Bücher veröffentlicht von Langaa RPCID

This book explores a collective understanding of the perception and treatment of borders in Africa. The notion of boundary is universal as boundaries are also an important part of human social organization. Through the ages, boundaries have remained the 'container' by which national space is delineated and 'contained'. For as long as there has been human society based on territoriality and space, there have been boundaries. With their dual character of exclusivism and inclusivism, states have proven to adopt a more structural approach to the respect of the former in consciousness of the esteem of international law governing sovereignty and territorial integrity. However, frontier peoples and their realities have often opted for the latter situation, imposing a more functionalist perception of these imaginary lines and prompting a border opinion shift to a more blurring form of representation and meaning in most African communities.This collective multidisciplinary effort of understanding how tangible and intangible borders have influenced Africa's attitude and existence for ages is worthy in its own rights. The difference between what borders are and what they are not to a people is the mere product of their own estimations and practices, a disposition that leads the contributors to this book to study borders beyond states or nations and how borders are crossed or transferred from one point to the other for the convenience of their histories and being.

Sierra Leone experienced 11 years' civil war after the incursion of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) from adjacent Liberia. The war of Sierra Leone is one of the most researched in Africa. However, the foci of studies are mostly on the RUF. Other armed groups are not sufficiently studied. This book focuses on the governmental side of the Kamajor and the Civil Defence Force (CDF). Kamajors were community-based vigilantes mobilised by paramount chiefs in various Mende communities. During the course of the war, the government organised Kamajors into a pro-governmental militia, the CDF. This book examines how human networks worked in the course of the formation of Kamajor and of the CDF. Even though the roles of human networks have been discussed in the realm of African politics, they have been left hypothetical. Few studies demonstrate the whole picture on how neopatrimonialism, patron-client relations or informal networks function within an organisation.This book describes the course of Kamajor/CDF along with functions of the human networks. In the networks, the threads of human relations are interwoven by subsuming the local, the international and the global dimensions of the armed conflict. Some connect to governmental figures. Others have transnational networks in adjacent Liberia. In the changing situations of the war, some of the relations are maintained, while some relations are disintegrated. Those who emerge as prominent figures in the Kamajor/CDF use their own human networks to obtain resources for the Kamajor/CDF, which in turn, afford themselves higher positions in the force.

As the world today faces messy problems, what in some circles has been called global weirding, the term resilience has taken centre stage. This is crunch time -as we grapple with the negative effects of both climate change and urbanisation. Some commentators have compared the huge problems we face today to Oom Schalk's proverbial leopard waiting for us in the withaak's shade. Do we endlessly count Oom Schalk's proverbial leopard's spots? This is the question posed by a stellar cast of academics, researchers, and experts whose contributions in this text is a rallying cry for action to build resilience to the challenging impact of urbanisation and climate change. To that end, this volume gives hope about the potential for human agency. Our challenge however, is to re-examine our values, to change our conservation conversation and return to a more wise and holistic understanding of ourselves and our place in the Universe. Perhaps, then only can the obituaries on our demise stay locked in the drawer.

The management of urban waste constitutes one of the major environmental challenges facing African cities in general and Cameroon in particular. Unprecedented population growth and changes in consumption patterns and lifestyles have led to increased waste generation. Municipal solid waste management efforts lag behind the rate of waste generation with attendant environmental and public health risks. The activities, the gender dynamics and politics at the pools of waste generation, particularly the households and markets largely influence the outcome of waste management strategies and policies. This book brings out the gender dimension of municipal solid waste generation and management in the City of Bamenda. It is hoped that the findings revealed and proposals made from the study will be employed by municipal authorities in Cameroon and beyond to enhance waste management efforts.

This book on decolonising education chastises, heartens and invites academics to seriously commence academic and intellectual manumission by challenging the current toxic episteme - the Western dominant Grand Narrative that embeds, espouses and superimposes itself on others. It exhorts African scholars in particular to unite and address the bequests of colonialism and its toxic episteme by confronting the internalised fabrications, hegemonic dominance, lies and myths that have caused many conflicts in world history. Such a toxic episteme founded on problematic experiments, theories and praxis has tended to license unsubstantiated views and stereotypes of others as intellectually impotent, moribund and of inferior humanity. The book invites academics and intellectuals to commit to a healthy dialogue among the world's competing traditions of knowing and knowledge production to produce a truly accommodating and inclusive grand narrative informed by a recognition of a common and shared humanity.

This innovative book is an open invitation to a rich and copious meal of imagination, senses and desires. It argues that cannibalism is practised by all and sundry. In love or in hate, fear or fascination, purposefulness or indifference, individuals, cultures and societies are actively cannibalising and being cannibalised. The underlying message of: 'Own up to your own cannibalism!' is convincingly argued and richly substantiated. The book brilliantly and controversially puts cannibalism at the heart of the self-assured biomedicine, globalising consumerism and voyeuristic social media. It unveils a vast number of prejudices, blind spots and shameful othering. It calls on the reader to consider a morality and an ethics that are carefully negotiated with required sensibility and sensitivity to the fact that no one and no people have the monopoly of cannibalisation and of creative improvisation in the game of cannibalism. The productive, transformative and (re)inventive understanding of cannibalism argued in the book should bring to the fore one of the most vital aspects of what it means to be human in a dynamic world of myriad interconnections and enchantments. To nourish and cherish such a productive form of cannibalism requires not only a compassionate generosity to let in and accommodate the stranger knocking at the door, but also, and more importantly, a deliberate effort to reach in, identify, contemplate, understand, embrace and become intimate with the stranger within us, individuals and societies alike.

No doubt. North-South relationship involving poor and rich countries is very convoluted; based and built on exploitative, unequal and unfair equilibria. It is purely jockey-horse-like connubium that serves one party as it disserves the other. This is why deconstructing and detoxifying this relationship is sine qua non. The author argues that the parties in this relationship must revisit it to make sure it equally benefits both for the benefit of the whole world. Importantly, the major question posed is: Why did the two global halves maintain and tolerate such toxic rapport while knowingly it is but colonial and unjust? The question is answered in this academic treatise which asks the parties to hark back; and thereby do justice to each other by viewing themselves as humans with shared needs and future whose lesson from the past may buttress them to be major thespians in realising world peace. This is because their parasitic relationship has fueled many conflicts revolving around the struggle for controlling resources in the South in order to sell to the North.

In spite of South Africa's progressive constitution, citizen's intolerance of non-citizens, refugees and economic migrants has escalated in recent years. What is more, xenophobic attacks are covered in the public discourse as mere episodes of crisis and often rather fuel rhetoric of national machismo than leading to an acknowledgement of the stories and experiences of people seeking refuge and being exposed to hostility on an everyday basis. This ethnography engages with the strategies employed by a group of refugee men from different African countries in surviving and stabilising their existence in the 'mother city' Cape Town in the face of precarity. It grapples with questions of how the men manage to bring about certainty in the face of unpredictability and extends its focus to the men's dreams and the modes by which these are sought to be achieved. It thereby highlights the ways in which objectifications as refugees and less-than-human are somewhat transcended by navigating spaces with care, purpose and imagination.

The book examines how men and women in Manenberg township, on Cape Town's inner periphery, manoeuvre to re-define themselves as gendered persons deserving of dignity, through the quotidian practices of ordentlikheid or respectability. Salo shows how reclamation of dignity is an intergenerational and gendered process that is messy and uneven, involves the expression of often-brutal physical and social exclusion of individuals through embodied and social violence. Theoretically, the narrative makes visible the careful, painstaking processes of place making and claiming dignity by men and women in a place represented as a wasteland in the dominant discourse of grand apartheid and in the contemporary neo-liberal turn in Cape Town.

La radicalisation est devenue un mot désignant notre monde en couleurs négatives. Ce livre cherche à comprendre ce que c'est que la radicalisation au Sahel et aux Pays-Bas ? Est-elle seulement négative? Quelle diversité de processus sociaux et politiques se trouve derrière ce concept? Les biographies de personnes nous dévoilent les messages cachés dans ce genre de dynamiques. Y a-t-il au fond un désir de changement social? Autant de questions soulevées, traitées, (partiellement) répondues, et autant d'autres que la lecture de ces recueils de textes aussi divers qu'intéressants, ne manqueront pas de susciter au lecteur contemporain.

This book examines the 'glocalization' - the adaptation of a global telecommunication technology to local particularities - in West and Central Africa. Through case studies in Cameroon and Guinea, the research presented evinces how local agency leads to the appropriation of mobile telephony, and the extent to which telecommunication companies acculturate their marketing strategies to consumer preferences and local realities. The book interrogates the presumptive neutrality of technology and presents evidence of agency superseding supposedly fixed limitations of use for mobile phones. In opposition to the notion of an Africa 'lagging' behind, the book also nuances the development discourse so often associated with the 'leapfrog' and spread of mobile telephony south of the Sahara. Overall, this study highlights ways in which agency leads to modernity being refracted locally in West and Central Africa and reflects on the tension at play between 'globalizers' and 'globalized'.

Right from the enslavement era through to the colonial and contemporary eras, Africans have been denied their human essence - portrayed as indistinct from animals or beasts for imperial burdens, Africans have been historically dispossessed and exploited. Postulating the theory of global jurisprudential apartheid, the book accounts for biases in various legal systems, norms, values and conventions that bind Africans while affording impunity to Western states. Drawing on contemporary notions of animism, transhumanism, posthumanism and science and technology studies, the book critically interrogates the possibility of a jurisprudence of anticipation which is attentive to the emergent New World Order that engineers 'human beings to become nonhumans' while 'nonhumans become humans'. Connecting discourses on decoloniality with jurisprudence in the areas of family law, environment, indigenisation, property, migration, constitutionalism, employment and labour law, commercial law and Ubuntu, the book also juggles with emergent issues around Earth Jurisprudence, ecocentrism, wild law, rights of nature, Earth Court and Earth Tribunal. Arguing for decoloniality that attends to global jurisprudential apartheid., this tome is handy for legal scholars and practitioners, social scientists, civil society organisations, policy makers and researchers interested in transformation, decoloniality and Pan-Africanism.

Words of wisdom within the African context, conjure the foundational thoughts of ancestors, thoughts which, today find themselves in the public sphere. With its focus on individual thoughts, this pan-African collection, among other things, amplifies the African-centred prism of knowledge as a collective creation, while stretching the boundaries of the concept of wisdom.They depict the intricate and unique African perception and relation to the universe. As Molefi K. Asante wonders, what could be any more correct for any people than to see with their own eyes? Collectively, these sayings constitute a pillar in the edification of a culture that departs from mere hearing, seeing and consumption to the creation of narratives and, hence, knowledge. They focus on the shared experiences and aspirations for freedom, a philosophical outlook heavily anchored on balance, as well as on community.Unfortunately, some are still tempted to dismiss words of wisdom as having no bearing on today's hi-tech and, even, post-modernist global village. Yet, if anything, these words have even more relevance in a cacophonic, estranged and even brutish world tightly in the grip of forces bent on twisting all thought processes toward a particular status quo.Each saying should be perceived as a coin - with two sides - and should, therefore, not be taken at face value. For, like virtue, each one is capable of turning into vice when stretched too far! As a vital prompt in the project of living, this collection proposes to the reader the advantage and a philosophy of balance as the worthwhile and healthy modus vivendi.

Whether Africa is developed or not, depends on how and what one addresses. Development is relative. Nonetheless, the fact is: Africa developed Europe; and thereby became underdeveloped. Addressed academically, the notion of development creates many questions amongst which are: Development in what? Whose development? Development for whom? Who defines development? In this volume, the development dealt with is polygonal; and touches on politico-economic sequels which also affect the social aspect. No doubt. Africa is abundantly rich in terms of resource and culture. Paradoxically, however, Africa is less developed economically compared to Europe thanks to the history of unequal encounters, among other reasons. We cannot emphasise enough the fact that Africa's underdevelopment is the price of the development of Europe which is based on historical realities gyrating around Europe's criminal past wherein slavery and colonialism enabled Europe to spawn its future capital and investment. How can anyone quibble about Europe's development resulting from perpetual plunderage of Africa with impunity committed by European treasure-hunting adventurers? This volume prescribes Africa's restorative recompense as the only way forward for the duo and the world.

One of the fundamental challenges in rethinking and remaking development in Africa from a Pan African perspective is that too much "mere talk" and "blame game" have played out at the expense of "real action". The blame game and mere talk on Africa's poverty and underdevelopment jam have remained printed in bold on the face of the continent, yet Africa's dire situation warrants nothing less than real emphatic action. This book focuses on the empirics of the production and reproduction of poverty and underdevelopment across Africa in a fashion that warrants urgent pragmatic policy attention and quest for workable homegrown solutions to persistent predicaments. The volume advances the need to recognise the realities of global inequalities and move swiftly in a most informed and transparent manner to address the poverty and underdevelopment conundrum. The book sets the tempo and pace on the need for praxis and pragmatism on the African situation. It is handy to students and practitioners in African studies, poverty and development studies, global studies, policy studies, economics and political science.