Radical Utu

Wangari Muta Maathai was a scholar-activist known for founding the Green Belt Movement, an environmental campaign that earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. While many studies of Maathai highlight her activism, few examine Maathai as a scholar whose contributions to various disciplines and causes spanned more than three decades. In Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai, Besi Brillian Muhonja presents the words and works of Maathai as theoretical concepts attesting to her contributions to gender equality, democratic spaces, economic equity and global governance, and indigenous African languages and knowledges. Muhonja’s well-rounded portrait of Maathai’s ideas offers a corrective to the one-dimensional characterization of Maathai typical of other works.

In Gender and Sexuality in Kenyan Societies: Centering the Human and the Humane in Critical Studies, edited by Besi Brillian Muhonja and Babacar M’Baye, contributors explore the application of ubuntu/utu responsive perspectives and methods to critical studies. Through the lens of ubuntu/utu, the contributors to this Kenya-focused volume draw from the diverse fields of postcolonial studies, literary studies, history, anthropology, sociology, political science, environmental studies, media studies, and development studies, among others, to demonstrate the urgency and necessity of humane scholarship/research in gender and queer studies. By centering decolonial approaches and the human and humane, concentrating on subjects and identities that have been largely neglected in national and scholarly debates, the chapters are subversive, complex, and inclusive. They advance within Kenyan studies themes and elements of alternative, non-binary, variant, and non-heteronormative gender identities, sexualities, and voices, as well as approaches to doing knowledge. Underscoring the timeliness of such a text is evidence rendered in sections of the collection highlighting the significance of ubuntu/utu-centric scholarship. Challenging the erasure of the human in academic works, the chapters in this volume look inward and locate the voices and experiences of Kenyan peoples as the pivotal locus of analysis and epistemological derivation.

Black Women's Rights: Leadership and the Circularities of Power presents Black women as alternative and transformative leaders in the highest political positions and at grassroots community levels. Beginning with a critique of the assumption of an equivalence between masculinity and political leadership, Carole Boyce Davies moves through the various conceptual definitions, intents, and meanings of leadership and the differences in the presentation of practices of leadership by women and feminist scholars. She studies the actualizing of political leadership in the Presidency of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the historical role of Shirley Chisholm as the first woman to run for presidency of the United States on a leading party ticket, the promise of the Black left feminist leadership of Brazilian Marielle Franco, and the current model of Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados in advancing new leadership models from the Caribbean. This book proclaims the 21st century as the century for Black women's leadership.

Whose knowledge counts? Why delve deep to understand self, history and intercontinental relations? How do people and communities heal from the wounds of colonization and related trauma passed from generation to generation? Such intractable questions are explored in this collection of essays on decolonization. To decolonize means to humxnize, which is of even greater urgency in the 21 st century with colonization showing itself in new forms. Perspectives from several continents suggest pathways toward more convivial and equitable relations in society, and each chapter is presented in conversation with an illustration. The book will inspire young leaders, educators, activists, policymakers, researchers, and anyone resisting colonization and its effects and working for a kinder, gentler world. These 13 instructive and sometimes personal chapters speak to the urgency of decolonization, building on a culture of ubuntu or recognizing oneself in others. – François-Joseph Azoh, Psychologist, Lecturer at Ecole Normale Supérieure of Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire Connections between colonization, racism, and other “isms” are addressed, as are rehumxnizing intercontinental movements such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and #RhodesMustFall. – Dr. Wanja Njuguna, Senior Lecturer, Journalism and Media Technology, Namibia University of Science and Technology Embrace this read and learn how we humXns are the X-factor in the liberation from mental and physical bondage. – Larry Lester, activist and President of the Greater Kansas City Black History Study Group, a branch of ASALH Decolonization brings a progressive transformation of the world. – Therese Mungah Shalo Tchombe, Emeritus Professor/Honorary Dean of Education, University of Buea, Cameroon

In African Ecomedia, Cajetan Iheka examines the ecological footprint of media in Africa alongside the representation of environmental issues in visual culture. Iheka shows how, through visual media such as film, photography, and sculpture, African artists deliver a unique perspective on the socioecological costs of media production, from mineral and oil extraction to the politics of animal conservation. Among other works, he examines Pieter Hugo's photography of electronic waste recycling in Ghana and Idrissou Mora-Kpai's documentary on the deleterious consequences of uranium mining in Niger. These works highlight not only the exploitation of African workers and the vast scope of environmental degradation but also the resourcefulness and creativity of African media makers. They point to the unsustainability of current practices while acknowledging our planet's finite natural resources. In foregrounding Africa's centrality to the production and disposal of media technology, Iheka shows the important place visual media has in raising awareness of and documenting ecological disaster even as it remains complicit in it.

This volume is a bold attempt to address a comprehensive range of themes and issues relating to contemporary Kenya. It covers independent Kenya’s history, society, culture, economics, politics, and environment with great breadth and depth, comprising thirty-four chapters divided into three parts. Part I focuses on independence and the political economy of development, followed by Part II on environment, globalization, gender, and society. Part III examines the external context’s impact and implications for Kenya and the role of Kenya in the global political economy.

Across contiguous nation-states in Eastern Africa, the geographic proximity disguises an ideological complexity. Land has meant something fundamental in the sociocultural history of each country. Those concerns, however, have manifested into varied political events, and the range of struggles over land has spawned a multiplicity of literary interventions. While Kenya and Uganda were both British colonies, Kenya's experience of settler land alienation made for a much more violent response against efforts at political independence. Uganda's relatively calm unyoking from the colonial burden, however, led to a tumultuous post-independence. Tanzania, too, like Kenya and Uganda, resisted British colonial administration—after Germany's defeat in World War 1. In Writing on the Soil, author Ng’ang’a Wahu-Mũchiri argues that representations of land and landscape perform significant metaphorical labor in African literatures, and this argument evolves across several geographical spaces. Each chapter's analysis is grounded in a particular locale: western Kenya, colonial Tanganyika, post-independence Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Anam Ka'alakol (Lake Turkana), Kampala, and Kitgum in Northern Uganda. Moreover, each section contributes to a deeper understanding of the aesthetic choices that authors make when deploying tropes revolving around land, landscape, and the environment. Mũchiri disentangles the numerous connections between geography and geopolitical space on the one hand, and ideology and cultural analysis on the other. This book embodies a multi-layered argument in the sphere of African critical scholarship, while adding to the growing field of African land rights scholarship—an approach that foregrounds the close reading of Africa’s literary canon.

Rethinking Sage Philosophy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on and beyond H. Odera Oruka discusses a variety of aspects of Henry Odera Oruka’s sage philosophy project, rethinking it with a view to current demands and recent debates in scholarship across several disciplines. Edited by Kai Kresse and Oriare Nyarwath, the collection engages perspectives and interests from within and beyond African philosophy and African studies, including anthropology, literature, postcolonial critique, and decolonial scholarship. The chapters focus on: studies of women sages; sage philosophy in relation to oral literature; an Acholi poem on 'being human' in context; takes on aesthetics and gender in Maasai thought; a comparative discussion of Oruka’s and Gramsci’s approaches to the relevance of philosophy in society; a critical review of method; a comparative discussion dedicated to the project of decolonization, with a South African case study; and a conceptual reconsideration of Oruka's understanding of sages, presenting the 'pragmatic sage' as typical of the late phase of the sage philosophy project.