Authors:George Bob-Milliar, Jeffrey Paller Abstract: Repetitive elections are important benchmarks for assessing the maturity of Africa’s electoral democracies. Yet the processes through which elections entrench a democratic culture remain understudied. We introduce an important mechanism called a democratic rupture: an infraction in the democratisation process during competitive elections that has the potential to cause a constitutional crisis. It provides a new avenue of citizen participation outside of voting, and political space for opposition party realignment and to strengthen its support. Drawing from the case of Ghana, we show how the 2012 presidential election petition challenge served as a democratic rupture by contributing to the opposition’s victory in 2016, enabling its political development. First, it exposed flaws in the electoral system and led to demands for electoral reforms. Second, it led to citizens being better educated on the electoral process. Third, it taught political parties that vigilance at the polling stations can help win elections. The article provides a critical analysis of the factors that shape democratic development, especially in cases where opposition parties defeat incumbent politicians. PubDate: 2018-06-25 Issue No:Vol. 53 (2018)
Authors:Michael Stasik Abstract: This article combines the concept of a “popular economy” with that of a “niche economy” to analyse the workings of a central bus station in Accra, Ghana, and, by extension, of Ghana’s public transport sector at large. In doing so it departs from generic models of the “informal sector” commonly used for describing road and roadside entrepreneurship in African contexts. At the same time, it challenges prevalent views of popular economies bent on emphasising mechanisms of reciprocity and solidarity over opportunity and profiteering. The focus on the station, it suggests, provides for a detailed reflection on the dialectics of collaboration and competition characteristic of Ghana’s local transport economics, and it offers significant continuities with practices, places, and politics of economic “informality” in Africa. PubDate: 2018-06-25 Issue No:Vol. 53 (2018)
Authors:Melchisedek Chétima Abstract: This article explores the different ways in which new houses built by migrants from the Mandara Mountains to bigger cities in Cameroon function as an important site for studying their relations within the cities and within their communities of origin. I argue that these new houses constitute both a powerful resource for addressing migrants’ stories about their migratory experiences and a constituent element of these experiences. In many circumstances, the migrants interviewed were unable to speak separately of their migratory experiences and their homes. Thus, the impact of their mobility to cities goes far beyond the mere ownership of the houses; they also manage to change their perceptions of themselves, to restructure their models of social interaction with other migrants, and to change the balance of their relations with the village. The article ends by proposing to connect the two sides of the village/city duality to find out how the local is a product of the global and how the local has reappropriated the global, giving it a meaning. PubDate: 2018-06-25 Issue No:Vol. 53 (2018)
Authors:B Camminga Abstract: South Africa is the only country on the African continent that constitutionally protects transgender asylum seekers. In light of this, it has seen a marked rise in the emergence of this category of person within the asylum system. Drawing on research carried out between 2012 and 2015, I argue that transgender-identified refugees or “gender refugees” from Africa, living in South Africa, rather than accessing refuge continue to experience significant hindrances to their survival comparable with the persecution experienced in their countries of origin. I argue this is in part due to the nature of their asylum claim in relation to gender as a wider system of “common-sense” dichotomous administration, something which remains relatively constant across countries of origin and refugee-receiving countries. Rather than being protected gender refugees, because they are read as violating the rules of normative gender, they find themselves paradoxically with rights, but unable to access them. PubDate: 2018-06-25 Issue No:Vol. 53 (2018)
Authors:Victor Ogbonnaya Okorie Abstract: Using the case of groundwater pollution in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, this paper examines the shifting contours of primitive accumulation in the region. Based on two years of ethnographic research, the paper unravels the losses experienced by individuals and their dependents whose privately owned sources of water were polluted. It argues that the groundwater pollution is a deadly but less discussed form of primitive accumulation that has strong implications for peace and development in the affected communities. The paper concludes that accumulation by dispossession driven by oil exploration in the Niger Delta operates in complex ways and generates multifaceted crises; as such, the prospects for resolving the conflicts lie in addressing various strands of the dispossession, including groundwater pollution in the region. PubDate: 2018-06-25 Issue No:Vol. 53 (2018)
Authors:Henning Melber Abstract: Review of the monograph: Lena Kroeker, David O’Keane, and Tabea Scharrer (eds) (2018), Middle Classes in Africa: Changing Lives and Conceptual Challenges , Cham: Palgrave Macmillan published by Springer Nature, ISBN 978-3-319-62147-0, xiii+376 pp PubDate: 2018-06-25 Issue No:Vol. 53 (2018)
Authors:Henning Melber Abstract: Review of the monograph Christi van der Westhuizen (2017), Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa , Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, ISBN 978-1-86914376-3, 240 pp. PubDate: 2018-06-25 Issue No:Vol. 53 (2018)
Authors:Helmut Asche Abstract: Review of the monograph Simone Claar (2018), International Trade Policy and Class Dynamics in South Africa: The Economic Partnership Agreement, London: Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-3-319-65713-4 (hardback), 978-3-319-65714-1 (e-book), xv+244 pp. PubDate: 2018-06-25 Issue No:Vol. 53 (2018)
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