Female Faith and the Politics of the Personal: Five Mission Encounters in Twentieth-Century South Africa

This article explores female religious interaction in racially divided ‘colonial’ South Africa through the lives of five unmarried Anglican women missionaries who worked in and around Johannesburg between 1907 and 1960. It particularly analyses the quality of their personal relationships with African women converts, colleagues and students.Deaconess Julia Gilpin, in the imperial, anglicizing post-Boer War years, encouraged devout, respectable wifehood on the mine compounds, contributing to the corporate solidarity of praying mothers as a deeply entrenched feature of most black churches. Dora Earthy interacted in a warmer, more egalitarian way with black churchwomen. Her transfer to Mozambique led not only to evangelistic building on African cultural traditions and pioneering anthropological research but also to the protection and validation of Christian widows' autonomy against coerced remarriage.Frances Chilton and Dorothy Maud, despite sharply contrasting class origins, struggled to connect with more assertive networks of married women in the segregationist 1920s and 1930s, devoting their energies rather to guiding and enhancing African girlhood and youth. Hannah Stanton, in the more politically fraught 1950s, recognized the necessary independence of African actors and the limitations of outdated white liberal advocacy. Her training of African women promised new theological and organizational maturity, a potential collegiality, cut short by her detention in the 1960 State of Emergency and subsequent expulsion.The historical sweep of this survey suggests which personal and political conjunctures opened up or closed down meaningful interaction between colonized and colonizing women. It also offers a more positive evaluation of the intersection of race and religion as not invariably a ‘fatal combination’. The politics of the personal in women's joint educational, mission and social welfare ventures across the racial divide helped keep alive the idea of a single society and thus aided the surprisingly peaceful transition to democracy in South Africa in 1994.     

Governance and youth unemployment in Africa

ABSTRACT

The objective of this study is to identify governance indicators that can reduce youth unemployment in Africa. Thereby, the authors incorporated governance indicators into the growth model. The dynamic panel estimation of the model, based on data from the World Bank, the IMF and UNCTAD for the period 2002–2016 found that some governance indicators such as control of corruption and political stability have a negative influence on youth unemployment in Africa. Moreover, political stability does not reduce youth unemployment in highly corrupt countries which are rich in natural resources. Similarly, other governance indicators such as government effectiveness, regulatory quality, the rule of law, voice and accountability are not yet producing the expected effects in African countries. As a result, political authorities must improve governance indicators, including the control of corruption and political stability.     

Islamic law in contemporary North Africa: A study of the laws of divorce in the Maghreb

At a time when the nations of Islam are being depicted as the new specter threatening the developed world's horizons, it is crucial that informed Westerners re-examine the prejudices and misconceptions they have acquired over the years. Distorted perceptions will be dispelled not with violent emotions but rather by the chipping away of ignorance with meticulous study. This is certainly no less true in the emotionally charged field of women's studies. The role of women in Islam is as poorly understood in the West as any aspect of Muslim culture and the responsible feminist is clearly confronted with a delicate delimma; the extrication of the justified urge for universal female equality from self-seeking cultural intrusion. This is only possible through a rigorous understanding of Islam's heritage, its context, and its own defined goals.The following paper is a contribution to this expanding body of knowledge in the west. It is an analysis of the Islamic laws of divorce as manifested in North Africa. The opinions of the prevalent Maliki school are presented with the analysis of their transformation under colonization and the present trends appearing in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.     

Land rights issues in Africa: the contribution of agrarian systems research in Burkina Faso

The standard approach to land issues is to consider that private property rights are more efficient because they encourage investment. Therefore, it is imperative to institute modern land rights to meet agricultural challenges in sub-Saharan Africa. Other authors stress the importance of the social role of customary law in farming communities. Establishing modern property rights would have exclusive discriminatory effects, especially on the poorest. This contribution attempts to clarify the links between land rights, technological change and social disparity using the agrarian system approach. Both the above-mentioned theories are put to the test here. The emergence of private property appears to be not the cause but the consequence of technical changes that arose as a specific result of the maintenance of customary rights. However, these same customary rights also paved the way for growing social disparity within farming communities.     

Prosperity in crisis and the longue durée in Africa

ABSTRACT

Understanding the evolution and tenacity of particular ways of envisaging economic growth and development for Africa requires a form of analytical history that examines how conceptual structures function over the longue durée. Such an approach is more than simply empirical analysis through time or a set of abstractions based on the self-understandings of historical agents. It involves the development of a hypothetical analytic structure which through its own forms of transformation eventually comes to play a role in shaping the lived world of participants, including researchers, policymakers and ordinary citizens. This article uses research from Kenya and Zambia to demonstrate how a long-running – but temporally and spatially variable – focus on agricultural productivity has shaped the character of rural life in Africa, and why it has consistently failed to deliver enlarged forms of prosperity based on quality of life and ecological well-being.     

Mosaics of property: control of village land in West Africa

ABSTRACT

The control of rural land in West Africa deviates strongly from the common notions of private and common property. Most rural peoples are formally borrowers of the land they farm. Results of a detailed study of the property rights attached to all fields within three proximate village territories in the Fakara region of southwestern Niger are presented. This work reveals that property landscapes vary significantly across villages as shaped by the history of settlement and ongoing struggles to redefine property rights. In particular, the politics within village chieftaincies over the definition of common land managed by the chief in contrast to private land held by chieftaincy members has important implications for the use rights held by all villagers. Observations point to an ongoing process of privatization supported by local interpretations of customary law.     

Case note: Same-sex Marriage in South Africa –the constitutional Court's Judgment

Late last year the Constitutional Court of South Africa decided that the exclusion of same-sex couples from the common law definition of marriage and the statutory marriage formula was unconstitutional as it violated the rights of such couples to equality. The Court suspended the declaration of invalidity for one year to allow Parliament to enact new legislation to correct the defects, failing which certain words would be read into the legislation to accommodate same-sex marriage. A single judge dissented on the issue of remedy, finding that the Court should have developed the common law to include same-sex couples within the definition of marriage and read the necessary wording into the legislation with immediate effect. The decision is the culmination of a legal struggle by gays and lesbians for recognition of their relationships and the protection of their rights. While the scope of the right to marry may have been extended, the rights of domestic partners lag behind, often to the detriment of women in these relationships.     

‘After years in the wilderness’: The discourse of land claims in the New South Africa

This article examines land restitution in the new South Africa, and the intersecting roles of land‐claiming communities, forcibly resettled from their land during the apartheid years, and the NGOs and — since 1994 — Government Commissioners who have helped them to reclaim the land. Ideas and practices concerning land, community and development that emerge from the interaction between these different players are mutually constitutive but sometimes also mutually incomprehensible. A populist rhetoric, evident both ir: discussions with former land owners, and in much of NGO publications such as Land Update, depicts land as something communally owned which must be communally defended. This sense of uniformly experienced injustice and shared resistance against outside intervention obscures the fact that claims on land derive from a series of sharply differentiated historical experiences and articulate widely divergent interests, such as those — in the case of the farm Doornkop for example — between former owners and their former tenants. The restitution of land to these former owners, while of great importance to them as a source of identity and as a redress of past injustices, is not necessarily the key to solving ‘poverty, injustice and misery’ as claimed for the process of land reform in South Africa as a whole.     

Remortgaging Women's Lives: The World Bank'sLand Agenda in Africa

In recent months, the World Bank has issued a series of draft policy reports on land relations. This is the first time in over two decades that the Bank has sought to review its policy on lending in the land sector. Access to the draft reports and participation in the consultation process has, however, been severely limited. Nonetheless, the World Bank expects to issue the final Report by the end of this year. This paper presents a gender analysis of the two draft documents that have been made available to date. It assesses their implications for gender relations in Africa. It explores the World Bank's promotion of formal rural credit and challenges the assumption of the availability of women's unpaid agricultural labour. The paper argues that, far from being over, the struggle over land relations which has characterised the last decade in Africa, must continue. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The agrarian question and class contradictions in South Africa: Some theoretical considerations

The article first considers two dominant approaches to black rural social formations in South Africa, those of neo‐classical populism and radical political economy, examining their ideology and politics as well as their theoretical inadequacies. The major part of the article then provides a general interpretation of the theory and politics of the agrarian question in Marxism, which has strategic implications for the current phase of national democratic struggle in South Africa, as for democratic and socialist struggles elsewhere. This discussion concentrates on issues concerning the land question, the agriculture/industry contradiction and the worker‐peasant alliance, petty commodity production and class differentiation vs. a homogenised rural mass ('the people'), and the centrality of the agrarian question to national democratic struggles and those for socialist transformation.     

Corporate power in the agro-food system and the consumer food environment in South Africa

This contribution maps the South African agro-food system with a focus on corporate ownership and power, inspired by value chain work applied to the food system as a a whole. Corporations tend to dominate some nodes, for example input supply, grain storage and handling, and feedlots. Other nodes have a corporate core but with a wide number of smaller economic actors, for example agricultural production, food manufacturing, wholesale and retail, and consumer food service. This wide number of actors points to possible areas of intervention to boost livelihoods by supporting their economic activities. The paper considers the influence of corporations in structuring consumer perceptions on food quality and health, from input into apparently neutral dietary-based guidelines to advertising. Financialisation in the food system, including the institutionalisation of share ownership and the rise of agri-investment companies, and the multi-nationalisation of South African agro-food capital especially into Africa, have implications for the ability of the nation state to regulate activities in the agro-food system. The paper concludes with some recommendations for further work.