Born in England in 1936 and educated at Oxford, Currey spent his formative years in publishing in South Africa, working for Oxford University Press in Cape Town in the early 1960s. These were the years of the Sharpeville massacre and the Rivonia trial, and Currey got to know writers Dennis Brutus, Bessie Head and Alex La Guma through contacts on the radical monthly The New African.
As the situation in South Africa deteriorated, and with states elsewhere in Africa gaining independence from European colonial control, Currey became more and more interested in the new generations of African writers then appearing across the continent, an interest that stood him in good stead when he went to work on the African Writers Series in 1967 at Heinemann in London.
Founded in 1962, the aim of the series was to promote the work of young African writers whose work was crying out for recognition both in Africa and abroad as the countries from which they came achieved independence. There was a need to make this work more widely known, even as Africa itself was undergoing something of a cultural renaissance as it emerged from European colonialism in the heady years of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature by James Currey
EAN: 9781868144723 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Security governance in Africa is a thorny issue at best – and all the thornier when it comes to a world super power and its policies toward the continent. Edwin Cawthra takes an in-depth look at the issues surrounding security in Africa in African Security Governance. In the article below, Daniel Volman, the director of the African Security Research Project in Washington DC, analyzes President Barak Obama’s position on security towards Africa – according to Volman, it’s ultimately all about oil.
When Barack Obama took office as president of the United States in January 2009, it was widely expected that he would dramatically change, or even reverse, the militarised and unilateral national security policy toward Africa (as well as toward other parts of the world) that had been pursued by the Bush administration. For many, expectations about the Obama administration’s approach to Africa were raised even higher by the speech that Obama delivered in Ghana in July 2009 and by the tour of Africa that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made in August 2009. But, after one year in office, it is clear that the Obama administration is essentially following the same policy that has guided US military involvement in Africa for more than a decade.
Thus, in its budget request for the State Department for the 2010 financial year the Obama administration proposed significant increases in US arms sales and military training programmes for African countries, as well as for regional programmes on the continent. These included the Foreign Military Financing Program (to pay for arms sales to African countries), the International Military Education and Training Program (to train African military officers in the United States), the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership and the East African Regional Strategic Initiative (to provide training and equipment to the military forces of countries in North Africa, West Africa and East Africa), the International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement Program (to provide equipment, infrastructure and training to police and other law enforcement units in Africa), military training programmes to help implement peace agreements (in Sudan, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo), the African Contingency Operations and Training Assistance Program (to provide training and equipment to a number of African military forces to enhance their ability to conduct peacekeeping operations and other military activities), and to several anti-terrorism programmes including the Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program, the Terrorist Interdiction Program, the Counterterrorism Financing Program and the Counterterrorism Engagement Program (to provide training and equipment to African countries and build ties with key political leaders on the continent).
Co-editor of Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region, Dr Fatima Sadiqi will be directing an International Conference on Marginalized Women in March this year. The conference will take place in Morocco and will be dealing with the lives of “single mothers, divorced women, widows, household breadwinners, in brief women without men in a globalized world seriously threatened by the impact of the financial crisis”.
To celebrate March 8, Isis Centre for Women and Development (based in Fes, Morocco and directed by Dr Fatima Sadiqi) is organizing an international conference (March 8-10, 2010) on marginalized women: single mothers, divorced women, widows, household breadwinners, in brief women without men in a globalized world seriously threatened by the impact of the financial crisis.
Discussing these categories of women is still taboo in the overwhelming majority of the Arab-Islamic countries, sub-Saharan Africa and the countries of the global south. In addition to a couple of plenary sessions, the conference will feature workshops with grassroot activists, visits to three listening centers, life stories, and awards for some local marginalized women who have made it.
Aims of the Workshop
The main objectives of the workshop are:
1. Historicize the theme of “women and social taboos”. Focus will be put on the history of development.
2.Create linkages between scholars, research institutes, and universities.
3. Include MA and PhD students of human sciences especially gender studies and history in the workshop.”
Pumla Dineo Gqola, author of the soon-to-be-released What is Slavery to Me? reminds us that, as president, Jacob Zuma should be demonstrating a greater respect for woman:
I will admit right of the bat that I wish that when the president of the republic makes front page news almost weekly, it would be for more politically refreshing reasons. I have wished this about all presidents of a democratic South Africa, and while interesting news can also be infuriating news, I’d rather read about something Zuma did that involves more than his love and sex life. I am not so delusional that I expect a feminist president when none was really in the running (although I did vote nationally for the one person I do interpret as Pan-Africanist, feminist, humane, unbought, Patricia de Lille).
Newspapers have had a field day with rumours about an emminent split between the ANC and the SACP. Business Day took a closer look at the history between the two parties and, what those who are in the know think about the chances for the alliance.
David Everatt not only acknowledges the bond these two organizations have had for many years but also refers to the inherent power struggle within the union in The Origins of Non-Racialism.
Communists have historically been active members in the African National Congress (ANC) for most of its 98-year history, a reality that cannot escape detractors in and outside the tripartite alliance.
On Wednesday, South African Communist Party (SACP) general secretary Blade Nzimande — himself a national executive committee (NEC) member of the ruling party — made this point during a commemorative tribute to the late SACP leader Joe Slovo.
“Comrade Slovo is also the personification of the role played by many other communists in our liberation movement. He was a member and leader of both the SACP and the ANC. He personifies the fact that there is no contradiction in being a communist and a member of the ANC, and that … good communists must be in the ANC,” Nzimande said.
Much has been made about South Africa’s transition from histories of colonialism, slavery and apartheid. “Memory” features prominently in the country’s reckoning with its pasts. While there has been an outpouring of academic essays, anthologies and other full-length texts which study this transition, most have focused on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Pumla Dineo Gqola’s What is slavery to me? links with that research in its concern with South Africa’s past and the meaning-making processes attendant to it, but reads specifically memory activity which pertains to colonial slavery as practiced predominantly in the Western Cape for three centuries by the British and Dutch.
What is slavery to me? is the first full-length study of slave memory in the South African context, and examines the relevance and effects of slave memory for contemporary negotiations of South African gendered and racialised identities. It draws from feminist, postcolonial and memory studies and is therefore interdisciplinary in approach. It reads memory as one way of processing this past, and interprets a variety of cultural, literary and filmic texts to ascertain the particular experiences in relation to slave pasts being fashioned, processed and disseminated.
Much of the material surveyed across disciplines attributes to memory, or “popular history making”, a dialogue between past and present whilst ascribing sense to both the eras and their relationship. In this sense then, memory is active, entailing a personal relationship with the past which acts as mediator of reality on a day to day basis. The projects studies various negotiations of raced and gendered identities in creative and other public spaces in contemporary South Africa, by being particularly attentive to the encoding of consciousness about the country’s slave past.
This book extends memory studies in South Africa, provokes new lines of inquiry, and develops new frameworks through which to think about slavery and memory in South Africa.
About the author
Pumla Dineo Gqola is Associate Professor of Literary, Media and Gender Studies at the School of Literature and Language Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Book details
What is Slavery to Me?: Postcolonial memory and the postapartheid imagination by Pumla Dineo Gqola
EAN: 9781868145072 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Environmentalist Leonie Joubert is as well known for her prize winning journalistic endeavours as for her environmental work in books such as Invaded, Boiling Point and Scorched. As such she was an obvious candidate to attend the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December of 2009. Published on the OneWorldGroup website, Joubert posted daily from the summit on its successes, failures and what really went on behind the scenes:
By the end of the day, yesterday, it was clear that we wouldn’t get a legal agreement. We were too close to the midnight deadline set by the United Nations, and countries were still stuck on the main issues of emissions cuts and climate compensation.
A draft of a new document, the “Copenhagen Accord” had been circulating all day—so we knew for sure that we’d see a political agreement come out of the climate summit.
What we didn’t expect was that Barack Obama would call a press conference close to midnight (with only White House press allowed into the room) in which he announced to the world that this agreement had been reached!
The list of correspondents in Bury Me at the Marketplace, Es’kia Mphahlele’s selected letters – now released in a new edition by Wits Press – is astonishingly wide in scope, ranging from the likes of Jack Cope and Njabulo Ndebele to Philip Tobias and Langston Hughes. The names alone reveal just how large an impact Mphahlele had in the wider worlds of literature and politics.
We’ve stumbled upon another means of appraising Mphahlele’s life through his letters: the Google Books keyword index of the original edition of Bury Me at the Marketplace – a list that makes for a fascinating and oddly familiar browse through South African history; one that, for all its seeming randomness, gels into a coherent picture:
Common terms and phrases in Bury Me at the Marketplace
The last interview that Es’kia Mphahlele gave, meanwhile, was to the writer Madala Thepa, who published it in the winter 2008 issue of Wordsetc:
He is sitting on a flimsy chair attached to a table without much heft to it. His arms are resting on the table. He is wearing shorts and the operation scars on both knees are visible. On the table is a glass with red liquid inside it, filled to the brim and placed between his hands. On the wall is a portrait of the author wearing a dashiki, the cabinet in the living room is set with sculptures and some other plastic arts. It’s not really a storehouse of art, books and papers. The house looks like a retired school principal’s house – neat, clean, bare. He is watching television with his grandchild. The only action he can muster is a nod, to which Stephina, his helper, responds by jumping to her feet to lower the volume.
“You finally found the place,” he says in a low, grave voice. “So tomorrow let’s meet at 10 in the morning then.”
At 9.30am I am lurking outside Es’kia’s house with a colleague photographer. Stephina answers the door. Es’kia is called. He plods in a circle when he walks, like he has left something behind. The interview is conducted in Sepedi, his language. I’m thinking I should not fall into bear pits of rigid translation methodologies. I’m hoping to be faithful to the quality of his words.
Bury Me at the Marketplace: Es’kia Mphahlele and Company, Letters 1943–2006 edited by N Chabani Manganyi, David Attwell Book homepage
EAN: 9781868144891 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Africa faces a seemingly ever-increasing range of security challenges. The traditional threats of civil and border conflicts, crises of governance and military coups may have receded but they remain active. Meanwhile, other issues have risen to prominence, such as globalisation, security sector reform, terrorism, private security actors, peacekeeping and peace-building and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
African Security Governance: Emerging Issues is a result of research carried out over a number of years by the Southern African Defence and Security Management Network (SADSEM) on many of these new and emerging security issues, in co-operation with the Danish Institute for International Studies and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
The broad focus is on security governance – the role of state and a wide range of social actors in the areas of both human and state security. It deals with a range of sectors, themes and national case studies and makes an important contribution to debates on security sector reform. The topics covered include policing transformation, intelligence governance, regulation of private security actors, challenges of nuclear proliferation, regional security, peace diplomacy and peace missions, the relationship between development and security and new challenges in governance of the military.
Written by scholars as well as practitioners, and African as well as international researchers, it brings a variety of insights to new as well as traditional security concerns.
When Chabani Manganyi published the first edition of selected letters twenty-five years ago as a companion volume to Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es’kia Mphahlele, the idea of Mphahlele’s death was remote and poetic. The title, Bury Me at the Marketplace, suggested that immortality of a kind awaited Mphahlele, in the very coming and going of those who remembered him and whose lives he touched. It suggested, too, the energy and magnanimity of Mphahlele the man, whose personality and intellect as a writer and educator would carve an indelible place for him in South Africa’s public sphere.
That death has now come and we mourn it. Manganyi’s words have acquired a new significance: in the symbolic marketplace, he noted, “the drama of life continues relentlessly and the silence of death is unmasked for all time”.
The silence of death is certainly unmasked in this re-published volume, in its record of Mphahlele’s rich and varied life: his private words, his passions and obsessions, his arguments, his loves, hopes, achievements, and yes, even some of his failures. Here the reader will find many facets of the private man translated back into the marketplace of public memory.
Despite the personal nature of the letters, the further horizons of this volume are the contours of South Africa’s literary and cultural history, the international affiliations out of which it has been formed, particularly in the diaspora that connects South Africa to the rest of the African continent and to the black presence in Europe and the United States.
This selection of Mphahlele’s own letters has been greatly expanded; it has also been augmented by the addition of letters from Mphahlele’s correspondents, among them such luminaries as Langston Hughes and Nadine Gordimer. It seeks to illustrate the networks that shaped Mphahlele’s personal and intellectual life, the circuits of intimacy, intellectual inquiry, of friendship, scholarship and solidarity that he created and nurtured over the years. The letters cover the period from November 1943 to April 1987, forty-four of Mphahlele’s mature years and most of his active professional life. The correspondence is supplemented by introductory essays from the two editors, by two interviews conducted with Mphahlele by Manganyi and by Attwell’s insightful explanatory notes.
About the editors
Chabani Manganyi is a clinical psychologist, biographer and non-fiction writer.
David Attwell is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of York, United Kingdom.
List of Correspondents
Lionel Abrahams, Chinua Achebe, Houston A Baker Jr, Ursula A Barnett, Gunnar Boklund, Edward Kamau Braithwaite, Andre Brink, Sonia Bronstein, Guy Butler, Gwendolen Carter, Gerald Chapman, Syl Cheney-Coker, Jack Cope, Tim Couzens, Adrian Donker, C J (Jonty) Driver, Ian Glenn, Nadine Gordimer, Andrew Gurr, Norman Hodge, Langston Hughes, Stuart James, Martin Jarrett-Kerr CR, Edward A Lindell, Chabani Manganyi, Teresa Mphahlele, Khabi Mngoma, Njabulo Ndebele, Isidore Okpewho, James Olney, William Plomer, Robert D Richardson, Makhudu Rammopo, Richard Rive, Sonia Sanchez, Sipho Sepamla, Jenny Stein, Sylvester Stein, Peter Thuynsma, Norah Taylor, Phillip Tobias, Charles van Onselen and Nick Visser.
Book details
Bury Me at the Marketplace: Es’kia Mphahlele and Company. Letters 1943–2006 edited by N Chabani Manganyi, David Attwell Book homepage
EAN: 9781868144891 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
David Tresilian profiles James Currey and his book, Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature, for Al-Ahram weekly:
