Felicitas Becker

AIDS and religious practice in Africa

This volume explores how AIDS is understood, confronted and lived with through religious ideas and practices, and how these, in turn, are reinterpreted and changed by the experience of AIDS. Examining the social production, and productivity, of AIDS - linking bodily and spiritual experiences, and religious, medical, political and economic discourses - the papers counter simplified notions of causal effects of AIDS on religion (or vice versa). Instead, they display peoples resourcefulness in their struggle to move ahead in spite of adversity. This relativises the vision of doom widely associated with the African AIDS epidemic; and it allows to see AIDS, instead of a singular event, as the culmination of a century-long process of changing livelihoods, bodily well-being and spiritual imaginaries.

Commoners in the process of Islamization: reassessing their role in the light of evidence from southeastern Tanzania

Many societies became Muslim gradually, without conquest by Muslim rulers. Explanations of this process typically focus on Muslim traders, proselytizing ‘holy men’, and the conversion of ruling elites, as the limited sources suggest. Yet it cannot be assumed that Islamization always made sense for elites as a power-enhancing stratagem, or that rulers or holy men were willing or able to shape the religious allegiances of commoners. In fact, studies of contemporary Islamic societies demonstrate the relative autonomy of commoners’ religious observance, and the tendency of elites towards accommodation. Evidence from a recently Islamized region in East Africa shows that, rather than following elite converts, ordinary villagers initiated rural Islamization. They learned from coastal Muslim ritual rather than scripture, and evoked Islam to challenge social hierarchies and assert a more egalitarian social ethos. The possibility of similar processes also exists in other sites of gradual Islamization.

‘Patriarchal masculinity in recent Swahili-language Muslim sermons’

This paper offers a close examination of statements on patriarchal masculinity from three widely traded sermon recordings produced in Zanzibar, Tanzania. It sets them in the context of Islamic reform, Muslim political discontent, and the consumption of sermon recordings in East Africa. Despite similar assertions on the need for men to protect and control women, in close reading the three preachers offer quite divergent characterisations of the patriarch’s methods, obligations, and entitlements within the household. The sermons show that Islamic reform in Zanzibar cannot be reduced to political discontent, and that it hearkens back to longstanding regional history. They also suggest that the concept of patriarchy is more relevant to the understanding of asymmetrical gender relations than recent discussion of Western gender relations has allowed, and highlight the centrality of bearing and rearing children as a site for both assertion and failure of patriarchal control. Lastly, they indicate the failure of sermon preachers and listeners to coalesce into a coherent counterpublic.

The bureaucratic performance of development in colonial and post-colonial Tanzania

Abstract This article examines change and continuity in development measures concerning cassava in a poor Tanzanian region over a period of 80 years. It shows ambivalent and dubious ways of reasoning about the causes of and solutions to poverty related to these measures, and argues that the persistence of such problematic arguments is understandable if one considers their political usefulness. Local officials have always had to safeguard their own viability in the eyes of their superiors in the administration, as well as those of local audiences. For them, “development” has become a focus of political performances that serve to reinforce their legitimacy.

Alamin Mazrui, Swahili Beyond the Boundaries: literature, language and identity . Athens OH: Ohio University Press (Ohio University Research in International Studies Series, African Series no. 85) (pb

years of radical change for women. The Idi Amin and Obote II presidencies brought ‘abrupt and forcible change’ – civil war and government ‘campaigns of repression against women’. For family survival, a second adjustment to the DVM surfaced – the ‘petty urban trade variation’ flourished when Uganda’s formal economy collapsed. Towards the end of the Obote II presidency, 16,000 women from 157 countries met in Nairobi at the third United Nations World Conference on Women. Inspired by the amount and variety of women’s activities at the conference, on their return home Ugandan women convened their own national conference – and launched a powerful movement. The National Resistance Movement (NRM) victory in 1986, led by President Museveni, brought political and economic stability to Uganda and affirmative action for women through a new constitution that supported their presence in government, university and primary education. The media gave positive coverage to women and their burgeoning NGOs and CBOs. Women increasingly worked outside the home, often in micro-enterprises, and the availability of education brought more middle-class women to entrepreneurship and the professions; this expansion is attributed to a combination of need, interest, and NRM support. But the gains were offset by structural adjustment programmes imposed by the international lending institutions: the shrinkage in government health and education budgets created a devastating effect on women’s workloads. During the NRM years debate continued on the major gender issues of colonial days. Despite its widely accepted variations, the DVM (2003) maintained a tight hold on the culture, especially in rural areas where women often remain subject to men’s authority. The model ‘simply could not stretch far enough to accommodate the new entrepreneurial women’, who continue to be seen as socially respectable and economically secure; they attend to family needs and show ‘appropriate’ respect for their husbands when in public. This brings us to the present. The primary recommendation of the authors is a call for new gender definitions and active intervention to assist poor women, necessitated by the ‘ongoing force of domestic virtue assumptions’ which are, they assert, detrimental to both men and women. The book’s maps, figures, illustrations, abbreviations, glossary and appendices list the newspapers analysed, people interviewed, and quantitative information about the samples studied. There is a report on the women leaders’ meeting of 20 March 2003 that capped their research. These features, together with an extensive bibliography and an index, testify to the care with which the book has been researched and written. This is indeed a very good book and and I recommend it for secondary school and university use.