For richer, for poorer: marriage and casualized sex in East African artisanal mining settlements

Migrants to Tanzania's artisanal gold mining sites seek mineral wealth, which is accompanied by high risks of occupational hazards, economic failure, AIDS and social censure from their home communities. Male miners in these settlements compete to attract newly arrived young women who are perceived to be diverting male material support from older women and children's economic survival. This article explores the dynamics of monogamy, polygamy and promiscuity in the context of rapid occupational change. It shows how a wide spectrum of productive and welfare outcomes is generated through sexual experimentation, which calls into question conventional concepts of prostitution, marriage and gender power relations

Can Africa claim the 21st century?' A World Bank publication, May 2000. Review and comments

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Eureka and beyond: mining's impact on African urbanisation

This collection brings separate literatures on mining and urbanisation together at a time when both artisanal and large-scale mining are expanding in many African economies. While much has been written about contestation over land and mineral rights, the impact of mining on settlement, notably its catalytic and fluctuating effects on migration and urban growth, has been largely ignored. African nation-states’ urbanisation trends have shown considerable variation over the past half century. The current surge in ‘new’ mining countries and the slow-down in ‘old’ mining countries are generating some remarkable settlement patterns and welfare outcomes. Presently, the African continent is a laboratory of national mining experiences. This special issue on African mining and urbanisation encompasses a wide cross-section of country case studies: beginning with the historical experiences of mining in Southern Africa (South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe), followed by more recent mineralizing trends in comparatively new mineral-producing countries (Tanzania) and an established West African gold producer (Ghana), before turning to the influence of conflict minerals (Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone)

The urban melting pot in East Africa: ethnicity and urban growth in Kampala and Dar es Salaam

No abstract available

Sub-Saharan Africa’s vanishing peasantries and the specter of a global food crisis

No abstract available

Ganyu in Malawi: transformation of local labour relations under famine and UIV/AIDS duress

Ganyu labour, a longstanding form of ad hoc casualized rural labour, has come to the fore in recent years as the major coping mechanism for the rural poor to combat food insecurity in Malawi. This chapter explores ganyu in light of long-term trends in Malawi’s local rural economies and the shocks of famine and the HIV/AIDS pandemic experienced at the outset of the 21st century. It is argued that ganyu, evolved from balanced to negative reciprocity over the past hundred years. During Malawi’s 2001-02 famine, with many rural families adversely affected either directly or indirectly by HIV/AIDS morbidity and mortality, ganyu labour increasingly altered in character in terms of: growing inequalities of rural asset holdings, labour exchange negotiated under extreme duress, growing labour negotiations between members of the famine-affected rural areas with non-kin from outside of the local community, a diminishing ethical foundation to labour contractual terms and, in the case of women, sometimes the necessity of morally degrading sexual compromise for the sake of securing vital food supplies or cash

The urban melting pot in East Africa: ethnicity and urban growth in Kampala and Dar es Salaam

No abstract available

Discovery and denial: social science theory and interdisciplinarity in African studies

This article discusses the ebb and flow of theoretical ideas in African Studies, specifically the interface between African Studies and Development Studies. It explores the epistemological nature of interdisciplinary in African Studies, interrogating when and how theoretical insight may contribute to an understanding of material reality and welfare improvement in some circumstances, and miss the mark by a wide margin in other cases. The purpose of this exercise is to stimulate reflection on the contribution of African Studies to continental and global intellectual and material change, juxtaposing African Studies theory and its role as an applied field of study. This necessitates consideration of Africa's position in the interplay of world politics and the power of agenda-setting international institutions, notably the World Bank

Lightening the load : women's labour and appropriate rural technology in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper questions the assumptions of the rural technology debate, reassessing if and how technological interventions and initiatives are potentially valuable to rural women in sub-Saharan Africa. This entails examining what kinds of technologies are being promoted, and for whom they are being introduced, with comparisons drawn from the Green Revolution experience in South Asia. The first section of the paper discusses rural African women's work regimes, factors contributing to the intensification of African women's workday, and the contraction of African women's access to community-held resources. An assessment of the different purposes and phases in the development and spread of rural technology and its impact on women producers follows. The concluding sections consider the overall utility of rural technology intitiatives in sub-Saharan Africa, emphasizing the challenges that women's severe lack of time and money pose for their appropriate design and distribution.ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde