ABSTRACT Although Apartheid has formally ended, many universities in South Africa continue to function as “epistemic plantations” even a decade after the Fallist movements. These institutions perpetuate whiteness, maintain exclusionary frameworks and uphold imperial, antiblack pedagogical structures. This essay examines two recent works that critically address this violent scenario: Epistemic Justice and the Postcolonial University (2023) and Predicaments of Knowledge (2024). Epistemic Justice, organised by Amrita Pande, Ruchi Chaturvedi and Shari Daya, brings together essays by academics from various disciplines at the University of Cape Town that document pedagogical experiments aimed at dismantling epistemic barriers within university structures. The experiences at this institution reflect challenges similar to those faced in other post-colonial contexts, positioning the book as both an inspiration and a catalyst for debate among those confronting entrenched academic colonialism. Predicaments of Knowledge offers Suren Pillay’s analysis of the epistemic transformation required for universities to move beyond Eurocentric and colonial scientific canons in pursuit of a democratic and antiracist national project. Both volumes are led by students and academics who demonstrate that the creation of an emancipatory, non-imperial university depends on sustained collective commitment to academic abolitionism and the adoption of innovative theoretical frameworks.

ABSTRACT Research on urban human geography in Africa reveals an increasingly dystopian reality in the continent’s major cities, often characterised by high unemployment rates, inadequate service delivery, homelessness and deteriorating physical and social infrastructure. While this urban crisis is largely attributed to the inability of postcolonial metropolitan authorities to manage a population explosion that places immense pressure on resources and life-supporting opportunities, this article underscores the primacy of colonial hegemonies and spatial dynamics in shaping the postcolonial city. Situating the discussion within the theoretical framework of Southern Urbanism, the article largely draws on Avery Gordon’s theorisation of hauntology and spectrality to conceptualise postcolonial urban dystopia in Southern Africa, as depicted in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013). The article interprets the cities of Johannesburg (South Africa) and Bulawayo (Zimbabwe) as sites haunted by imperial ghosts. This serves to advance the claim that there is a causal relationship between failed urbanism and the persistence of colonial hegemonies and spatial disconnections. The article further examines the postcolonial city as a site of ambivalence, where marginalised urbanites adopt various existential strategies to negotiate belonging and reinvent themselves.

ABSTRACT African governments continually envision cities as “world-class cities” to attract businesses to invest and promote economic growth and development. Unfortunately, these neoliberal planning ideals result in inequalities seen through marginalisation, exclusion and peripheralisation. Despite these inequalities, poor urban residents show resilience by navigating the restrictive systems to meet their daily needs. Accra Airport City is a neoliberal capitalist enclave that restricts any form of informality. However, informal food vending persists in the liminal spaces in the enclave. How do marginalised groups navigate such restrictive spaces, and what is the result of their navigations around the strict boundaries? The objectives of the paper are to examine the factors leading to the formation of liminal spaces in Airport City, the nature of the liminal spaces and the planning implications. In-depth interviews with some low-wage workers and food vendors revealed that low incomes and the desire to access affordable food promote informal food vending in liminal spaces in the enclave. The paper concludes that appreciating the processes of everyday practices and understanding the existing social structures through a structurationist lens can support a better appreciation of informality in the enclave.

ABSTRACT The mass and social media coverage of Zimbabwean immigrants in South Africa highlights the urgent need to address the xenophobic crisis. There appears to be a deliberate muting of ordinary Zimbabwean immigrants’ voices in the narrativisation of Johannesburg. This paper foregrounds Zimbabwean migration experiences not solely defined by abjection. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation at music shows and social gatherings, it examines how Zimbabweans employ music-mediated practices to claim belonging and inclusion in the city. Findings reveal that immigrants use music to mediate sociality, build communities, and resist cultural erasure. Their musicking and placemaking practices, often enacted publicly, assert identity amid xenophobic threats while challenging dominant narratives of invisibility and crisis. These practices generate bonding and bridging social capital, strengthening resilience, visibility, and urban participation. The paper concludes that Zimbabwean immigrants’ experiences reveal richer dimensions of sociality and community-making than currently acknowledged in media discourse or academic literature.

ABSTRACT Young women constitute a persistently disproportionate share of new HIV infections in the hardest hit countries of Africa – three times higher than among male peers. Transactional sex is a key driver of HIV infections among women in Africa, and the “women-poverty-transactional sex” perspective dominates the conceptualisation of this link. Yet, the manifest nature of poverty and its intersectionality with HIV risk among young women, is more complex and inadequately understood. We examine the evolving nature, motivations and meanings of transactional sex among young women aged 15–35 years through 32 focus group discussions with young women, young men and community members in Mbarara district, south-western Uganda. The findings affirm and transcend conventional poverty-based notions, which typically depict desperate victims struggling to meet basic “needs.” Instead, they reveal the agency of relatively educated and sometimes well-off young women who engage in risky sexual behaviour to fulfil their desires – “wants.” The findings advance knowledge on the intersection of poverty, agency and power inequities in shifting manifestation of transactional sex across lifecycle transitions among young women and can inform the micro targeting of relevant local HIV-prevention initiatives, including economic empowerment efforts to overcome the high rates of new HIV infections among young women.

ABSTRACT This paper examines how struggles for housing and other basic services such as water and electricity are characterised in South Africa. There has been a shift in categorising local protests from the previously accepted “service delivery protests” to other phrases such as “local political protests” or “local protests” or “community protests.” Drawing from data gathered through in-depth interviews and focus group discussions in Gugulethu and Khayelitsha, two townships in Cape Town, South Africa, I argue that these new concepts conceal the service delivery-related challenges faced by poor communities throughout South Africa. The paper’s focus on housing stems from the fact that a house often functions as a site where several services come together. While protests are nuanced and have varying reasons, they have a large service delivery component. As such, the study of protest in South Africa will benefit from research that spotlights service delivery problems. This also helps to highlight the prevalence of such protests throughout the country.

ABSTRACT The visual devices employed by the artists Anton Kannemeyer and Brett Murray to criticise apartheid-era patriarchal rule seemed to have remained intact in their satirical critiques of black male leadership, yet their later works generate markedly different affects. This difference in affect is explored through the application of key Lacanian concepts (primarily the RSI and jouissance). It is argued that a slippage in the operation of the signifier demonstrates the tensions, complexities and anxieties that underpin white male subjectivities in times of radical transition. It is proposed that the artists’ jouissance, an irrepressible and destructive kind of enjoyment fuelled by the feeling that one’s rightful enjoyment is not only denied but has indeed been stolen by a cultural other, is behind the production of these works and is responsible for its affects.

ABSTRACT The institution of queen motherhood, or remnants thereof, is found across the African continent. A study of queen motherhood during the nineteenth century in the south-eastern region of Africa coincides with the European arrival and its inevitable deleterious impact on African institutions. The title of this paper is derived from the incident of the tragic death of one George Floyd in 2013 who suffocated to death from a police officer’s knee pressure that was exerted on his neck, reminiscent of imperial constriction on indigenous societies. In this study, the focus is on the lives and struggle of ooNdlunkulu/Queen Mothers Sutu and Nonesi of amaRharhabe and abaThembu, respectively. An exploration of the vicissitudes of these women is also part of the growing herstoriographies of European invasion. Also explored is the theme of the making of ooNdlunkulu and how the institution was sustained. The study of the two women provides the researcher with information on the leadership exercised by these women within the matripotent-filial legacy of izizwe zamaXhosa and abaThembu. The main feature of this institution is its existence within a fluid inter-relational system that was appositional as against the matriarchy-patriarchy binary that dominates current academic studies.

ABSTRACT While Africanisation remains a popular idiom for intellectual decolonisation, it raises difficult issues around citizenship, identity and belonging, alongside their constitutive dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Using the “politics of belonging” as a conceptual frame, I unpack the tensions involved in grounding decolonisation in a substantive insistence on Africanness. This lens centres important questions like who can successfully claim Africanity and what it means to be intellectually African. Reflecting on the former, both historically and in the aftermath of student calls for a decolonised African university in South African higher education, I show that Africanness is rarely settled by first principles. There are often competing claims regarding the African for whom representation is sought. I therefore contend that the intuitiveness of framing decolonisation as Africanisation elides the politics of belonging that characterises talk of making universities more African, which is sometimes shaped by exclusionary configurations of race, class, nation and indigeneity.

ABSTRACT This essay unfolds in four parts. In the first part I argue that the struggle against apartheid must be understood as a war against war, namely a war that is waged with the superego of apartheid as war itself. In the second part, I consider J.M. Coetzee’s essay on The Mind of Apartheid in the context of the hypothesis put forth by Jacques-Alain Miller and others that racism is the theft of enjoyment. I show that the superego of apartheid is both a threatening and a threatened object and that working to produce the impression that the object of enjoyment is under constant threat is an essential component of the superego’s sadism. In part three I stay with Coetzee’s essay to consider the spatialisation of the superego under apartheid. I argue that this spatialisation should be understood in terms of Carl Schmitt’s concept of the nomos. Finally, in part four I reconsider earlier work on apartheid as enforced melancholia to argue for a burial of the apartheid superego that can release the subject of the postapartheid from enforced psychosis.