardness’, ‘development versus regression’ and other similar dichotomies. This article looks into timescapes prevalent in the early modern period, using the latter as a background against which we can reflect on the historical making and baggage of linear timescapes such as the “past, present and future”, about the diversity, or multiplicity, of timescapes in the past and today, how this could inform our understanding of constructions of cultural difference and how much we would need a transperiodical and transregional anthropology of time.

This study revisits and explores the contributions of women religious organizations in Nigeria, namely, The Federation of Muslim Women Organizations in Nigeria, (FOMWAN) and Zumuntar-Mata (Church Women League) of Christian Churches, in comparative and proportional evaluations. The elemental findings reveal that these religious organizations under study are well structured and methodical associations with the primary aim of addressing some major challenges faced by women in Nigeria, and had taken necessary steps to ameliorate them. Initiatives such as Economic empowerment, educational, religious and political enlightenments, and provision of health services are their major contributions to women and the society at large. One interesting manifestation of toleration among the two differing religious groups was that they cooperate and, in some cases, jointly execute some essential and enablement programs to both Muslim and Christian women. Their slogans ‘the act of kindness knows no boundary’ is always at fore. In the same vein, in order to widen the horizon of their activities and responsibilities they partner favorably and mutually with development partners governmental and non-governmental within Nigeria and beyond with a bid to advance and extend their interventions to as many women as possible in the cities as well as in the rural areas. Through their various programs and initiatives for self-help, therefore, the organizations significantly contributed towards women enfranchisement and impacted in societal development positively.

The World Health Organization recommends initiating breastfeeding in the first hour of life, exclusive breastfeeding for six months, and continued breastfeeding for at least two years. Aggressive marketing of breast milk substitutes (BMS) undermines breastfeeding and is linked to adverse child and maternal health outcomes. This is particularly problematic in the Global South, where socioeconomic conditions often amplify the risks associated with BMS. The adoption of national BMS legislation in line with the 1981 International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes is therefore crucial but difficult due to strong opposition from the transnational formula milk industry. Breastfeeding advocates in Kenya were able to overcome this powerful opposition when the country adopted a strict BMS Act in 2012, which has since facilitated and protected remarkable improvements in breastfeeding rates. We conduct a qualitative case study to identify the political enablers of the successful adoption of this important law.

Recent accounts of the re-emergence of debt distress in Africa, while offering significant insights, fail to provide the historical political-economic context within which African indebtedness is set. On the surface, spending induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, economic fallout from the Russia–Ukraine war, and repeated examples of fiscal indiscipline by African governments appear to be the causes of the current wave of debt crises. Beyond these factors, however, this article argues that the present indebtedness, like previous episodes, is rooted in the economic and financial subordination of African economies. Specifically, the article places Ghana's extensive debt within the country's post-independence political-economic context, and thus traces the structural factors and external constraints that underlie its economic vulnerability and financial dependence. These include the collapse of developmentalism in the 1970s, the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s, and an exploitative transnational lending system dominated by Western commercial creditors. Internally, recent fiscal mistakes by the government, within its limited policy space, have exacerbated Ghana's indebtedness. The Ghanaian experience shows that unconditional debt cancellation, widely called for, is a necessary but insufficient measure to address the recurring cycles of indebtedness. Debt cancellation should be followed by broader economic and financial reforms, globally and domestically.

Ali Smith’s novel Autumn (2016) immediately acquired near-canonical status in academic discussions of ‘BrexLit’, i.e., literary responses to the 2016 British referendum on leaving the European Union. This chapter considers the functions of Autumn’s self-conscious references to the Victorian genre of the ‘Condition of England’ novel. It argues that the older genre’s central premise – the idea that England is divided into ‘two nations’ – is explored in Autumn as a potential pattern for making sense of the current political situation. However, Smith dismisses the standard solutions offered by that genre’s conventions, especially the dialogue between the divided ‘cultures’ within the nation, as model responses. In the process, ‘genre knowledge’ (Gattungswissen) and ‘form knowledge’ (Formwissen) are exposed as conventions disappointing the hopes placed in them. Still, the function of literature and art as repositories of historical models for problem solving is affirmed: the post-referendum ‘Remainers’ are presented as deeply disorientated, and the novel suggests that a cure for their despair may be found in a ‘shared’, cosmopolitan and European archive, rather than in an isolationist national tradition.

Saharan historians have often argued that women were integral to the local Islamic scholarly culture. These women frequently took on crucial roles such as teaching, writing, counselling, spiritual guidance and legal orientation. However, only very few historical sources document these activities. Starting from a list of authors, the analysis focuses on cultural remembering techniques that help preserve local intellectual achievements and illustrates how women were systematically excluded from local documentation of erudition. The author argues that due to established gendered practices within the traditional local Islamic scholarly culture, texts written by women were most likely to be at risk of disappearing. This is a classic example of historical amnesia at work. Nonetheless, approved details about women’s presence in Islamic intellectual life led to the conclusion that in the Saharan intellectual tradition, there is an “absence in the presence” of female Islamic scholarship.

This collection of essays documents the formative decades of African history across two countries by following the career of a British historian-cum-archivist Paul Jenkins (born 1938 in Sutherland) from West Africa to Central Europe. It retraces his academic path from Ghana to Switzerland while engaging his curiosities in, contributions to, and impact on the development of African history since the 1960s. The volume reflects on Paul’s academic services throughout the 1960s and 1970s, mainly at the University of Ghana (1965–1972) and subsequently at the Basel Mission Archive and University of Basel (1972–2003) in Switzerland – as key sites where he established himself as a teacher and promoter of African history. These episodes led to lasting bonds of intellectual friendships between Paul and an array of inter-/national and -generational scholars of Africa, several of whom are contributing to this volume. Significantly too, the volume highlights the importance of resources Paul curated during the early 1970s, notably his “Abstracts of the Basel Mission’s Gold Coast Correspondences”, through which he increased access to the rich collections of the Basel Mission Archive for scholars of Africa. Altogether, the essays celebrate, engage, interrogate, and push beyond Paul’s numerous past publications and ongoing academic work.

This paper investigates the effect of mining activities on health care, income and water deprivations in Africa. By combining household data with mining locations, we conducted an econometric analysis to assess the impact of mining on self-reported water security, health, and economic opportunities for 142,838 households. Our study utilizes the presence of active and inactive mines to measure the effects of household exposure to mining activities. We observe that proximity to active mining sites is associated with self-reported improved water security, access to health, and economic opportunities. Instrumental variable estimates support a causal interpretation of our results. Specifically, households located within a 50?km radius of active mines reported a 4% lower probability of lacking clean water. Our findings also reveal that robust local institutions not only enhance water security but also mitigate the negative health impacts associated with mine closures. These results suggest that strengthening local governance can amplify the potential benefits of mining operations. Therefore, we recommend the strengthening of local government institutions to foster the resilience of vulnerable mining communities.

Traditional recommendation proposals, including content-based and collaborative filtering, usually focus on similarity between items or users. Existing approaches lack ways of introducing unexpectedness into recommendations, prioritizing globally popular items over exposing users to unforeseen items. This investigation aims to design and evaluate a novel layer on top of recommender systems suited to incorporate relational information and rerank items with a user-defined degree of surprise. Surprise in recommender systems refers to the degree to which a recommendation deviates from the user’s expectations, providing an unexpected yet relatable recommendation. We propose a knowledge graph-based recommender system by encoding user interactions on item catalogs. Our study explores whether network-level metrics on knowledge graphs (KGs) can influence the degree of surprise in recommendations. We hypothesize that surprisingness correlates with specific network metrics, treating user profiles as subgraphs within a larger catalog KG. The achieved solution reranks recommendations based on their impact on structural graph metrics. Our research contributes to optimizing recommendations to reflect the network-based metrics. We experimentally evaluate our approach on two datasets of LastFM listening histories and synthetic Netflix viewing profiles. We find that reranking items based on complex network metrics leads to a more unexpected and surprising composition of recommendation lists.

This chapter examines the effectiveness of the African Children’s Committee in addressing child trafficking through a balanced approach. To support this argument, the authors present three key sub-arguments. First, they contend that the Committee’s normative framework provides sufficient guidance for tackling child trafficking. Second, they suggest that while the Committee’s institutional framework shows promise, it requires further strengthening to ensure its adequacy in addressing child trafficking. Lastly, the authors propose that an analysis of the Committee’s jurisprudential developments can inform future strategies for combating child trafficking. In passing, the approach of the African Children’s Committee requires improvement to make it more effective. A conclusion and recommendations follow.

Africa is the world’s youngest continent, with over 70 per cent of its population aged under 30 years. Several African governments, individually and collectively, have implemented laws and policies aimed at maximising the potential that the young population brings to the economy. This ranges from creating avenues for employment through agriculture to investment in the entertainment industry, vocational training, industrial development, and fostering trade through regional economic communities. With all these efforts, African governments have not been able to completely absorb the continental workforce in the domestic labour market, thereby fortifying the need for labour externalisation. However, the emergence of labour externalisation programmes has seen the rise of reports of African youths being abused, exploited, dispossessed of their passports and having their body organs harvested without their consent. Nevertheless, there is a dearth of literature analysing these incidents, their relation with the crime of human trafficking, as well as the legal and policy safeguards against these incidents. This chapter fills this void by analysing the legal norms in East Africa with Tanzania as a case study.

Como podemos falar de identidades em países que foram colonizados, sem reproduzir incontestadamente as categorizações dos colonizadores? Como podemos (re)valorizar os saberes dos grupos marginalizados, sem negar as suas relações complexas com as culturas hegemônicas? Enfim, como podemos fazer pesquisa sobre processos identitários, sem ocultar a nossa própria inserção nas estruturas de poder? A partir dessas questões, o objetivo principal da minha contribuição para este livro é fazer uma reflexão crítica sobre os processos identitários que acontecem no decorrer das nossas pesquisas. Concomitantemente, pretendo realçar a importância de uma (co)produção de conhecimentos que visa superar, na medida do possível, as relações desiguais de poder-saber. Para isso, convém combinar as perspectivas de diferentes autores do Sul e do Norte Global, representando diversos contextos socioculturais, identificações étnico-raciais, gêneros e disciplinas acadêmicas. Entre eles destacam-se o francês Pierre Bourdieu, a argentina Irene Vasilachis de Gialdino, o português Boaventura de Sousa Santos e o brasileiro Milton Santos. Cabe acrescentar que o artigo está enfocado na pesquisa social qualitativa que implica trabalho de campo, mesmo que muitas das noções expostas possam ser aplicadas também a outras áreas de conhecimento. A minha reflexão concluirá com uma manifestação a favor de diálogos que ultrapassam barreiras culturais, hierarquias de poder e fronteiras disciplinares. Ao todo, esse artigo é um apelo para que cada um de nós questione as dinâmicas identitárias que distorcem a própria visão e valorize os conhecimentos dos sujeitos que pretende conhecer, respeitando tanto a igualdade como as diferenças.

This experience report summarises the findings from an online survey dataset consists of 102 respondents from 33 countries from the global North and South. Using an independent non-parametric t-test, we found a significant difference in the way both sides used certain technologies and platforms to collaborate with their colleagues, as well as the factors affecting their ability to work from home during the pandemic.

The contemporary currency hierarchy is neither natural nor neutral: It’s an imperial construct. This paper traces the origins of today’s currency hierarchy back to the violent imposition of imperial money. Through a longue durée analysis of Nigeria (1861–1960), this paper demonstrates how British imperialism dismantled pre-colonial monetary plurality and imposed Sterling, institutionalised in 1912 via the West African Currency Board (WACB), an institution requiring 100% Sterling reserves. Archival evidence reveals three mechanisms to establish imperial money: (1) legal demonetisation of pre-colonial currencies; (2) overvalued Sterling distorting domestic prices; (3) tax collection and wage payment. These processes restructured labour and production across the colonised regions, birthing a disarticulated economy, where Nigeria exported raw materials and cash-cropss but relied on imports for basic needs - a template replicated globally then and now. Key findings include first, how imperial money’s monopoly relied on violent demonetization; second, the WACB’s reserves prefigured modern foreign exchange traps; and last, people have continuously resisted to preserve monetary sovereignty. By reframing currency hierarchies as products of imperial extraction, the study challenges IPE’s presentist focus and charts a path for decolonial monetary alternatives.

During the Second World War, 2,700 Greek refugees lived in camps in Eastern Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi. They had escaped from the German Nazi occupation and famine conditions on the Aegean Islands. Their movement through Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda was part of a more extensive network of refugee hosting and transfer, orchestrated by British officials in Cairo and guided by strategic interests in London. This article uncovers this overlooked episode and situates it in the broader history of the thousands of European refugees who found refuge in the Middle East and Africa. It argues that this was part of a more extensive system of imperial refugee management with implications for the history of the British Empire and the international refugee regime. Adding to the historiography of the empire’s war effort, it uncovers the contribution of Africans to hosting distressed European refugees. It further highlights the importance of imperial rule in the emergence of the post-war international refugee regime. Due to the racism of the colonial division of labour and society, European refugees in Africa enjoyed a comparably comfortable situation. The imperial refugee regime cared well for its white subjects, housing them in some of the most privileged refugee camps of the world.

This chapter scrutinises the negotiation of various actors about the governance of the Mauritanian Islamic heritage. In the context of hopes for democratisation and the war on terror, social frictions are fuelled and lead to a quite confrontational mode of negotiating identity and citizenship. The traditional Islamic educational institution, the maḥḍara, plays a crucial role within these debates. Being perceived as an institution for (re)producing local tradition, the maḥḍara and its visions become the focus of conflict, praised by politicians and the ʿulamāʾ (Islamic scholars) as a driver of social peace, feared by security experts as a breeding ground for terrorism, and finally, wished to be reformed by human right activists. The war on terror goes hand in hand with the threat of terror, producing more rumours than facts and spreading feelings of insecurity that foster violent action.

African (postcolonial) societies function as collectivist group-based cultures. The worth of the individual is often measured in terms of the worth of their group. The individual, therefore, prioritises the defence and preservation of the group’s face even above theirs. Using data collected from an out-of-studio radio programme in Cameroon, I demonstrate how individual lives and faces are often subsumed into the group’s face in these interactions that take place in the public sphere. Relying on the postcolonial pragmatics framework, I analyse this specific Cameroon English discourse for markers of collectivist group values and social norms, and for how interlocutors factor these into their social interactions. They adopt and perform asymmetrical kinship, social affective roles and tasks, give and take advice, and reproach and accept blame in line with societal norms built on interlocutors’ age, social status, social hierarchy and sometimes gender. Performing these potentially (individual) degrading acts in public shows how strong allegiance is to the collectivist group, its culture and norms.

This volume explores an understudied aspect of courts: The extent to which informal institutions and relational networks (e.g., professional, clientelist, family etc.) relations affect how courts are organised and operate. For instance, to what extent can ‘good personal relations’ outweigh professional merits in judicial appointment processes? Or in what ways do international or domestic judicial networks help protect courts against other branches of power?