Postcolonial African Anthropologies

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Postcolonial African Anthropology showcases some postcolonial ethnographies and aims to figure out how and why anthropology has engaged with conversations on decolonisation and postcolonialism. The postcolonial ethnographies in this book show that Africans may not necessarily interpret and communicate their experiences in the ways that anthropologists trained in Western institutions and disciplines do, but they are multi-vocal and are ever present to speak with authority on their experience. This book, then, deepens and diversifies conversations on Africa and, in particular, a ‘postcolonial’ Africa to understand the position of anthropologists, the position of Africans and the positioning of the discipline of anthropology in Africa.

Content
About the Contributors
Acknowledgements
List of Figures

1. Introduction: Continuities and Contradictions in Postcolonial African Anthropologies

ROSABELLE BOSWELL

2. Men, women, temporality and critical ethnography in Africa – the imperative for a trans-disciplinary conversation

ELAINE SALO

3. Romance, Reflection and Reflexivity in South Africa – Researching the Congolese ‘other’ in Muizenberg, South Africa

JOY OWEN

4. Research, Knowledge and Power: a Case Study of Interaction between an Anthropologist and a ‘Çommunity’ Over Three Decades in Chatha, South Africa

CHRIS DE WET

5. Mapping Journeys through landscape: Phenomenological Explorations of Environment Amongst Rural AIDS Orphans in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa

PATRICIA C. HENDERSON

6. Re-imagining Identity in Indian Ocean Africa

ROSABELLE BOSWELL

7. Border Crossing: Exploring the impact of African scholarship on Indian witchcraft studies

HELEN MACDONALD

8. Say you are one of them? Elites and Ethnographic Encounters in Africa and Nigeria

WALE ADEBANWI

9. African Trysts: Rethinking the Saharan Divide

NEJM BENESSAIAH and IRENE CALIS

10. Communicating Anthropology, Anthropology as Communication

FRANCIS B. NYAMNJOH

Editors

Rosabelle Boswell is an anthropologist and Dean of Arts at the Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. She holds a PhD from Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and is author of Le Malaise Creole: Ethnic Identity in Mauritius (Oxford: Berghahn Books), Representing Heritage in Zanzibar and Madagascar (Addis Ababa: Eclipse), as well as several articles on identity, social justice and heritage management in the south West Indian Ocean. She has done fieldwork in Mauritius, Madagascar, Seychelles, Zanzibar and South Africa.

Francis Nyamnjoh is a Chair of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Nyamnjoh joined the University of Cape Town in August 2009 as Professor of Social Anthropology from the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Dakar, Senegal, where he served as Head of Publications from July 2003 to July 2009. He is a B2 rated Professor and Researcher by the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) since 2010, a Fellow of the Cameroon Academy of Science since August 2011, and a fellow of the African Academy of Science since December 2014.He is author of several novels, as well as the following books: Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa (CODESRIA/ZED Books, 2006)

Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa (Langaa/African Studies Centre Leiden, 2009), The Postcolonial Turn: Re-Imagining Anthropology and Africa (Langaa /African Studies Centre, Leiden, 2011)