Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Africa, as both a place and as an idea, looms large in the construction of Black identity in Brazil and plays an increasingly important role in the identity processes of many Afro-American societies. Consequently, this dissertation seeks to explore how the idea of Africa is used and manipulated in the discourse and formulation of Blackness in the northeastern Brazilian state Bahia. Today, Afro-Brazilian elites and academics---particularly anthropologists---privilege the cultures of the Bight of Benin as crucial markers of a new Black identity in Black Bahia's religious spaces, cultural institutions and social movements. This new form of Black identity seeks to reject the dominant ideology of 'racial democracy' in Brazil and replace it with one that articulates an Africanised approach to Blackness. In this model, Yoruba religious practices are emphasised and placed at the centre of an array of cultural forms including carnaval, Afro-Brazilian religion, language instruction, culinary practice and the remnant maroon communities of the Bahian interior. In analysing these movements, the present work eschews the need to define Afro-Brazilian cultural practices in the historical context of a plantation society that contained so-called 'survivals' of African culture. Rather, this work adopts a perspective that simply attempts to understand how ideas such as 'Africa', 'slave', 'roots', 'orixa', 'Yoruba' and other, similar African concepts are deployed in the creation of Bahian, and more generally, Brazilian Blackness. Further, the construction of Africanised Blackness in Bahia needs to be understood in the context of an ongoing live dialogue between the cultures and peoples of Afro-America and different regions of the African continent. This dissertation explores this dialogue and also investigates the extent to which these redefinitions actually resonate and penetrate the diverse Black populations of Bahia, including those that are not actively involved with Bahia's Black movements, such as evangelical Christians and residents of the impoverished Bahian interior---the sertao. / Keywords: Africa, Bahia, Blackness, Brazil, dialogue, elites, ethnography, identity, Yoruba.

No description available.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1994.

The concern of this study is "locating the African Renaissance in development discourse: a critical study" and aims to investigate how the South African President Thabo Mbeki has conceptualized the African Renaissance. Through this the author has discovered the meaning of Mbeki's African Renaissance discourse with regard to its context in African development and how it is located in historical conceptions of development in Africa. Through this what innovation to development in Africa is presented by the discourse of the African Renaissance has been identified. Therefore this study is based primarily on an extensive literature research on conception of development and the African Renaissance. In comparison with other discourses on development, the study finds that Mbeki's African Renaissance discourse has been inspired by Pan-Africanist discourses such as self-reliance and African regeneration combined with dominant political and economic discourses such as globalization, good governance, structural adjustment and democracy. The study finds that the great contribution of Mbeki's African Renaissance is to call again on the Africans to realize their self-rediscovery and to restore the African's self esteem without which Africans will never become equipped for African development. However Mbeki stops short of attempting to suggest practical strategies to do so. The study finds that Mbeki' s Arican Renaissance discourse is moralistic and can no longer challenge global economic inequalities. / Thesis (M.A.)- University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2001.

This study begins by highlighting the fact that after identifying the causes of defects in the socio-economic development of Africa and its populace African scholars argue for the re-centering of African cultural heritage as a strategy for (re)-construction and socioeconomic development. In fact, the alienation and marginalization of African cultural values and traditions by the designs of colonialism and apartheid have resulted in the distortion and disorientation of some of the most fundamental aspects of the culture of the colonized. Undeniably, this phenomenon contributed immensely to the situation of 'underdevelopment' in Africa Culturally, people were prevented from engaging the European culture(s) on their own terms. Economically - because the African cultural heritage was degraded to the level of the 'savage', the 'primitive', 'uncivilized' and even the level of the 'superstitious' or 'mystical' compared to the ' logical' found in the Western cultural thought and behaviour - African people(s) were mostly prevented from participating in the development of the continent. More importantly, given the present unfolding scenario of the African leaders' dream for an African century- manifested in the transformation of the Organization of African Union into the African Union (AU) (during the week of the 9 to 12 July 2001) and the vision and mission of New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) - juxtaposing this ideal to the pressures globalisation process exerts on the African continent, this study III seeks to identify essential elements of African Cultural Heritage that (if reclaimed and redefined) can contribute towards the transformation and development of (South) Africa and its people. The two critical questions here are: (a) Against the backdrop of Africa's economic disposition, what is the way forward for the continent to extricate itself from the quagmire of poverty, disease and instability? (b) Is Pan-Africanism the solution to the African crisis in the 2IIt century and the globalizing world? The African Renaissance discourse (as a new Pan-Africanism vision in the 2IIt century and a philosophical framework for (re)-construction and development) is central to this study, precisely because no nation that was uprooted from its soul can be able to recover wholly and progress without basing its socio-economic development plans on its own cultural identity and self-knowledge. It is hoped that this study will form part of existing critical resource material concerning the legacy of underdevelopment, and the constructive proposals and strategies critical in the socio-economic (re)-construction and development of Africa in the context of g1obalisation and its marginalising tendencies and practices against the countries of the South. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Durban-Westville, 2004.

Please read the abstract in the section 08summary of this document. Please note that page 1 of chapter 1 was missing in both available copies of this dissertation. / Dissertation (MA (Political Sciences))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Political Sciences / unrestricted

PhD (English Literature) / Department of English / This study explored the depictions and perspectives of health, illness and death in selected postcolonial texts written after the year 2000. Although tantamount attention has been directed to notions of health, illness and death in literary texts (medical narratives) largely from scientific and clinical perspectives, the study primarily focuses on memoir accounts of experiences and perspectives of health, illness and death. In response to the dearth of critical work, which primarily refers to body and its wellbeing socially integrating clinical diagnosis and the socio-natural human factors. The study interrogates how memoirs depict the health, illness and death subjective experiences and perceptions of people in typical African communities. My argument is that literature and memoirs in particular, are a site where conceptions of perspectives and experiences of people (Africans) are (de)constructed. The experiences of health, illness and death are not an exception. In reading the selected texts, I focused on how a merger of factors such as culture, gender, beliefs (African and Religious), age, society, and social status are drawn from the personal narratives in the selected memoirs (re) conceptualise the notions of health, illness and death in a typical African community. The discourses in memoirs challenge the norms and the construction of human and social expectations in dominant ideological discourses such as culture, beliefs, gender, race, class, democracy, post colonialism, Afrocentrism among others. The study enters into a critical conversation with the postcolonial personal (memoir) representation of health, illness and death as a human social context. Using discourse analysis and literature review, I have placed Postcolonial, Afrocentric and bio-political perspectives of several writers in conversation with the health, illness and death defined practices voiced in the selected texts. The discursive debates in the study allow us to consider personal or individual experiences and perspectives as chambers, sites and conceptions of knowledge production in a typical African community and this either silence or make visible the minority and marginal African social ideals and interpretations of health, illness and death as well as body agency. The study established that, the hybridity of perspectives and experiences in personal narratives (memoirs), the subject, and discourses are in the ‘third’ space from where the writers challenge the norms which dictate over the nature of how the body (subject) and the other social factors decipher health, illness and death. Thus, my thesis concludes that the perspectives and experiences examined in the selected texts, the socio-cultural factors of human existence premise the interpretations of the clinical understanding of the body as the point of departure, but socio-cultural interpretations of the body pre-occupy perspectives and experiences of health, illness and death. The clinical aspects and interpretations of the human body are then perceived through the social production of information. The selected texts are Our Kind of People: A Continent's Challenge, A Country's Hope (2005) by Uzondimna Iweala, Eloquent Body (2012) by Dawn Garisch, The Last Right (2013) by Marianne Thamm, Postmortem (2014) by Maria Phalime , Holding My Breath (2016) by Ace Moloi. / NRF

Thesis (DLitt (Church History))--Stellenbosch University, 1954. / Please refer to full text for abstract.

In the 20th century the relationship between African-Americans and Africa grew into a prominent subject in the lives and perspectives of people who claim Africanheritage because almost every facet of American life distinguished people based on skin color. The prevailing discourse of the day said that the way a person looked was deeply to who they were.1 People with dark skin were associated with Africa, and the notion of this connection has survived to this day. Scholars such as Molefi Kete Asante point to cultural retentions as evidence of the enduring connection between African-Americans and Africa, while any person could look to the shade of their skin as an indication of their African origins. In either case, something seems to always hearken back to Africa. However, in this modern world there is a gap between Africans and African Americans: African-Americans have achieved some great milestones in terms of liberty and equality, while many people living on the African continent still suffer poverty, political disenfranchisement, and precluded liberties. African-Americans have made great strides in dealing with these problems at home, but it is clear that they are on the whole better off than their African counterparts. The lectures and writings of W.E.B. Dubois, Malcolm X, and Kwame Nkrumah reveal that the linkages between African-Americans and Africans are political in nature and therefore do not rest solely on connections of culture or color, but on the shared struggle to achieve the unalienable rights guaranteed to all people.