Lorena Núñez

The Orthodoxy of Gender Mainstreaming Reflecting on Gender Mainstreaming as a Strategy for Accomplishing the Millennium Development Goals

Gender mainstreaming has itself become something of a mainstream practice in much development work. As the theory and practice of mainstreaming has developed so too have a range of debates over what exactly gender mainstreaming can contribute to development. This article reflects on a gender mainstreaming intervention in the East African region to explore the role that gender mainstreaming can play in achieving the Millennium Development Goals. In this article we discuss how gender mainstreaming has, at times, functioned as a retreat from womens equality and is used to render feminist perspectives more palatable to those who resist them. Far from being a simple critique of gender mainstreaming this reflects the broader tensions and debates that are shaping what gender has come to mean in different contexts. This brings difficult tensions over who develops a gender mainstreaming agenda and who claims to have expertise on gender. We explore how much is at stake in claims to represent the ‘beneficiary’ groups and the ways that donor relationships with NGOs function in this regard. Gender mainstreaming has clearly offered a mechanism for legitimating attention to gender inequality that is sufficiently flexible to account for local contexts. However, this flexibility also means that gender mainstreaming can be co-opted for conservative means and the struggles over ownership of gender mainstreaming can just as easily hamper the achievement of gender equality as envisaged in the MDGs.

Chronicles of Death Out of Place: Management of Migrant Death in Johannesburg

It is unsurprising that a range of organisations have been created both by and for migrants, as unique needs have arisen alongside the growing flow of migration from the African sub-continent to South Africa in the post-apartheid era. This article investigates in particular the Johannesburg-based organisations that serve the needs of cross-border migrants and their families when death occurs, facilitating the chance for a funeral and burial in the home country by navigating the social, governmental, economic and spiritual channels necessary for determining the course of a deceased migrant body. This article is concerned with the motivations, roles and actions of a selected set of these organisations as they assist and prepare a migrant body for its posthumous journey (including the factors that mediate against a ‘successful’ return of the body home). We ask how these actors interact during this journey and what these connections and processes might suggest to us about living and dying in Johannesburg as a foreign migrant. Rather than examining funerals and burials themselves, we go on an extended journey from the deathbed back to the living migrant community, exploring the way in which death is managed in Johannesburg in the interim period between death and burial. Such an exploration, we believe, will provide a view of the lived experience of migrants that has been given neither sufficient attention in the literature on death in Africa nor in the literature on migration.

Vital instability: ontological insecurity and African urbanisms

This special issue aims to trace the manifold insecurities and responses to these, enfolding ontological concerns, in geographically diverse African urban spaces. The papers in this volume reveal the multiple forms of insecurity characterizing African urbanisms: violence; joblessness; indeterminate legal regimes; infrastructural fragility; continual persecution by state and private actors; epidemic disease and metaphysical disorders, among others. However, while these insecurities are violent and corrosive, they are also generative. Responses to insecurities have multiple forms: evolving and diverse systems of healing, religion and ritual; the production of new technological and media-scapes; and emergent forms of civic resistance, mobility and conviviality. Our concern with African urbanisms is not limited to the geographic continent but also includes and extends to diasporic spaces. Furthermore, our aim is not to essentialize African urbanisms or ontologies, but rather to situate them in their colonial and post-colonial contexts and within historical and contemporary lines of migration. A focus on Africa has been widely by-passed in the so-called and recent ‘ontological turn’ in the social sciences. This special issue aims, in part, to address this neglect. However, more than just an application of trends in North American and European thought to the African continent, we wish to show in this introduction, and the special issue more widely, that concerns around ontology have been immanent to African anti-colonial and post-colonial intellectual traditions. Without this, there is a danger of re-enforcing Africanist scholarship itself as a Westernized way of reading African beliefs and lived realities rather than one that gives accounts of people’s realities for what they are and mean according to the people engaged in local contexts. Nonetheless, we will argue here that elements of the new ‘ontological turn’ have relevance to African scholarship because they draw attention to reflexive modes of being, knowing and thinking. Critical to our approach here is an analysis of African conceptions of being and personhood as they evolve in relation to urbanization, new materialities and transnational migrations. The special edition encompasses a range of case studies both on the African continent and in diasporic communities in Europe, including: the generativity of new communications technologies in Nairobi; the insecurities of motorcycle taxis in Kampala; the precarious lives of communities living in the shadows of an oil refinery in Durban; the outbreaks of fire and infrastructural fragility in inner-city Johannesburg; and the emergence of new religious forms in South Africa and Spain; along with exploring migration both within and beyond Africa. Guiding these explorations is a concern with the instability and generativity of African urbanisms; unstable and evolving relations of being and personhood; along with the corporeality and the materiality of the urban form.

(Un)Rest in Peace: The (Local) Burial of Foreign Migrants as a Contested Process of Place Making

This chapter explores the relationship between mobility, belonging and places of burial. The focus is on foreign migrants who die in Johannesburg and are buried on foreign land, away from their hometowns and countries of origin. Questions about where in the City of Johannesburg foreign migrants are buried and how decisions around burial place are made are of interest. These questions are informed by historical patterns of burials in South Africa, as they are a reflection of broader societal orders and past racial hierarchies. We take an historical perspective on the evolving spatial regimes of cemeteries to illustrate this point. In our efforts to understand the choices (or lack of thereof) the living make around the burial place for deceased foreign migrants, we engage with the concept of place making and challenge its traditional deployment in the literature in light of our focus on the current burials in a foreign land. In engaging this concept, we use data gathered through interviews with key informants, namely, public servants, representatives of funeral parlours and different foreign migrant groups residing in Johannesburg.

Healing and Change in the City of Gold

This volume collects case studies on the lives of people living in post-apartheid Johannesburg, South Africa. In doing so, it considers how people manage, respond to, narrate and/or silence their experiences of past and present violence, multiple insecurities and precarity in contexts where these experiences take on an everyday continuous character. Taking seriously how context shapes the meaning of violence, the forms of response, and the consequences thereof, the contributing chapter authors use participatory and ethnographic techniques to understand people’s everyday responses to the violence and insecurity they face in contemporary Johannesburg. Each case study documents an example of a strategy of coping and healing and reflects on how this strategy shapes the theory and practice of violence prevention and response. The case studies cover a diversity of groups of people in Johannesburg including migrants, refugees, homeless people, sex workers and former soldiers from across the African continent. Read together, the case studies give us new insights into what it means for these residents to seek support, to cope and to heal challenging the boundaries of what psychologists traditionally consider support mechanisms or interventions for those in distress. They develop a notion of healing that sees it as a process and an outcome that is rooted in the world-view of those who live in the city. Alongside the people’s sense of insecurity is an equally strong sense of optimism, care and a striving for change. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that this book deals very centrally with themes of the struggle for progress, mobility (geographic, material and spiritual), and a sense of possibility and change associated with Johannesburg. Ultimately, the volume argues that coping and healing is both a collective and individual achievement as well as an economic, psychological and material phenomenon. Overall this volume challenges the notion that people can and should seek support primarily from professional, medicalized psychological services and rather demonstrates how the particular support needed is shaped by an understanding of the cause of precarity.

Healing and Deliverance in the City of Gold

This chapter provides an overview of the key lessons that can be read across the case studies of precarious life in Johannesburg. Reflecting on the different case studies, a number of themes emerge. Firstly precarity is a central part of life for many of Johannesburg’s residents and has been since the city began. This requires an understanding of precarity beyond what currently exists in the literature. In addition, many of the chapters explore the politics of narration and show how and under what conditions people narrate their precarious lives. They grapple with the risks of both speaking out and remaining silent. In doing so, many migrants in Johannesburg constantly navigate their visibility and invisibility on a daily basis with new forms of (in)visibility possible and desirable in the city. The case studies also require us to rethink what we mean by help-seeking behaviour. Help was sought and found in unexpected places and blurred the divisions of physical, emotional, spiritual assistance so common in formal services. Connected to this, the dichotomies so prevalent in the literature and in the delivery of services such as African/traditional, physical/emotional or victim/perpetrator are blurred in the spaces where people seek help. Finally, these lessons force us to rethink healing and conceptualise it as a life project connected to the constant striving for change that is a part of life in Johannesburg. Healing is found in multiple ways and places which, at first glance, seem contradictory but speak to the complex lives that the residents of Johannesburg live.

Conclusion: Towards New Routes

This volume has charted diverse lines of mobility and migration and the ways religion has shaped these, and Johannesburg, in multiple ways. It has explored the sojourns of the living and the dead, the movement of people, ideas and objects, across borders and within city blocks. It has explored the ways in which spirits are experienced as incarnated not only in sacred spaces but also in the banality and tumult of everyday life.

Migration and the Sacred in Greater Rosettenville, Johannesburg

This chapter examines various waves of migration and their processes of settlement in Greater Rosettenville in south Johannesburg from a historical and contemporary perspective. We explore how various migrant groups have gained access to sacred spaces and this exploration leads to an analysis of these spaces as pivotal in the process of place making. We discuss here the process of place making, examining the case of a longstanding but dwindling Jewish community residing in the area and contingently sharing the synagogue space with a more recently settled Congolese Pentecostal congregation. We begin from the standpoint that when communities move to a new area, the manners in which they claim these spaces are as diverse as people themselves. By exploring the ways in which the Jewish and the Congolese migrant community occupy the same religious space, we hope to shed light on the relationship between mobility, diversity, and politics of the sacred in the city.

Routes and Rites to the City: Introduction

This book is an exploration of the ways religion and diverse forms of mobility have shaped post-apartheid Johannesburg. By mobility, we refer to not only transnational and intra-national migration but also movements of commodities, ideas and forms, the traffic of objects, sounds and colours within the city. By taking this approach, we aim to re-theorize religion and urban super-diversity (Vertovec 2007, 2015): here super-diversity is viewed not simply in terms of the plurality of religious, ethnic, national and racial groups, but conceived in terms of the multiple movements and enclosures through which religion produces and permeates urban space. The relationship between religion, mobility and urbanization involves both temporal and spatial diversity and the shifting borders of spatial production, belonging and exclusion. This is a constant process of territorialization and de-territorialization of physical, aesthetic and symbolic forms of the city. We argue here that while religion allows for a sense of belonging and capacitates movement, freedom and aspiration in the city, it is also complicit in establishing new forms of enclosure, moral order and spatial and gendered control.

Remembering, Healing, and Telling: Community-Initiated Approaches to Trauma Care in South Africa

This chapter presents three case studies of, what the authors have termed, trauma care in contemporary South Africa. The case studies are not about psychosocial interventions in the traditional (counselling) sense, but they look rather at how migrant communities in South Africa have sought out ways to deal with the deeply dislocating effects of living as migrants in the complex political context of post-apartheid South Africa. They therefore present a range of activities which may not, at first glance, seem to be trauma interventions. Nevertheless, they were taken seriously as interventions precisely because of their frequent use by migrants and the absence of more mainstream psychosocial interventions for migrants in contemporary South Africa. The previous work that the authors had done on psychosocial interventions had made us realise that their use by migrant communities is not common and so we began from a different starting point. We began by asking what it is that migrants are already doing to deal with distress, trauma, and post-violence reconciliation, and how does this in turn connect to the ongoing process of peacebuilding, development, and social transformation both in South Africa and in their countries of origin. It is from this question that the three case studies presented here were selected. These three were chosen (from seven in total, see Palmary et al., Healing and change in the city of gold: Case studies of coping and support in Johannesburg, forthcoming) because they presented the diversity of what might be considered a trauma intervention, but also because they spoke of the need to consider how the context of political transition in so many African countries and associated attempts at peacebuilding, connects with the contemporary socio-economic injustices that characterise South Africa’s political transition in ways that refuse a distinction between the economic, social, and psychological.