According to the Stiwanist theory, colonialism, oppressive traditional structures, and African men (sometimes women too) can all impede social reform and contribute to gender inequality in Africa. Various studies highlight the importance of formal education in contributing to the emancipation of women in contemporary societies, despite challenges brought by the aforementioned obstacles. The choice to discuss two highly esteemed African female novelists who are from different generations of writers is imperative in tracking the evolution of formal female education in lightening the patriarchal weight in black societies. Through a close reading and thematic analysis of Emecheta’s Double Yoke and Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, this study shows that despite being confronted with sexist resistance in Nigeria between the 1970s and 1980s, black female university lecturers such as Miss Bulewao and Ifeoma serve as agents of socio-economic transformation cultivated by egalitarianism. In addition, the discussion on Obinze’s mother in Adichie’s Americanah highlights that while there are systems which are counter women’s liberation stemming from society’s sexist ideologies, the 21st century is showing an adjustment to the implications of the newly-educated African woman, especially as a professional and mother.
Contribution: Through the adoption of Stiwanism as a theoretical lens, this study contributes to the existing literary scholarship of African feminisms that advocate for a collective activism to combat gender disparity, with women as active participants. This is with particular attention to how sexism, as underpinned by neocolonialism and traditional ideologies, continues to oppress girls and women despite the influence of formalised education, which can also be attributed to women’s economic dependence. Through the analysis of academic female characters in selected classical novels by Emecheta and Adichie as primary sources of data, the current article reveals the novelists’ prophetic fictional narratives regarding the challenges and successes faced by higher education in addressing female marginalisation. This study is important for the present milieu because it emphasises the challenge of the continued exponential increase in gender bias against black female lecturers and scholars in and outside the academy, highlighting that women’s access to and improved enrolment numbers in higher education institutions does not necessarily abolish gender inequality in education.
In Buriat, the consonant realized contextually as dorsal or uvular alternates with zero at stem- suffix boundaries. This alternation has been analyzed as phonological epenthesis and has been known as a challenge to the existing theories of phonological markedness. The analysis of this alternation has also been debated. This paper presents new fieldwork and experimental evidence addressing the ways in which the reported epenthesis pattern is generalized to new environments. The results do not fully support the phonological insertion account of the alternation. An alternative analysis of Buriat dorsal-zero alternation in terms of floating features is proposed
Philology. Linguistics, African languages and literature
James Lappeman, Caitlin C. Ferreira, Jeandri Robertson
et al.
Purpose The purpose of the paper is to investigate the nature of variations among established and emerging middle class consumers in South Africa in response to the institution context factors associated with emerging markets that are established in international business studies. Design/methodology/approach An exploratory research approach using semi-structured expert interviews was used to collect data. Findings Key findings indicate distinct approaches in dealing with factors such as different fallback positions, asset ownership, education, language, family responsibility, career aspirations and risk protection in the middle class process of attaining and sustaining middle class status. Research limitations/implications The focus on one country has the potential to minimize the generalizability of findings from the study, however, South Africa has a significantly high proportion of sub-Saharan middle class consumers. This provides a basis for further a basis for further research into other sub-Saharan African countries. Practical implications Findings from the study provide practical insights on risk profiling of middle-class consumers for marketing practitioners. Social implications The study provides insights into the distinct variations between emerging and established middle class consumers in areas such as language and education. These insights have potential implications on the implementation of government policies such as the Empowerment Policy and consumer protection. Originality/value The paper expands the research agenda in the area of middle class consumer behavior in emerging markets. By concentrating on South Africa, the research expands existing knowledge beyond emerging giants like China and India, which are often a focus in literature.
The narrativization of the trafficked body in the novels of Abidemi Sanusi and Chika Unigwe allows for a contemplation of Europe in African migrant imaginaries as both promise and failure. Sanusi’s Eyo is a narrative of a ten-year-old girl who is trafficked to the United Kingdom as a human sex slave. The novel draws attention to the tensions that define her being/unbeing in Europe and beyond, even after a brave escape from her traffickers. This precarious existence is enhanced in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street, whose main characters exist in Europe selling their bodies while existing in states of continuous vulnerability. In reading these two novels side by side, this article explores the discursive meanings of trafficked bodies and how traumatic existence allows for an engagement with Europe as illusory in the imaginaries of African women who cross borders into Europe. The article argues that while the female characters are vulnerable, they retain an ambiguous agency contained within their ability to survive and remain resilient in the face of atrocities for borders crossers. The narrative form of the novel allows for an exploration of what this agency looks like in the face of extreme vulnerability.
Djado Sékou, a professional storyteller, is one of the most celebrated griots in Niger. He has a predilection for everything that deals with the imaginary and dreams. His audience is fond of love stories, which he considers a superior form of literature. Love in the narratives of Djado Sékou, it is a founding and fundamental theme. The theme of love permeates Niger’s courtly epic as the narratives “Labdedjo” by Tinguizi and “Garba Mama” by Djéliba Badjo well exemplify. Djado Sékou is one of the storytellers who have sung the most of love, in particular, the love of men for one woman, Awli Djawando. Along with Lobbo Soga, Takadé Waldé, Fatumata Bidani and Sipti Diembel, Awli Djawando has entered the pantheon of Niger’s celebrated muses. However, if Djado Sékou sings of love, the joy and revival of individuals who experience “dizziness”, it is noteworthy that his songs also often originate from suffering and the misfortunes of love. This essay explores constituting themes Djado Sékou’s narrative repertoire: love stories as fairy tales, ecstasy and loss, metamorphosis of places and names and journeys.
Al-Kenani, Tawffeek Abdou Saeed Mohammed, Felix Banda
This study deals with the problems involving translating Arabic cartoons into English and the strategies that can be adopted by a translator to make them more accessible and more target-audience friendly. It uses an approach based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL; Halliday 1985/1994; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). The concept of equivalence is revisited within the framework of SFL to include register analysis and the three strands of meaning or metafunctions. The study is based on a number of Yemeni cartoons that have been translated in the Yemen Times, a prominent English-language Yemeni newspaper. The study concludes that if a cartoon is to be translated in such a way that the target cartoon sounds as natural and entertaining to the target audience as the original, the translator should take into account the context of culture, the context of situation (i.e., register analysis) and the metafunction(s) involved in the source cartoon and tries to render them as far as possible in the target language. In addition, a cartoon is a multi-semiotic genre in which both text and image go hand in hand. The image-text semantic relation in this multi-model discourse can facilitate the comprehension of the context and the interpretation of the schemata of the cartoons more clearly. The translation of a cartoon cannot be achieved unless the two codes are considered.
Philology. Linguistics, African languages and literature
Aristotle’s Poetics has remained one of the most resourceful reference materials to literary critics and theorists over the centuries from classical antiquity to contemporary times. However, in spite of its lofty status and acclaim the classical source material has also faced serious criticisms especially concerning certain unrealistic and vague postulations made in it about tragedy. The most challenged postulations are those relating to the status of the tragic hero, his flaw, the emotions of pity and fear, and catharsis. Some of these “problematic” areas constitute the crux of Elechi Amadi’s concern in “Gods and Tragic Heroes,” a polemical essay on which this study hinges. Re-examining some existing conversations on the subject and Amadi’s charges against Aristotle, the essay affirms that tragedy is a flexible literary form and that Amadi, amidst his evaluation of Aristotle’s enduring aesthetics, proposes a novel model in which hamartia and the emotional impacts of the hero’s fall on the audience are a function of an overarching supernatural activity in the tragic plot. Consequently, the essay appraises Isiburu as Amadi’s practical example of the proposed model.
‘Who let out the secret?’ – Sexual identity in Johann Nell’s farm novel Sondag op ’n voëlplaas [Sunday on a bird farm] (2013). The statement of the narrator in Johann Nell’s farm novel Sondag op ’n voëlplaas (2013) about his self-quest amongst ‘wild, fierce and erect ostrich necks’ (pp. 244–245), alludes to his doubts about his sexual identity. The apparent latent homosexual is strengthened by the epigraph, a direct translation of an excerpt from Calaf’s aria ‘Nessun Dorma’ from Puccini’s opera Turandot. In the traditional Afrikaans farm novel, the narrator is usually a third-person (auctorial) narrator. The use of a first-person narrator in Nell’s novel emphasises his deviation from the (stereo)typical traits and attributes of the traditional farm novel. The subjectivity inherent to the firstperson narration (the I-as-protagonist) implies that what is represented in this novel is the main character’s version of reality and his response to, especially, the farm as bastion of masculinity and traditional socio-political beliefs. Based on the above, this article takes as its point of departure the hypothetical assumption that the epigraph has an important part to play in the interpretation of the secret in that the implied or abstract author, by means of a parodying perspective, highlights a specific vision regarding the thematic significance. The epigraph not only reinforces the idea of a lack of identity and the idea that the ‘true’ identity could perhaps be a homosexual disposition, but also that it is simultaneously an etiological journey to the original opera libretto. In its turn, the libretto can be traced back to the Greek myth of Oedipus and the sphinx. By both discussing the intertexts and analysing the narrator’s language usage, his disposition and his tale of the (traumatised) self, his sexual identity is scrutinised.
The South African Nobel Prize winner, J. M. Coetzee has a particular connection to the Netherlands. For instance, he had reviewed
Dutch literature for the New York Times (the reviews were later included in a book called Stranger Shores: essays 1986–1999)
and he translated and compiled an anthology of Dutch poetry (Landscape with Rowers, 2004) for the English readership.
Moreover, his books are frequently published in their Dutch translation prior to their official English releases. In 1976, Coetzee
translated a novel by Marcelus Emants Een nagelaten bekentenis (1894), published in English as A Posthumous Confession.
Parallel to this translation work, Coetzee also worked on his second novel In the Heart of the Country (1977). This paper is devoted
to a detective-like tracing of reflections that Coetzee’s close reading of the Dutch novelist might have left in his own book. Why did
Coetzee in the first place decide to translate Emants’ novel? What was its appeal that attracted him so much? What was Coetzee’s
reading of Emants back in the 1970s? Key words: J. M. Coetzee, Marcelus Emants, Dutch literature, comparative literature.
From 1969 until 1972 the South-African writer and graphic artist Breyten Breytenbach published 29 poems, prose texts and three drawings in the Dutch experimental periodical Raster (first edition: 1967). H. C. ten Berge, writer, poet and Raster's main editor, attributed Breytenbach an unusually prominent position in his magazine. In the Dutch language area of the late sixties and early seventies, Breytenbach was mostly known for his political engagement within the anti-apartheid movement. Ten Berge, however, also praised his work for its formal and experimental aesthetic qualities. According to Ten Berge experiment and engagement are related to one another in a very unique way. By examining the position of Breytenbach in Raster, the paper presents a documentation of the exceptional literary relationship between Breytenbach and Ten Berge, as well as their shared interest in certain motifs in poetry, the use of a specific metaphoric language (e.g. perception of nature and body) and a common belief in the power of poetic language.
In the land of the Boers: The reception of the Anglo-Boer War in Polish youth literature Polish writers and journalists frequently used the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) as a symbol of resistance against foreign rule in their country. Since 1795 till the end of World War I, Poland had been absent from the map of Europe, divided between the European powers of Prussia (later Germany), Russia and Austria. In this context, high hopes for independence were encouraged, among others, by the romantic patriotism of national uprisings. Foreign inspirations, such as the Anglo-Boer War, also embodied prospective freedom. Symbolic meanings of the Anglo-Boer War are most clearly visible in the youth literature of the time. At that period, youth literature was not only conceived as entertainment, but also as a messenger of contents forbidden from schools as a result of russification and germanisation policy. In this context, the Boer fight provided suitable ground for allusions to the contemporary political situation of Poland. Two factors facilitated the delivery of the idea of independence – the censorship was less strict with respect to the youth literature and, secondly, there existed strong Boer support on the side of the whole Europe. This paper aims at showing the ways in which the contents related to the state of subjugation, such as political repressions, forced migration, critique of the rulers, unfortunate national uprisings were all included in the books whose main plot took place in South Africa. Paradoxically, the symbolism of subjugation was accompanied by Polish colonial desires. The colonized Poles would eagerly recall the times of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largest European powers in between 1386–1772. In this context, the myth of the Polish border – the area of the eastern frontier colonized by the Poles, covering roughly present day Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus was born. In this area, the Polish nobleman was viewed as an agent of acculturation, supposed to live in harmony with his neighbours and fight the barbarian Tatar hordes. The reality of the Commonwealth was, however, much less idyllic, much more brutal and colonial in its nature. Also this component of “Polish colonialism” was transported into the South African literary space.
Antjie Krog’s Body Bereft (2006) details both the bodily changes brought about by older age and the ways in which these changes fracture a person’s previously-stable sense of self. This article reads Krog’s depiction of the ageing body in a small selection of poems from this collection in relation to the unavoidable reality of bodily decay and what is referred to in gerontological theory as ‘successful ageing’. This tension dominates large parts of the gerontological field, and can be seen in Krog’s ambivalent representation of older age in Body Bereft. Through close readings of a number of poems, I will investigate the ways in which Krog problematises the relationship between the lived experience of older age with its concomitant sense of deterioration, and the societal impetus to age well and accept ageing with magnanimity. I will demonstrate that this collection foregrounds the poet’s refusal to accept pre-existing discourses that delimit ageing as something either to bemoan or celebrate. I will conclude that this refusal finds particular expression in her poems “dommelfei / crone in the woods” and “how do you say this”.
Published in 2008, the novel Retour de manivelle (“Backlash”) by Julien Kilanga Musinde revives the unfinished debate related to the search of identity in African writing. The universe depicted represents the modern society and Musinde’s main character is changing as fast as he relocates to a different society. The author depicts this flexibility as a strength that commands the adaptability of the character without suppressing the initial culture of the protagonist. Musinde chooses to freely express his fantasy and, at the same time, integrate his subjective world vision and multidimensional scholarship in the interpretation of the identity. The question of culture being central to the novel, the paper is aimed at demonstrating, however, that the culture that is depicted as both exclusive and dynamic in Musinde’s work should be understood mainly in cyclic perception in which both the starting and the arrival points are joining in a unique individual subjectivity, such a subjectivity having the potential of engendering a new discourse by attempting to juxtapose conflicting ways of life. The paper also demonstrates how Musinde distances himself from the materialistic world vision commonly expressed by existentialists and Epicurean philosophers. This attitude allows the author to reflect on the interconnectivity between the immediate empirical reality and the world beyond from the perspective of a transnational African intellectual in a globalizing world.
In Zimbabwe, as in most traditionally conservative, patriarchal and Christian dominated countries, female sex work is abhorred on moral grounds as an unbecoming means of livelihood which takes away the practising woman’s social respectability. In such societies, then, the moral threat and stigma associated with female sex work affect women’s decisions on whether or not to take up sex work as a permanent means of livelihood. One can, however, ask how sustainable and stable these patriarchally constructed notions of morality and female identity are, especially in the face of crises? This article uses Virginia Phiri’s novel Highway queen, which is set in one of Zimbabwe’s economically tumultuous eras, to demonstrate how cultural texts grapple with the discourse of female sex work in contemporary Zimbabwe. The gist of my argument is that dominant prostitute identity constructs shaped by Zimbabwe’s patriarchal social and economic system are unstable. I find that the novel Highway queen manipulates such instability not only to re-inscribe sex work as a product of patriarchal impairment of female agency but, perhaps more importantly, to reflect on how women who are forced by circumstances to become sex workers can rise above their passive victimhood to achieve personal goals despite the social odds charted by patriarchy. Zooming in on the representation of the daily experiences of the female sex worker and protagonist, Sophie, the article explores the various ways in which the novel deconstructs stereotypical perceptions of female sex work and sex workers. The analysis ends with the argument that, whilst Sophie’s situation is fundamentally tragic, it affectively appeals to our sense of morality in a way which destabilises dominant (patriarchal) constructs of sex work.
The quadrivalent HPV vaccine is highly effective in primary prevention of anogenital warts (AGWs). However, there is lack of systematic review in the literature of the epidemiology of AGWs in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA). To review the prevalence, incidence and risk factors for AGWs in SSA prior to the introduction of HPV vaccination programs. PubMed/MEDLINE, Africa Index Medicus and HINARI websites were searched for peer reviewed English language published medical literature on AGWs from January 1, 1984 to June 30, 2012. Relevant additional references cited in published papers were also evaluated for inclusion. For inclusion, the article had to meet the following criteria (1) original studies with estimated prevalence and/or incidence rates among men and/or women (2) detailed description of the study population (3) clinical or self-reported diagnosis of AGWs (4) HPV genotyping of histologically confirmed AGWs. The final analysis included 40 studies. Data across different studies were synthesized using descriptive statistics for various subgroups of females and males by geographical area. A meta - analysis of relative risk was conducted for studies that had data reported by HIV status. The prevalence rates of clinical AGWs among sex workers and women with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) or at high risk of sexually transmitted infection (STIs) range from 3.3% - 10.7% in East, 2.4% - 14.0% in Central and South, and 3.5% - 10.5% in West African regions. Among pregnant women, the prevalence rates range from 0.4% - 3.0% in East, 0.2% - 7.3% in Central and South and 2.9% in West African regions. Among men, the prevalence rates range from 3.5% - 4.5% in East, 4.8% - 6.0% in Central and South and 4.1% to 7.0% in West African regions. In all regions, the prevalence rates were significantly higher among HIV+ than HIV- women with an overall summary relative risk of 1.62 (95% CI: 143–1.82). The incidence rates range from 1.1 – 2.7 per 100 person-years among women and 1.4 per 100 person years among men. Incidence rate was higher among HIV+ (3.0 per 100 person years) and uncircumcised men (1.7 per 100 person-years) than circumcised men (1.3 per 100 person-years). HIV positivity was a risk factor for AGWs among both men and women. Other risk factors in women include presence of abnormal cervical cytology, co-infection with HPV 52, concurrent bacteria vaginoses and genital ulceration. Among men, other risk factors include cigarette smoking and lack of circumcision. AGWs are common among selected populations particularly HIV infected men and women. However, there is need for population-based studies that will guide policies on effective prevention, treatment and control of AGWs.