CIHA Blog Highlights – Fall 2018
By: Anna Kamanzi
As the new year approaches, we would like to welcome any new readers of the blog we have gained this year and encourage you all to share this site with your friends. At CIHA, we seek to foreground critical and religious voices to explore connections among issues of faith, governance, gender, and race in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Through our analysis and dialogue, we strive for equality, justice and, ultimately, respect for others’ desires, beliefs and practices. This mission in exemplified in today’s post where we are highlighting the interesting and important work we have put out this fall.
Since I took over the position of Editorial Assistant for the UC Irvine team, CIHA has been at the forefront of discussions about current events, legacies, and happenings on the African continent. I am so pleased to be a part of such a dynamic and engaged group of scholars! However, I am not the only new CIHA editorial assistant. We have many new graduate student team members from across Africa contributing to the blog, all of whom are introduced here. For example, Rebecca Mugo, a Master’s student at HIPSIR, jumped right into her new role and wrote an analysis of the potential consequences of pushing development agendas by increasing borrowing and taxation in Kenya in her post “Kenya’s Economic Policy: Borrowing from China Plus Regressive Taxation is Problematic for Social Welfare and Economic Growth.”
Additionally, we had a series of posts examining humanitarianism, charity, and development in Africa, whether from NGOs operating on the continent, foreign aid from outside of Africa, or philanthropists based anywhere in the world. We posted a two-part piece by Father Dr. Toussaint Kafarhire Murhula of the Hekima Institute of Peace Studies and International Relations (HIPSIR) in Nairobi, Kenya. In his posts, he discussed the Humanitarian Conference on the Democratic Republic of Congo, which took place earlier this year in Geneva, and responses by the Congolese government on the representation of the crisis and suffering. Read part one and part two by clicking these links. Dr. Willy Mafuta wrote an insightful critique of Donald Trump’s problematic comments on land development and race in South Africa. And finally, we re-posted an investigative article originally written by Finley Young of ProPublica which chronicled wide-spread abuse of girls by an American-run charity in Sierra Leone. CIHA contributor Titilope Ajayi wrote an extended introduction to the repost.
I began my tenure at CIHA by collecting several posts about various aspects of the so-called “Anglophone Crisis” in Cameroon. This fascinating collection of work by our Co-Editors and guest writers provides information on the developing unrest, going on since 2016, as well as several astute analyses of the history and contemporary conditions which led up to the crisis. Dr. Cilas Kemedjio writes about the Anglophone question, linguistic plantation complex and Biafra’s ghosts in Cameroon. Dr. Cecelia Lynch and Tatiana Fouda ask how religious women construct modernity in Cameroon. Father Ludovic Lado shares his thoughts about solidarity and dialogue in the Anglo- and Francophone part of the country. Former editorial assistant and graduate student Gerald Acho makes a plea for subsidiarity and asks: what went wrong?
We have also collected many exciting opportunities and events happening in Africa from our teams in Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. These have included the 2018 JL Dube Memorial Lecture held at UKZN, a call to co-host the next African Studies Association of Africa meetings in Ghana, and a CIHA Blog call for publications for the Alternation Journal at UKZN. We have also posted many more events and opportunities on those sections of the blog.
Finally, one of the most important things CIHA does is provide a space for discussions of how religion and faith intersect with politics, culture, and society in Africa, including the roles of faith-based NGOs in humanitarian work. We have had many important posts this season which investigate the interpretations, roles, and legacies of religious actors and institutions in Africa. We posted excerpts from the introduction to Dr. Ebenezer Obadare’s new book, Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria (Zed Books, 2018). Dr. Obadare has written for the blog before and you can find his other posts here. We also posted a two-part series by Thabang Nkadimeng called “Migrations of the Holy” which reflected on the nature and efficacy of sacramentals in religious circles and charms in popular culture in South Africa. The first post in this series began a discussion of the ways that religious fervor in South Africa has migrated towards a new object of worship and the second part gives a historical study of how sacramentals and relics are understood in Catholic teaching.
We are always happy to note that our posts continue to spur conversations both online and off and look forward to continued engagement. As we head into the holiday season and prepare for some temporary changes at CIHA, we would like to thank you for your support and ask for your thoughts in the comments section. Happy reading!