Naming And Othering In Africa

This book examines how names in Africa have been fashioned to create dominance and subjugation, inclusion and exclusion, others and self. Drawing on global and African examples, but with particular reference to Zimbabwe, the author demonstrates how names are used in class, race, ethnic, national, gender, sexuality, religious and business struggles in society as weapons by ingroups and outgroups. Using Othering theory as a framework, the chapters explore themes such as globalised names and their demonstration of the other; onomastic erasure in colonial naming and the subsequent decoloniality in African name changes; othering of women in onomastics and crude and sophisticated phaulisms in the areas of race, ethnicity, nationality, disability and sexuality. Highlighting social power dynamics through onomastics, this book will be of interest to researchers of onomastics, social anthropology, sociolinguistics and African culture and history.

The Postcolonial Condition of Names and Naming Practices in Southern Africa represents a milestone in southern African onomastic studies. The contributors here are all members of, and speakers of, the cultures and languages they write about, and, together, they speak with an authentic African voice on naming issues in the southern part of the African continent. The volume’s overarching thesis is that names are important yet often underestimated socio-politico-cultural sites on which some of the most significant events and processes in the post-colony can be read. The onomastic topics covered in the book range from the names of traditional healers and male aphrodisiacs to urban landscapes and street naming, from the interface between Chinese and African naming practices to the names of bands of musicians and mini-bus taxis. There is a strong section on literary onomastics which explores how names have been variously deployed by southern African fiction writers for certain semantic, aesthetic and ideological effects. The cultures and languages covered in this volume are equally wide-ranging, and, while some authors focus on single languages and cultures (for example Thembu, Xhosa, Shona), others look at inter-cultural influences such as the influence of the Portuguese and Chinese languages on Shona naming. Written by Professor Adrian Koopman Emeritus Professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal

This book examines the connections between poverty and innovation in Africa. Through case studies and theorizations from a distinctly African perspective, it stands in contrast to current theoretical works in the field, which remain very much rooted in Western-orientated thinking. The book investigates the application of methodologies which explain numerous African contexts in connection with issues of poverty and inequality. It reflects on comparative practices and praxes on the African continent, including commonplace traditions and practices in alleviating poverty, taken against a background of the failure of current prescriptions for poverty alleviation, such as the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) and the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP). There is a dire need for new practical perspectives which move Africa forward using its indigenous knowledge. Owing to a general lack of recorded African theories and methodologies on poverty, inequality and innovation, this book represents a pioneering corpus of African knowledge addressing poverty and inequality through local innovations. Adopting a transdisciplinary approach, it is relevant to students and scholars in development studies and economics, African studies, social studies, political history and political economy, climate studies, anthropology and geography.

This book fills a gap in the literature as it uniquely approaches onomastics from the perspective of both anthropology and linguistics. It addresses names and cultures from 16 countries and five continents, thus offering readers an opportunity to comprehend and compare names and naming practices across cultures. The chapters presented in this book explore the cultural significance of personal names, naming ceremonies, conventions and practices. They illustrate how these names and practices perform certain culture-specific functions, such as religion, identity and social activity. Some chapters address the socio-political significance of personal names and their expression of self and otherness. The book also links the linguistic structure of personal names to culture by looking at their morphology, syntax and semantics. It is divided into four sections: Section 1 demonstrates how personal names perform human culture, Section 2 focuses on how personal names index socio-political transitioning, Section 3 demonstrates religious values in personal names and naming, and Section 4 links linguistic structure and analysis of personal names to culture and heritage.

Focusing on the epistemic value of African names, this edited collection is based on the premise that personal names constitute valuable sources of historical and ethnographic information and help to unveil endogenous forms of knowledge. The chapters assembled here document and analyze personal names and naming practices in a slew of African societies on the geographically vast and ethnically diverse continent, including contributions on the naming practices in Angola, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda. The contributors to this anthology are scholars from different African language communities who investigate names and naming practices diachronically. Taken together, their work offers a comparative focus that juxtaposes different African cultures and reveals the historical and epistemic significance of given names.

What is Africanness? Contesting nativism in race, culture and sexualities by Charles Ngwena 2018 ISBN: 978-1-920538-82-8 Pages: 306 Print version: Available Electronic version: Free PDF available About the publication What is Africanness: Contesting nativism in culture, race and sexualities, by Charles Ngwena, Professor of Law at the Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, is a peer-reviewed monograph aiming to contribute to the ongoing scholarly conversation in and beyond South Africa about who is African and what is African. It aims to implicate a reductive sameness in the naming of Africans (‘nativism’) by showing its teleology and effects; and offers an alternative understanding of how Africans can be named or can name themselves. The book develops an epistemology for constructing the hermeneutics of Africanness today, long after the primal colonial moment and its debasing racialising ideology. It interrogates the making of Africa in colonial discourses and the making of an African race and African culture(s) and sexuality(ies) in ways that are not just historically conscious but also have a heuristic capacity to contest nativism from the outside as well as from within. The arguments in this book go beyond problematising African identity by addressing an existential gap in theory for explicating African social identity. The book develops an interpretive method – a hermeneutics – for locating and deciphering African identifications in ways that are historically conscious and conjunctural. The hermeneutics look to the present and the future in addition to the past, so that African identifications are not nailed to a mast but remain invested with mobility and the capacity to mutate radically and make new and unexpected beginnings. Comments Charles Ngwena’s timely and original book is a wonderful read, rich in theory and insight, and an essential companion for those interested in exploring the ‘multiplicity of histories, cultures and subjectivities’ that constitute the diversity of ‘Africanness’ and African identities. – Professor Cathi Albertyn, School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand, Editor, South African Journal on Human Rights This is a brilliant exploration of liberating and affirming ways to speak of African identities and sexualities, reminding us there can be creative beauty where pain and dispossession have resided. – Rudo Chigudu, Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria This is a masterpiece! Not only does the author capture the discourse and debates on “Africanness”, he aptly examines them before offering his views on “decentring the race of Africanness” with the important recognition of “Africa as land of diverse identifications”. – Prof Serges Djoyou Kamga, Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, UNISA Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PREFACE DEDICATION PART 1: BACKGROUND TO THE HERMENEUTICS OF HETEROGENOUS AFRICANNESS 1. INTRODUCING THE ‘MANYNESS’ OF AFRICANNESS 1 Introduction 2 Nativism 2.1 Theocratic vision 2.2 Logic of identity 3 Reformulating African identity: Overcoming status subordination and achieving inclusive equality 4 Scope and structure of the book: A broad triangulation of race, culture and sexualities 4.1 Part 1: Background to the hermeneutics of heterogeneous Africanness 4.2 Part 2: Africanness, race and culture 4.3 Part 3: Heterogeneous sexualities 2. HERMENEUTICS OF AFRICANNESS: BUILDING ON STUART HALL’S CULTURAL THEORY OF IDENTIFICATIONS 1 Introduction 2 Connecting inclusive equality with a deconstructive hermeneutics of Africanness 3 Who/what is African?: A central discursive question 4 Hall’s cultural theory of identity as enunciation 4.1 Identity as becoming and being 4.2 Implications of a Hallian approach for conceptualising Africanness 4.2.1 Transposing Hall’s theory to Africanness as broad cultural and racial identifications 4.2.2 Transposing Hall’s theory onto African sexuality identifications 5 Positionality PART 2: AFRICANNESS, RACE AND CULTURE 3. WHAT’S IN A NAME? THE NAMING OF AFRICA AND AFRICANS, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RADICAL CULTURAL ALTERITY 1 Introduction: Representation, truth, knowledge and power 2 Naming of Africa 2.1 Provenance of the naming 3 Naming of Africans: Epochal re-description 3.1 Africa at the edge of time: The founding of alterity in anachronistic space 3.2 Africa as land of cultural otherness: A leaf from Mudimbe’s The invention of Africa 3.2.1 Christianity and the production of African spiritual alterity 3.2.2 Anthropology and the production of African cultural alterity 4 Mudimbe’s contribution to dialogic Africanness 4. AFRICA AS LAND OF RACIAL OTHERNESS 1 Introduction 2 The contribution of philosophy and science to the construction of African racial alterity 2.1 Philosophy 2.2 Science 3 Re-membering Saartjie Baartman: Black embodiment, ascribed identity and fetishisation 3.1 Logic of identity 3.2 Fetishisation 4 Apartheid and the banality of race 4.1 Creating ‘Africans’, ‘Coloureds’, ‘Indians’ and ‘Whites’ 4.1.1 ‘Africans’ and ‘Whites’ as extreme polarities 4.1.2 ‘Coloureds’ 4.1.3 ‘Indians’ 4.2 Racial positioning among inferiorised ‘races’ 4.3 Apartheid as not so much about apartness but baasskapism 5 Ode to an open Africanness 5. DECENTRING THE RACE OF AFRICANNESS 1 Introduction: putting race under erasure 2 Recalling Hall’s deconstructive identification template 3 Decentring the race of Africanness 3.1 Appiah’s In my father’s house 3.2 Blyden’s black personality 4 Retaining the political salience of race 4.1 Afropolitanism 5 Africa as space for diverse identifications and recognition of ever-evolving ethnicities PART 3: HETEROGENEOUS SEXUALITIES 6. REPRESENTING AFRICAN SEXUALITIES: CONTESTING NATIVISM FROM WITHOUT 1 Introduction 2 Said’s discourse of orientalism 2.1 Orientalism and Said’s aporias 2.1.1 Hybridity: Breaking with coloniser/ colonised binary 3 Nativising African peoples 4 Mamdani’s discourse of nativism 5 Nativism and the construction of colonial whiteness 5.1 Compulsory whiteness and regulation of sexualities 6 Nativising black men’s sexuality 6.1 Southern Rhodesia and the phantom of the ‘black peril’ 7 Black women’s sexual degeneracy and colonial continuities in Caldwell et al: A performative study of African women 7. ‘TRANSGRESSIVE’ SEXUALITIES: CONTESTING NATIVISM FROM WITHIN AND OVERCOMING STATUS SUBORDINATION 1 Introduction 1.1 Proclaiming heterosexuality and castigating homosexuality 1.2 Democratising sexuality 2 Discursive clarifications 2.1 Transgressive sexualities: the terminological rationale 2.2 Overcoming status subordination 2.3 Avoiding LGBTI essentialism 2.4 Avoiding unproductive LGBTI anti-essentialism 2.5 Remaining conscious of colonising sexuality knowledge 3 Deconstructing sexualities 3.1 Essentialist social construction 3.2 Transformative social construction 3.3 Deconstructing the relationship between sexuality and gender: Drawing on Richardson’s analytic template 3.3.1 Naturalist approach 3.3.2 Prioritising gender over sexuality 3.3.3 Gender as an effect of sexuality 3.3.4 Sex and gender as separate, non-deterministic, historically and culturally situated systems 3.3.5 Sexuality and gender elision 4 Way forward 8. MEDIATING CONFLICTING SEXUALITY IDENTIFICATIONS THROUGH POLITICS AND AN ETHICS OF PLURALISM 1 Introduction 2 Rawls’ overlapping consensus 3 Rescher’s dissensus management approach 4 Young’s critique of the ideal of impartiality and the civic public 5 Arendt’s concept of citizenship in a plural political community 6 Finding an overlapping consensus and asymmetrical reciprocity in African political and constitutional frameworks EPILOGUE: THEORISING AFRICANNESS BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

What are the most popular names of the Ambo people in Namibia? Why do so many Ambos have Finnish first names? What do the African names of these people mean? Why is the namesake so important in Ambo culture? How did the long independence struggle affect personal naming, and what are the latest name-giving trends in Namibia? This study analyses the changes in the personal naming system of the Ambo people in Namibia over the last 120 years, starting from the year 1883 when the first Ambos received biblical and European names at baptism. The central factors in this process were the German and South African colonisation and European missionary work on the one hand, and the rise of African nationalism on the other hand. Eventually, this clash between African and European naming practices led to a new and dynamic naming system which includes elements of both African and European origin.