There is no shortage of alternatives to Africa’s political, economic and social problems. What requires more critical analysis are the interests and voices that tend to be ignored by the Western media, aid agencies and indeed scholars themselves. This panel takes up the challenge by comparing one influential discourse with less well-known attempts by Africans to imagine alternatives. Human rights discourse, particularly in its association with liberal democracy, is challenged and modified by various alternative discourses, some of them ill-suited to the schemes of Africa’s donors and creditors. The alternatives may modify the liberal emphasis on individual freedoms with claims to social and economic rights, or they may suggest different imaginaries altogether. This panel debates examples that highlight present and historical challenges to rights talk, drawn from the study of, for example, religious movements, popular culture, elite associations, women’s organisations, and local appropriations of development and humanitarian aid. At the same time, attention is given to the ways in which these cases challenge assumptions in critical social and historical analysis. How are, for example, evangelicalism and conservative ‘culture talk’ to be understood in the context of considerable pressures, many of them donor-driven, towards liberalism? Is social science itself obliged to publicise only certain discourses and either ignore or dismiss others? Are the fundamental presuppositions of rights talk so much part of the social science vocabulary that alternative notions of the person, value, property, power, and so on, are virtually unthinkable? How to avoid in our studies the prescriptive tone that now risks making rights talk a new tyranny?
This panel explores how alternatives to Africa’s political and economic problems are imagined in, for example, religious movements, popular culture, literature, and local appropriations of external aid. A central objective is to assess whether these alternatives challenge both human rights and academic paradigms that represent and explain Africa.
This paper analyses the preaching and writing of Archbishop Ezekiel Guti, leader of Zimbabwe Assemblies of God, Africa, ZAOGA. It demonstrates how his innovative and idiosyncratic response to African socialism, cultural nationalism, western human rights discourses and culture of dependency is central to the appeal of one of the continent’s most vital and rapidly expanding religious movements.
In the 1990s Malawi became host to organisations and agencies supporting orphans in accordance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). This paper looks at one orphanage and asks how the care that it provides fits in to the lives of the ‘children’ that it aims to support.
In the South African national elections of 2004, the ruling ANC (African National Congress) increased its majority, particularly in poor and predominantly black rural voting districts. With reference to ethnographic research conducted in Bushbuckridge, a large rural municipality in Limpopo Province, this paper investigates reasons for this seemingly peculiar pattern of voting. It argues that voting for the ruling party constitutes a strategic attempt by desperately impoverished households to secure access to social welfare.
The paper will examine Wole Soyinka's critique of contemporary Africa and his conception of the way beyond current political and social constraints to progress in Africa. It will focus primarily on two plays: Camwood in the Leaves and The Strong Breed. It will argue that fundamentally Soyinka regards the issue of imagining alternatives to the present as a problem of knowledge.