Introduction: Global Citizenship Education for Learning/Volunteering Abroad

For several years Canadian universities and colleges have been expanding opportunities for students to learn and/or volunteer abroad for academic credit. Many of these study abroad programs are directed to the European Union, Singapore and other “business opportunity” destinations. For this collection, however, we are concerned with travel and study in less developed countries – those countries deemed by the United Nations to be low income whereby the vast majority of residents of the country live, on average, on $1-$2 per day. The focus on less developed countries exposes the specific ethical dilemmas one encounters abroad as a result of economic disparities, cultural differences, historical circumstances and social situations linked, for example, to the legacy of colonialism. This introduction provides context and background information on learn/volunteer abroad programs, the diverse opportunities available to college and university students, the potential impact of these programs, and the relationship (perceived or real) of learn/volunteer abroad programs, and global citizenship education

Achebe, Nwando. — The Female King of Colonial Nigeria

This book tells three distinct histories. The first, and most original and important contribution, is a biography of colonial Nigeria’s only known female warrant chief, Ahebi Ugbabe, who ruled over a collection of 33 villages known as Enugu-Ezike from 1918-1948. The second is a social history/ethnography of northern Igboland that emphasizes the perspectives of the author’s Igbo informants. And the third is how the author managed to reconstruct Ugbabe’s life and times when conventional sources..

Gay Rights, the Devil and the End Times: Public Religion and the Enchantment of the Homosexuality Debate in Zambia

This article contributes to the understanding of the role of religion in the public and political controversies about homosexuality in Africa. As a case study it investigates the heated public debate in Zambia following a February 2012 visit by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who emphasised the need for the country to recognise the human rights of homosexuals. The focus is on a particular Christian discourse in this debate, in which the international pressure to recognise gay rights is considered a sign of the end times, and Ban Ki-moon, the UN and other international organisations are associated with the Antichrist and the Devil. Here, the debate about homosexuality becomes eschatologically enchanted through millennialist thought. Building on discussions about public religion and religion and politics in Africa, this article avoids popular explanations in terms of fundamentalist religion and African homophobia, but rather highlights the political significance of this discourse in a postcolonial African context

Homosexuality, politics and Pentecostal nationalism in Zambia

Building upon debates about the politics of nationalism and sexuality in post-colonial Africa, this article highlights the role of religion in shaping nationalist ideologies that seek to regulate homosexuality. It specifically focuses on Pentecostal Christianity in Zambia, where the constitutional declaration of Zambia as a Christian nation has given rise to a form of ‘Pentecostal nationalism’ in which homosexuality is considered to be a threat to the purity of the nation and is associated with the Devil. The article offers an analysis of recent Zambian public debates about homosexuality, focusing on the ways in which the ‘Christian nation’ argument is deployed, primarily in a discourse of anti-homonationalism, but also by a few recent dissident voices. The latter prevent Zambia, and Christianity, from accruing a monolithic depiction as homophobic. Showing that the Zambian case presents a mobilisation against homosexuality that is profoundly shaped by the local configuration in which Christianity defines national identity – and in which Pentecostal-Christian moral concerns and theo-political imaginations shape public debates and politics – the article nuances arguments that explain African controversies regarding homosexuality in terms of exported American culture wars, proposing an alternative reading of these controversies as emerging from conflicting visions of modernity in Africa