Child Sponsorship as Development Education in the Northern Classroom

This chapter explores the ethical dilemmas, and potential harm done when child sponsorship NGOs market sponsorship to children in school settings. Arguing that child sponsorship functions as a form of development education in the northern classroom, this chapter points to the potential for CS marketing strategies to infantalise and demean the poor, through a well-intentioned lens of paternalism. The chapter calls for greater commitment to global citizenship education in the crowded curriculum of secondary education and provides key questions (after Andreotti, 2012) for NGO marketing staff to consider in their public communication

Bye-bye Barack: dislocating afropolitanism, spectral marxism and dialectical disillusionment in two Obama-era novels

In contextually specific and formally distinctive ways, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers are fictional interrogations of Obama’s presidential pledge to resuscitate the American dream on the wake of the global financial crash. This paper explores how they supplement and challenge familiar tropes associated with African and American, rather than African-American, diaspora writing. Given broader debates within transnational literary studies about flows and exchanges (of people, finance, cultural production, dissemination, consumption et al.) linking the global South and North, I consider how these texts grapple with the complexities and complicities of contemporary neoliberalism through the lens of renascent African Marxisms. While my chosen writers could not be described as Marxist, I engage with more materially oriented scholarship, such as Krishnan’s Writing Spatiality in West Africa and Ngugi’s The Rise of the African Novel, to consider how Americanah and Behold the Dreamers circulate in a global literary marketplace where certain texts, not to mention authors, are seen as symptomatic of an African and/or Afropolitan and/or ‘Africapitalist’ renaissance. By grappling with Marxist-inflected scholarship, this paper interrogates the politics, as well as poetics, of the oft-conspicuous airbrushing of those socio-economic, specifically class concerns at the heart of these entangled debates

Colonial Heritage, Identity-Building and Communication: English and Nigerian Languages in Biafra

The Biafran War (1967–1970) has often been called “the forgotten war”, yet it marked a watershed in the development of the Nigerian foreign policy, gave birth to the NGO Médecins sans frontières and its refugee camps taught foreign journalists the intercultural skills they were to use later to report on other African conflicts. While many books and scholarly articles have been written on the war, its use of languages and impact on post-war language policies have never really been considered. Using media bulletins compiled by the author between 1968 and 1970, data collected by French journalists and published in 1968–1969, memoirs published later by various people involved in the humanitarian efforts of the period and songs recorded by the Biafran Red Cross during the conflict, this chapter will reveal how war years confirmed language preferences built during the colonial period. It will show how the necessity to communicate both with the outside and within the Biafran enclave contributed to gradually shape language practices, and will consider the reasons behind that choice. It will finally confirm the huge emotional and psychological power mobilised by languages during the conflict