And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism

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Power and rights in the community: paralegals as leaders in women's legal empowerment in Tanzania

What can an analysis of power in local communities contribute to debates on women’s legal empowerment and the role of paralegals in Africa? Drawing upon theories of power and rights, and research on legal empowerment in African plural legal systems, this article explores the challenges for paralegals in facilitating women’s access to justice in Tanzania, which gave statutory recognition to paralegals in the Legal Aid Act 2017. Land conflicts represent the single-biggest source of local legal disputes in Tanzania and are often embedded in gendered land tenure relations. This article argues that paralegals can be effective actors in women’s legal empowerment where they are able to work as leaders, negotiating power relations and resisting the forms of violence that women encounter as obstacles to justice. Paralegals’ authority will be realised when their role is situated within community leadership structures, confirming their authority while preserving their independence

Writing history’s silences: Interview with Parselelo Kantai

Parselelo Kantai is a Kenyan investigative journalist, academic and creative writer. A founding member of the East Africa literary magazine, Kwani?, Kantai has published several provocative short stories and novellas, among them ‘The Reddykulass Generation’, ‘The Cock Thief’, ‘The Story of Comrade Lemma and the Jerusalem Boys’ Band’, and. ‘You Wreck Her’. The last two were nominated for the prestigious Caine Prize for African writing in 2004 and 2009 respectively. Kantai is currently working on a novel based on the life story of iconic Kenyan trade unionist and politician Tom Joseph Mboya, who was assassinated in 1969 in Nairobi

Submerged fault lines: Interests and complicities in the Julie Ward case

Julie Ann Ward visited Kenya’s Maasai Mara Game Reserve in September 1988 to photograph the annual wildebeest migration from Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park into the Maasai Mara. On 6th September 1988 she was reported missing. Six days later, her partly burnt remains were found in the game reserve. Julie Ward’s death was a hotly contested matter with various theories about how she had died. Eventually, an inquest revealed that she had been murdered. This finding was followed by a protracted search for her killers, who, at the time of writing, are still at large. Ward’s death and the search for her killers is the subject of three books: her father John Ward’s The Animals Are Innocent: The Search for Julie’s Killers; Michael Hiltzik’s A Death in Kenya: The Murder of Julie Ward; and Jeremy Gavron’s Darkness in Eden: The Murder of Julie Ward

Reading relations: Kenya and South Africa

Through a self-reflexive mode, this essay explores a set of reading experiences using Italo Calvino’s perspectives on reading classics, and Tony Bennett’s theorisation of reading formations. Calvino prioritises the text as a stable object with inherent capacity to generate different reading experiences, while Bennett insists on the text’s multiplicity. What is clear from both scholars is that reading is a highly contested practice: who reads, what they read, when they read, how they read, what meanings they derive from reading, what meanings they should or shouldn’t derive from reading are concerns that have historically swirled around reading, in many cultural contexts. In this essay, I offer snapshots of the patterns these concerns have taken in my reading experience as a variously untutored, tutored, youthful and adult reader in Kenya and South Africa; both locations being discursively laden with ideological views on literature and its political labour. The essay surfaces the contradictions that flow through the English and Kiswahili narratives I read, their enmeshment in these ideological contestations and their imprint on my reading experiences across the tutored-untutored continuum