ABSTRACT In precolonial Africa, hair played an important role in how Africans conceptualised identity, beauty, status, spirituality and cultural pride. With the advent of slavery, colonialism and apartheid, African hair became the object of ridicule, racialisation and inferiority. The Eurocentric ideal of beauty became dominant in African women’s perception of ‘self’ and ‘identity’. For many women in apartheid South Africa, it became a way of acceptance into the European consciousness and to access social, cultural and economic privileges that colonialism and apartheid reserved for whiteness. Do the vestiges of colonial-apartheid and the Eurocentric constructs of beauty and identity persist among those who grew up and lived through apartheid now that South Africa is a free country? Through a theoretical lens of postcolonial discourse of race and identity, this study explores colonial-born Black women’s (aged 47 to 83) opinions about hair and identity in post-apartheid South Africa. It seems their perceptions remain fixed in the Eurocentric standard.

INTRODUCTION For the Ruth First Fellowships, of which African Studies is a sponsor, we seek new, younger voices to address a pressing, current issue in the tradition of Ruth First’s activist research. In 2021, we asked applications for the Fellowship to speak to the following key question: What do the radical changes in the public sphere enabled by the power of Big Tech mean for the public sphere? We hoped to tease out the meaning, paradoxes and contradictions of the impact of the big technology companies and their instruments with regard to the public sphere. Murray Hunter responded with a proposal to produce an essay – part narrative, part analysis – meditating on why the private power of giant technology companies seem largely to be treated as more palatable and benign than state power. And, equally importantly, what we need to do about it. At a hybrid event hosted live at The Forge in Braamfontein and online, Hunter delivered the 2021 Ruth First Memorial Lecture in January 2022, with a keynote address by Nanjala Nyabola, writer, political analyst, and activist based in Nairobi, Kenya.

ABSTRACT The number of African older people who live permanently in urban areas is growing. This qualitative ethnographic study explores how older people employ welfare strategies, often involving members of the extended family in mutual care and support. These welfare strategies are emplaced; in this case, in different housing types in a former township in Namibia – Kuisebmond in Walvis Bay. Older people stay in former township houses, in backyard shacks or other rentals, or at an old-age home. Government welfare that was adjusted to family needs appeared in similar shapes in these housing types, such as access to better schools. Older people were both caregivers and receivers of care in these efforts. Taking care of grandchildren while their parents migrated for work was a mutuality of informal support that was highly beneficial to all involved. The non-contributory pensions facilitated many strategies by alleviating risks. Access to high quality housing and government healthcare made urban living a feasible alternative that challenged rural living. The study concludes that housing is a strategic welfare space where formal and informal welfare are optimised in various ways. Older individuals contribute to a large extent to the adjustment, maintenance, and development of these joint spaces.

ABSTRACT This conceptual article falls within the scope of the politics applied to the Covid-19 pandemic in Zimbabwe. The central argument is that the state authority’s redeployment of liberation war ideology in its efforts to combat the Covid-19 pandemic tends to marginalise what the state authority refers to pejoratively as ‘ordinary Zimbabweans’. Using critical theory as theoretical framework, I argue that the deployment of liberation war ideology as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic concurrently reinforces the dominance of state authority while marginalising ordinary Zimbabweans. Liberation war ideology is premised on the assumption that the state authority has the sole mandate to actively deploy weaponry and personnel to eliminate an enemy on behalf of its citizens. The application of liberation war ideology to the Covid-19 pandemic suggests that the state authority has monopolised and politicised the measures taken against the pandemic.

ABSTRACT We offer a critical reading of Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech to illustrate how he foregrounded humaning, namely onto-epistemological recovery, as a key dimension of psycho-political reconstruction. Mbeki’s speech, delivered on the occasion of the adoption of South Africa’s democratic Constitution, was inherent to the larger quest to (re)imagine South Africa and (South)Africanness and assert independent Black intellectual thought. Positioning himself as an epistemic agent, Mbeki historicised that moment of adopting the Constitution and attempted to raise critical consciousness about the protracted struggle for democracy. He mobilised marginalised knowledge about the anti-colonial struggle to challenge forgetfulness and limited interpretations of South Africa’s negotiated settlement. Mbeki also invoked the idea of a relational ontology and hermeneutic love to effect an inclusive Africanity constituted of multiple histories and ‘races’. Mbeki, resisting Afro-pessimism, referenced the making of an inclusive Africanity against Africa as a generative place despite the colonial encounter, African humanism and South Africa’s aspirations for reconciliation as articulated by the ANC and the Constitution. Notwithstanding the psycho-political import of Mbeki’s speech, the process of humaning remains incomplete.

ABSTRACT This article argues that the landmark legal case of Gulamo (also spelled Goolam or Gulam) Nabi, a Mozambican resident of Indian-origin (Indo-Mozambican) caught smuggling shrimp into Swaziland, signalled a critical fracture in the façade of Mozambican socialism. Nabi was sentenced to death by firing squad for fish smuggling and price gouging. Like a ghost, Nabi’s legacy haunted my ethnographic fieldwork on Indo-Mozambican identity and belonging in the twentieth century. This article explores the depth and breadth of contemporary domestic narratives around perceived social and economic infractions by Indo-Mozambicans over the long durée. It argues that the post-colonial government used Nabi’s punishment as a show of force both domestically and internationally, particularly with capitalist South Africa and its territories. The case served as an ethnographic entry point to better engage the trials and errors in Mozambique’s process of nation building, national identity formation, and the creation of a multiracial, socialist state in Africa.

ABSTRACT This article analyses the use of ‘the disc’ – a curious pedagogical post-colonial artifact, intended to discourage native languages – a tool employed in teaching colonial languages in schools in parts of the post-colonial world. The disc assumes many forms depending on where it is employed, but it is usually an object fashioned to be carried, or worn as an article of clothing, or a cap making it reminiscent of the Dunce Cap. The role of the disc and its variants is the same: to leverage surveillance and shaming and channel them towards the purposes of instilling school discipline, promoting moral education and often as a pedagogical tool. However, the use of shame for these purposes has since fallen out of favour in the West (Stearns & Stearns 2017). Using Michel Foucault’s notion of panopticism to illuminate the workings of this artifact, this article focuses on shedding some light on the indignities suffered by speakers of native languages in such post-colonial school systems. As Foucault (1980, 30) wrote, power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions, attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives. This article’s main gist is on this one aspect of colonial legacy in education: the language policies that put a premium on mastery of colonial over native languages. Among the issues typical in post-colonial discourse, this vestige represents apt exemplification of deleterious aspects of colonialism that continue to present perverse challenges in post-colonial societies. It however concurs, in spite of the blistering critique of the emphasis on colonial language use, and in light of a rapidly globalising world, with Kevin Forster’s (2003) analysis, which concludes that in instances where contemporary values like empowerment and perfection is gained while sacrificing autonomy and freedom from surveillance, subjugation could be seen as worthwhile.

ABSTRACT By employing a critical discourse analysis and approaching Black economic empowerment as an institutionalised discursive phenomenon, this article argues that BEE has always maintained a discursive stance against the transformation of historical, structural and power inequities in South Africa. However, there is a presumption in academic circles that BEE aims to transform these inequities that emanate from the structural legacies of apartheid and colonialism. This article disputes this presumption in constructionist and discursive terms. It concludes that BEE contains corporate and ahistorical discourses of managerialism and depoliticised empowerment and redistribution that disconnect the policy from structural and political processes. These discourses structurally preserve, conceal, reproduce and depoliticise oppression and domination while running the risk of maintaining existing structures of decision-making, power and procedures in the private sectors. The article finds that primary documents such as the Black Economic Empowerment Commission Report, the Department of Trade and Industry’s BEE Strategy and the BBBEE Acts appropriate anti-colonial and anti-apartheid discourses to legitimise the legalisation, formalisation and implementation of BEE and to promote the inclusion, participation and assimilation of Black people within the existing structures and historical practices that produced racial injustices in the first place.

ABSTRACT As part of customary homicidal practice, blood feuds have persisted for generations in various countries. Due to the different motives for this kind of discord, and due to its divergence and multifaceted consequences, it is very difficult to determine universally accepted causes of blood feuds. Even though it has been a common social practice that has persisted for generations in Ethiopia, the blood feud phenomenon has, to date, received little scholarly attention. Given its complex nature and idiosyncrasies and the paucity of research in the Ethiopian context, this article aims to explore the causes of the blood feud in Ethiopia’s Amhara regional state. The findings from our ethnographic study reveal that economic, political and socio-cultural causes may lead to blood feuds.

ABSTRACT The notion that Africans lack a sense of future was extensively debated following John Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy (1969) and has since entered the scholarly and popular discourse as a fixed topos which we label #African time (‘Europeans have watches, Africans have time’). The most recent references to the topos are found in future vision reports of many African states and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that assert and demand a sense of future for Africa and from members of African societies. While the notion of a homogenised past-oriented ‘African time’ has been largely abandoned in academia, #African time appears to be an accepted and enactable popular discourse among policy makers, state planners and NGO workers. This article provides examples of this phenomenon and it extends James Scott’s (1998) idea, that state authorities tend to make its citizens ‘legible’ in order to govern them, to explain the tenaciousness of the #African time topos. While Scott’s examples are almost exclusively about shaping space for legibility, we show that there is a similar process taking place with regards to time, and that citizens, communities and societies are expected to formulate visions for the future if they want their interests to be ‘read’ by the state, by NGOs, donor agencies and other powerful agents they interact with. In this process of making the future visions of citizens legible, the topos of #African time plays a major role.