Janet Bujra

Targeting men for a change: AIDS discourse and activism in Africa

Campaigns against the spread of AIDS in Africa have recently begun to target men. This raises challenging questions not only about forms of intervention, but also about theoretical perspectives which have abandoned essentialist views of men and masculinity and shifted to a perception of masculinities as plural and contingent. In addressing these concerns, JANET BUJRA re-interrogates field data from a recent study in Tanzania and reviews AIDS initiatives in Africa which target men

The accumulation of dispossession

Eleven years ago, this journal published a special issue on ‘The Struggle for Land’ in Africa (volume 27, issue 84, June 2000). Its focus was on struggles over access to land and land rights, probing the relationship between town and country and how land and agricultural strategies are shaped by political power. It also looked at how different struggles over land helped shape the ways in which African states were unevenly incorporated into a world economy shaped by imperialist intervention. At first glance it seems that the processes of underdevelopment identified in that issue are being repeated in the contemporary period: the World Bank and other international financial institutions remain heavily fixated on promoting individual and privatised land tenure. People’s rights to access and the more general rights that rural Africans seek to promote remain central issues of contested politics and class struggle, whilst recurrent food insecurity propels a rationale for liberalised markets to promote entrepreneurial initiative, in the vain hope that this will produce improved well-being. Yet contemporary debate about land in Africa and about land ‘grabbing’ suggests that all these processes have recently intensified. Driven by dispossession, rural protest and urban food riots, the centrality of land and struggles over access to it and how it is to be worked and owned are once again at the fore of political debate and policy-making interventions. The issues of 10 years ago are not simply being repeated, albeit this time on a greater scale. There is now a qualitative difference in the ways in which land and land transformation are shaping Africa’s political economy. One of the most important distinguishing features of contemporary debate about land in Africa is indeed the scale of recent dispossession. Accuracy in figures to account for what exactly is happening in relation to land transfers and foreign capital intervention is elusive. This is a point made well in this volume by Hall who problematises, among other things, the language used to describe land transfers and the purposes to which the land is eventually used. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) estimates, for example, that between 15 million and 20 million hectares in developing countries changed hands between 2006 and 2009. And it seems that the assumption underpinning the stance of international financial institutions and transnational companies, not only in the North, but also from the Global South, is that Africa has a lot of land that is simply idle – and what better purpose for available liquidity than to facilitate access to land? Land can be used as a hedge against crisis-ridden international financial markets; it allows for investment in agricultural production, usually of high-value luxury (low nutritious) food or horticultural products for export, or for the production of biofuels at a time when global energy prices have been at an unprecedented high. The myriad set of reasons for accessing African land link the continent immediately into the vagaries of the international market and provide evidence for accumulation of international capital on the back of African land, livelihoods and resources. Thus one of the most recently contentious land deals has involved South African farmers accessing 172,000 of the 10 million hectares of land that the government of Republic of Congo

AIDS as a Crisis in Social Reproduction

Using the conceptual framework of social reproduction as a way of reassessing the AIDS crisis in Africa, this paper finds contradictory tendencies: a devastating impact on agricultural modes of livelihood which sustain the majority and which enable workers to present themselves as cheap labour, but also a crisis for the reproduction of capital as its supply of such labour is depleted. The impact on and response to the epidemic by the state is explored as well as its reflection of marked gender and class inequalities. Conversely the impetus to certain fractions of capital which benefit from AIDS and the confrontation of the state and pharmaceutical companies by an emergent populist movement demanding the right to treatment, exposes the extent to which transformation rather than simple reproduction is in evidence.

Class relations: AIDS & socioeconomic privilege in Africa

A critical consideration of the way social class is defined in studies of HIV/ AIDS in Africa exposes the inadequacies of ‘indexical’ accounts in which class is reduced to a statistical category (the predominant mode of analysis in epidemiological research). It compares this to relational accounts which view class as a set of dynamic interactions between groups struggling to assert or defend social positions relating to livelihoods. Arguing that class relations frame both the transmission and the response to the AIDS epidemic in Africa, it looks at the evidence which can be drawn from both indexical and relational accounts of the particular significance of class in this situation, noting its crucial intersection with gender relations and taking Tanzania as its key case. This paper was originally presented to the African Studies Association Biennial conference: Goldsmiths College, University of London: 13-15 September 2004.

Social science research on AIDS in Africa: questions of content, methodology and ethics.

An international symposium on the social sciences and AIDS in Africa was held in Sali Portudal, Senegal, in November 1996. English- and French-speaking researchers and AIDS activists came together to consider a broad range of topics, with reference to individual country experience. The authors review some of the issues discussed at the symposium; in particular, the need for more social science research on AIDS to reconsider and re-evaluate methodologies and their role in relation to interventions, the variety of discourses through which AIDS is articulated and understood, and ethical questions relating to confidentiality and disclosure, as well as international disparities in income and access to resources. The shift in perception and understanding about the significance of AIDS, with its implications for the weakening of a former sense of common purpose, makes conferences such as this one all the more important.

Taxing development in Tanzania: why must women pay?

The extension of a development tax to women in Tanzania raises the general issue of the relevance of gender to patterns of economic development in a country with a ‘socialist’ reputation. This article looks at the link between gender and development in Tanzania, but equally importantly it focuses on the way in which the question of gender has been contested and debated within Tanzania. While the debate on gender has highlighted the way in which ‘socialist’ policies have intensified womens workloads without removing patriarchal social relations, the development tax both recognises the contribution of women but also exposes their continued dependence on men, since their production does not always result in cash income. Structural adjustment programmes have, however, begun to force women into the marketing of subsistence food in order to make ends meet, as the inflationary effects of adjustment bite. Rather than being ‘integrated into development’, SAPs and the Development Levy bind women more closely into ...

Editorial: special issue on AIDS

The spectre of AIDS is haunting Africa. If present trends continue, its impact on development and society will be devastating. This issue of ROAPE looks at some of the graphic realities of the situation as faced by those who must cope. It also explores the struggles and the debates around who might take responsibility for delivering programmes of prevention and care, for making affordable drugs available to those in need and for dealing with the consequences of loss wreaked by the epidemic. If families bear the heaviest burden, what role do states, NGOs and international agencies have in managing the crisis and in averting the worst scenarios? These questions have to be considered in context. The epidemic comes at the worst possible time for Africa, already facing economic crisis and indebtedness, the deliberate downsizing of national governments through externally-imposed neo-liberal policies, as well as riven by more armed conflicts than any other region of the world.

Não vamos esquecer (We will not forget)

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Agendas, past & future

This issue marks the 30th anniversary of the birth of The Review of African Political Economy in 1974. At the time, its founders were unsure if it would get off the ground and they certainly never thought it would last thirty years! Apart from debate about what its role would be, there were doubts about their own stamina, and about whether successor generations would emerge to take it on. The challenge was set out by Anderson in relation to another Left Review: …political journals have no choice: to be true to themselves, they must aim to extend their real life beyond the conditions or generations that gave rise to them (Anderson, New Left Review, 2000).

ROAPE's Africa Research Fund: a report

A few months ago ROAPE decided to initiate a small research grants competition for African scholars and/or activists based in Africa and pursuing a political economy agenda. This has turned out to be one of the most successful ventures ROAPE has engaged in to reach out to progressive African intellectuals. The establishment of the Fund was based on the premise that the shortage of funding for critical research was one of the problems faced, and one of the explanations for, the limited amount of such material coming to ROAPE. ROAPE therefore offered four small research grants (each of £3000) to applicants who could devise a small research project and write it up. Half the grant is to be delivered immediately, the other half on completion of a submission to be considered for publication. The response went far beyond our expectations. We received over two hundred applications from all over Africa – from South Africa to Tunisia, Madagascar to Senegal, Burkina Faso to South Sudan. A high proportion came from Nigeria, with South Africa, Zimbabwe and Uganda also generating many applications. We were particularly pleased that over 20% of the applications came from female candidates. With only four grants to disburse we were hard-pressed to make a choice from amongst a very competent and worthy set of applications, mostly from academics, but some from political activists and others who encompassed both locations. We decided to focus on projects with a strong and clear political economy framing and with a convincing research methodology. Despite this clear objective many promising candidates still had to be turned down. This suggests to us that there is a huge unmet need for critical research support in Africa and we hope to sustain this initiative into the future (our own funds permitting). The four winning candidates were as follows: