Heike Becker

Fieldwork in shared spaces: positionality, power and ethics of citizen anthropologists in southern Africa

The paper reflects on the ethical complexities of fieldwork ‘at home’ in Cape Town, South Africa and Namibia. It draws on Cheaters (1987) idea of the ‘citizen anthropologist’ to consider the obligations of resident anthropologists to the subjects of their research. It shows the shifts in understandings of research and the research relationship and explores the power dynamics of such relationships. It argues that anthropologists should be viewed in terms of situated identifications in order to lead the ethics debate towards more historically and politically conscious considerations.

'New Things After Independence': Gender and Traditional Authorities in Postcolonial Namibia

This article is concerned with gender and traditional authorities in postcolonial Namibia. Drawing on fieldwork in four rural localities, I argue that the widely-noted resurgence of chieftaincy in post-apartheid southern Africa is linked to shifts in local gender discourses and practices, which have re-imagined global and national gender discourses and have resulted in partial transformations of the institution. While these recent developments are uneven, the re-making of local gender discourses and practices testifies to the ability of chiefs and ordinary rural people to continually reinvent the political institutions in their communities. I argue that the recent gender politics of traditional authorities, in their various forms, are a product of local agency as well as a reaction to exogenous forces while building on local forms and histories. Thus, they (re-)fashion local, gendered modernities.

De-provincialising South African anthropology: on relevance, public culture & the citizen anthropologist

This paper examines a range of challenges to anthropology in post-apartheid South Africa in the hope of stimulating a much needed debate on ‘doing anthropology’ from the perspective of South African anthropologists who research and teach within their own complex society. It addresses questions about the continuities and discontinuities of ‘doing anthropology’ in South Africa, which pay special attention to the disciplines historically situated politics in the post-apartheid society. The title of the essay takes its cue from Dipesh Chakrabartys effort to ‘provincialise’ Europe and builds upon the ‘World Anthropologies’ project, initiated by Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar. I highlight the legacy of the late apartheid eras exposé anthropology which critically included a reluctance to engage with cultural analysis due to apartheids preoccupation with ‘cultures’ as its ideological basis. The paper argues, further, that post-apartheid anthropology needs to develop an approach to interpret the meanings and engage with the contemporary world in South Africa and beyond. It investigates three interrelated sets of critical issues: ‘Doing anthropology at home’: the anthropologist as investigator and citizen; the question of ‘relevance’, whither for a publicly engaged anthropology, and perspectives on anthropology, public culture and the postcolonial state.

Global and African: exploring hip-hop artists in Philippi township, Cape Town

This article investigates hip-hop, identity and global cultural flows among young people in contemporary Cape Town. We argue that hip-hop functions as a vehicle for identity negotiations in contemporary South Africa. The discussion of hip-hop in an ‘African’ township shows that the search for local forms of African identity in the time of globalisation does not necessarily mean the confirmation of old boundaries or the construction of bounded ‘new ethnicities’. Instead of dismissing forms of global popular youth culture as a threat to presumably ‘authentic’ African culture, the protagonists of the spaza hip-hop culture coming out of Capetonian townships have appropriated hip-hop in their quest for alternative, fluid African identities in contemporary South Africa.

Introduction to Anthropology Southern Africa special issue on ‘Engaging Difference: Perspectives on belonging and exclusion in contemporary southern and East Africa’

This special issue of Anthropology Southern Africa is the result of troubling questions of how to engage difference and belonging. Anthropologists in South Africa, like their colleagues elsewhere, today face the return of difference thinking. The articles in this special issue speak to a range of interconnected challenges presented by the politics of difference in contemporary southern and East Africa. Despite the variation of conceptual, epistemological and methodological approaches, the articles gathered in this issue all address tricky connections between difference, belonging, and exclusion. In this introductory article, I chart the genealogy of the relationship of South African anthropology with the practice and concept of difference. I also point towards recent innovative theorising of authenticity, which takes up the challenges to constructivism whilst retaining the valuable insights of constructivist approaches. Such re-conceptualising of difference thinking enables us to move beyond the worn primordial/essentialist vs. instrumentalist/constructionist divide in anthropological discourse on difference. This special issue, most importantly, sets the stage for further discussions about the concept, practice and politics of difference in southern and East Africa.

Beyond Trauma: New Perspectives on the Politics of Memory in East and Southern Africa

More than a decade ago Richard Werbner (1998:1) famously declared a ‘postcolonial memory crisis, emerging widely across the African continent’. This crisis, Werbner argued, was not merely about what was publicly remembered and what was forgotten. Rather, the challenge, whether in everyday life or in major public occasions, was to the very means and modes of remembrance (Werbner 1998:1). A critique of power and a renewed understanding was needed of ‘the force of memory, its official and unofficial forms, its moves between the personal and the social in postcolonial transformations’ (Werbner 1998:2).

The politics and aesthetics of commemoration: national days in southern Africa

The contributions to the special section in this issue study recent independence celebrations and other national days in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They explore the role of national days in state-making and nation-building, and examine the performativity of nationalism and the role of performances in national festivities. Placing the case studies in a broader, comparative perspective, the introduction first discusses the role of the state in national celebrations, highlighting three themes: firstly, the political power-play and contested politics of memory involved in the creation of a countrys festive calendar; secondly, the relationship between state control of national days and civic or popular participation or contestation; and thirdly, the complex relationship between regional and ethnic loyalties and national identifications. It then turns to the role of performance and aesthetics in the making of nations in general, and in national celebration...

Remembering Marikana: public art intervention and the right to the city in Cape Town

ABSTRACT This article investigates the role played by cultural initiatives in urban struggles in South Africa, and the emergence of public art to assert the right to the city. I explore how artistic–activist interventions engage an understanding of social justice and the right to the city in provocative visual and performance art. I demonstrate how such interventions reflect Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the city as a space to be inhabited in an active process, which critically includes its re-imagination. The paper focuses on creative interventions in Cape Town that confronted the city’s genteel public space with the second and third anniversary of the shooting of 34 striking miners at Marikana on August 16 2012. I argue that bringing the commemoration of the massacre into the public urban space – where post-apartheid Cape Town exhibits its claim to cosmopolitanism – challenges the politics of space in South Africa. I asked, how these cultural initiatives articulate claims through reimagining the city how they engage with the intertwined politics of culture and class followed by both the city and the nation–state, and how the artistic practices contest urban citizenship in contemporary South Africa.

The burden of history: Namibia and Germany from colonialism to postcolonialism

When former German Foreign Minister Joseph ‘Joschka’ Fischer visited Windhoek in October 2003, he went on record to say that there would be no apology that might give grounds for reparations for the first genocide of the 20th century, which was committed by German colonial troops in Namibia in 1904–1908. Fischer’s rather undiplomatic words are indicative of the intense and heated historical and present relations between Germany and her erstwhile colony.

Un/making difference through performance and mediation in contemporary Africa

This special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies grew out of a panel we organized at the European Conference on African Studies in Lisbon in June 2013. Our starting point was the obser...