Regard sur la Collection des Sanza de L'Institut des Musees Nationaux du Zaire

Sanza, often translated as "thumb piano", is one of the important traditional musical instruments in Africa. It is neither a percussion nor a wind instrument, and because of this ambiguity it has been a problem to the Western ethnomusicologists who are interested in the classification of musical instruments. The authors describe the forms, decorations, raw materials and playing techniques of various sanzas, based on the materials stored at the National Museum of Zaire, and attempt to classify them, mainly according to the type of resonance box. Also pointed out in this paper is the importance of the study of musical instruments for better understanding of traditional society

Americans are in favor of interracial marriage until they areasked about their own family

Nearly ninety percent of Americans are in favor of marriages between Black and White people, and yet, the rate of interracial marriage remains relatively low at less than 1 percent of all marriages. Using recent General Social Survey Data, Yanyi K. Djamba and Sitawa R. Kimuna write that this discrepancy may be because the general interracial marriage opinion questions used in surveys are too broad for understanding how people actually feel about marrying outside one’s race. Digging further into the data, they find that only 42 percent of Blacks and 13 percent of Whites strongly favor their close relative marrying someone of the opposite race

SPOUSES’ SOCIODEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS AND CONTRACEPTIVE USE IN KINSHASA, ZAIRE

This paper examines the impact of spouses’ education, fertility desires, and marital characteristics on contraceptive use in Kinshasa, Zaire. The results reveal that, while family planning services focus their activities exclusively on women, husbands’ education and fertility desire are very important in explaining the use of birth control in marriage. This male role is crucial in understanding fertility patterns in Africa, where the major familial decisions are made by the husband

Family Planning in Africa: Old Belief and New Perspective

This article reviews the underlying assumption of most family planning programmes in Africa. The results show that the hypothesis that African men oppose the use of contraceptive methods is erroneous. Rather, current data reveal that men want to learn more about birth control. Also, most men and women believe that husbands are the primary decision-makers of reproductive and sexual lives. A new perspective for men's involvement programmes is then provided as a route to low fertility in Africa

Overcrowding of Residential Houses in Ethiopia: A Study of Selected Demographic and Socio-Economic Correlates

Existing housing related evidences attest to the fact that many Ethiopians live in houses that are not conducive for healthy life. This article examines the nature of overcrowding of residential units in Ethiopia using the 2007 Population and Housing Census data supported by literature. Descriptive and multivariate statistical analyses are employed to generate empirical evidences that demonstrate the extent to which many live in overcrowded houses. The results show that more than half of Ethiopians live in overcrowded housing units. Findings from multivariate analyses show that overcrowding is strongly linked to demographic and socio-economic characteristics of households, their migration status and type of place of residence. In particular, housing units headed by males are more likely to be overcrowded than those headed by females. Education is negatively associated with overcrowding suggesting that exposure to formal schooling leads to smaller families. There are also significant differences in the level of overcrowding by ethnicity and religion. It is implied from the results that variations in the level of overcrowding of housing units, and hence housing conditions, remain to be one of the indicators of differentiated livelihood situations in the country, which needs to be redressed through investments and instituting the required housing standards.Keywords: Ethiopia, housing, household heads, overcrowdin

Family Context and Premarital Sexual Activity in Kinshasa, Zaire.

Studies on sexual behavior in Africa have shown that the proportion of women with premarital sexual experience is high, but the factors associated with premarital sexual behavior have not been clearly identified. This is partly due to the separation between theory and research. This study attempts to fill this gap by constructing a new conceptual framework in which hypotheses of rational adaptation, social disorganization, and patrilineal bias theories can be empirically tested. Based on a life history approach, the present framework emphasizes the role of three dimensions of family background in shaping individual behavior: financial capital, human capital, and social capital. The data derive from a random sample of 2,000 women aged 14-24 years interviewed in Kinshasa in 1995. The results show that 46 percent of respondents were sexually experienced before marriage, but only 16 percent of them used contraceptives at their first sexual intercourse. Among these 2,000 respondents, 26 percent had sexual relations with multiple partners. The results of multivariate analysis show that AIDS knowledge reduces the risk of engaging in premarital sexual activity. Even those who elect to have intercourse before marriage, knowing AIDS significantly limits the number of sexual partners and increases the chance of having first contracepted sexual experience. Consistent with the anthropological hypothesis of patrilineal bias, these data indicate higher risk of premarital sexual activity and more chance of having multiple sexual partners among matrilineal women than their patrilineal counterparts. This study offers only partial support to the social disorganization theory. While education and human capital are positively associated with both premarital sexual permissiveness and premarital promiscuousness, urban background and exposure to mass media reduce the risk of having premarital sexual experience. Also, unlike what has been commonly assumed about female poverty, current data reveal a positive association between financial capital and premarital sexuality. Similarly, social capital within the family increases the risk of having premarital sexual intercourse, suggesting that children in larger families receive less adult attention. These findings indicate the importance of AIDS information, family background, and kinship system in research and intervention programs aimed at reducing the burden of premarital sexuality

Bread and peace for the Democratic Republic of Congo : is decentralisation the answer?

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been ravished by internal conflicts for the past two decades. These conflicts have come at a great cost to the people of the DRC, often resulting in a number of human rights atrocities. These atrocities range from the loss of life, resulted in internal displacement and creation of refugees’ communities, as well as the destruction of property and infrastructure , all contributing to prevailing conditions of poverty and deep societal divisions. While there are many underlying factors that fuel these conflicts, the key drivers of the conflict are linked to the unequal distribution of the DRC’s national resources and the mismanagement of public services. Intense frustration and a sense of helplessness to change the status quo have repeatedly manifested itself in a cycle of war and ethnic cleansing. In this regard, the pattern of conflicts has been the manifestation of the frustration of the Congolese people as a whole.Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) -- University of Pretoria, 2010.A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Law University of Pretoria, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Masters of Law (LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa). Prepared under the supervision of Prof. Nico Steytler at the Faculty of Law, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa. 2010.http://www.chr.up.ac.za/Centre for Human RightsLL

The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence

Over the past twenty years, interest in women’s violence has grown as an area of academic research and teaching across disciplines such as criminology, sociology, history, international relations, public health and film and literary studies. This handbook makes a timely contribution by acting as a comprehensive introduction to a wide range of international, interdisciplinary scholarship which applies feminist perspectives to the phenomenon of women’s violence. Violence is enabled and enacted by individuals, organisations and states with interconnections between these different levels (Collins, 1998, 2017). We adopt this multilevel understanding of violence in the handbook, bringing together contributions on interpersonal and intimate violence by women, women’s violence as agents of institutions, and women’s political violence as state and non-state actors. The handbook is international in scope with contributions from scholars across countries in the Global South and North. Women’s acts of violence are rarer than men’s and frequently perceived as more shocking. Violence by women is regularly sensationalised and stigmatised, especially in media discourses. This sensationalisation and stigmatisation relies on and reproduces misogynistic tropes about violent women as ‘evil’, ‘unnatural’ and masculinised. The chapters in this handbook are written from a feminist perspective and eschew or deconstruct stereotypical portrayals in favour of more considered and complex analyses of the violence women enact and the relevance of their social and political positioning, as well as cultural understandings of womanhood and how these inform understandings of and responses to this violence. Previous literature has emphasised that women’s violence is frequently understood as deviant and transgressive, violating norms of ideal femininity. Such ideas are explored throughout the handbook in contributions which consider, for instance, the vilification and monsterisation of women who kill. These chapters tease out the ways in which violent women are profiled as unnatural and abject. The handbook therefore retains a focus on scholarship which considers the ‘abnormality’ of violent women while also including contributions which demonstrate that women’s violent acts can be normalised and made invisible, for example when perpetrated during a professional role. Adding further nuance, various chapters address how, due to marginalisation across axes of race and class, certain women are not always presumed to be non-violent or perceived through norms of ideal femininity. The handbook explores how these assumptions can lead to overcriminalisation and harsh treatment within the criminal justice system. The significance of women’s intersectional identities is a consistent theme throughout the handbook. Running through the chapters too is the seemingly intractable problem of agency – including the obstacles to fully assigning agency to violent women as well as the frequently unwanted consequences when they are considered to have acted with agency and are punished more harshly. Throughout the handbook, authors grapple with questions of women’s volitional capacity, considering difficult questions of how far we should consider the contexts in which women commit violence, which include structural oppression, domestic- and gender-based violence, and cultural norms. The contributions reveal the necessity of abandoning a binary view of victim-perpetrator, agency/non-agency and evolving a more complex framework in which to gauge questions of intention and deliberation. The handbook is divided into eight sections: historical perspectives; understanding women’s acts of violence; women as perpetrators of interpersonal and intimate violence; power and women’s violence; women and non-state political violence; cultural interpretations of violent women; fictional representations of violent women; and violent women and girls in the criminal justice system. The rest of this introductory chapter outlines the handbook’s structure and summarises each contribution