This paper is centred on a conversation which I conducted with the Cameroonian artist and restitu... more This paper is centred on a conversation which I conducted with the Cameroonian artist and restitution activist Sylvie Njobati for the 2022 summer/ spring school of the International Research and Training Group ‘Transformative religion’, Njobati speaks about how she started the campaign to bring back the Ngonnso statue looted under German colonialisation from Cameroon, the significance of spiritual revitalization, and her and her comrades’ hopes for the future. The conversation is contextualised with notes on related initiatives of restitution and repair.
This article presents a set of arguments about decolonisation debates and practices in the South ... more This article presents a set of arguments about decolonisation debates and practices in the South African academy, and particularly efforts by anthropologists based at South African universities to reinvent their discipline from a 21 st century southern African perspective. I argue that the student movements of 2015-2016 were the primary cause of robust conversations about epistemological and pedagogical issues that had previously not been raised in the post-apartheid South African academy. Questions about the politics of knowledge and curriculum reform were forcefully put on the agenda by the massive movements and opened the space for intense debates about the decolonisation of academic institutions and knowledge production in teaching and research. The discussion starts with an appraisal of the student movements that called for decolonisation of teaching and research in South African universities. Debates and practical efforts of decolonising South African anthropology will be presented against the background of past and present anthropological practice in the country. Corresponding to my argument that while decolonisation is an indispensable response to colonialism and coloniality everywhere, the concepts of decolonisation have distinctive meaning in different contexts, I contend that in South Africa, as a grossly unequal society, social justice is inevitably a key element of any discussion of decolonisation. Inequalities likewise continue to manifest in and between post-apartheid universities, which I demonstrate through close descriptions of recent efforts to decolonise the production of anthropological knowledge in three South African institutions.
This contribution to the special issue on rethinking gender and time in African history (co-edite... more This contribution to the special issue on rethinking gender and time in African history (co-edited by Jonna Katto and Heike Becker) develops an argument about time and gender in African history in relation to historical sound recordings. Revisiting a case study from the Namibian sound archive I demonstrate innovative methodological strategies that open up new avenues of conceptual and theoretical thinking about gender and time in African history. Using the example of Nekwaya Loide Shikongo, a prominent woman from Ondonga in northern Namibia (the colonial 'Ovamboland'), and an epic poem on the deposed King Iipumbu yaShilongo that she performed in 1953, I discuss how gender was constituted and mediated in relation to colonial temporalities. The article presents a historical ethnography of how both the Christian mission's cultural discourse and the South African colonial administration's efforts to masculinize the 'native' political authority produced a gendered perception of Owambo women during the first half of the 20th century. However, it also demonstrates the performer's powerful, creative reappropriation of these discourses, which we can gauge by approaching the historical sound archive with a methodological strategy of 'close listening'. The argument thus extends to a broader reflection on the potential of historical sound recordings for challenging Eurocentric teleological narratives of gender and modernity. It also looks into the inherent limitations, and thus the opportunities and challenges, which the colonial sound archive presents for the development of decolonial methodologies in fields such as historical ethnography, cultural studies, and historiography.
This special issue seeks to problematize the way that time and gender-and their relationship to e... more This special issue seeks to problematize the way that time and gender-and their relationship to each other-is conceptualized in prevailing historical narratives about African pasts. Often we take these notions for granted in our practices of research and writing. Even today, histories about gender in Africa often continue to be framed by Eurocentric teleological narratives of modernity. In this special issue-that brings together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, focusing on different time periods, and using different methodological approaches-we ask what would happen if we brought the notions of time and gender into a more critical focus. How would this reshape the gendered histories we write?
This article portrays a recent movement towards intersectional activism in urban Namibia. Since 2... more This article portrays a recent movement towards intersectional activism in urban Namibia. Since 2020, young Namibian activists have come together in campaigns to decolonize public space through removing colonial monuments and renaming streets. These have been linked to enduring structural violence and issues of gender and sexuality, especially queer and women's reproductive rights politics, which have been expressly framed as perpetuated by coloniality. I argue that the Namibian protests amount to new political forms of intersectional decoloniality that challenge the notion of decolonial activism as identity politics. The Namibian case demonstrates that decolonial movements may not only emphatically not be steeped in essentialist politics but also that activists may oppose an identity-based politics which postcolonial ruling elites have promoted. I show that, for the Namibian movements' ideology and practice, a fully intersectional approach has become central. They consciously juxtapose colonial memory with a living vision for the future to confront and situate colonial and apartheid history. Young Namibian activists challenge the intersectional inequalities and injustices, which, they argue, postcolonial Namibia inherited from its colonial-apartheid past: class inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, and gender-based violence.
A few months short of the 25th anniversary of independence from South Africa in March 1990 Namibi... more A few months short of the 25th anniversary of independence from South Africa in March 1990 Namibia reached her Fanonian moment. As Achille Mbembe has explained this term with regard to the South African student movements of 2015, a new generation has entered the country’s social and political scene and has forcefully asked penetrating new questions. In Namibia this has come in the shape of the Affirmative Repositioning (AR) movement.
Global and african: Exploring Hip-Hop Artists in Philippi Township, Cape Town. In this article we... more Global and african: Exploring Hip-Hop Artists in Philippi Township, Cape Town. In this article we explore a set of issues related to the contemporary hip-hop culture in Cape Town. Firstly, we demonstrate how hip-hop as a form of popular culture and the construction of identity are linked to the specifics of ‘space and place’. We discuss different forms that the performance of hip-hop takes in different spaces in greater Cape Town. The discussion of space and the politics of culture are linked to two interrelated aspects that are particularly significant for the discussion of cultural flows and identities. In contrast to the common perception that hip-hop in Cape Town was primarily of interest among ‘coloured’ youth, our presentation focuses on young performers living in an ‘African’ township. We pay special attention to the use of language and the performance of hip-hop lyrics in African languages. Our discussion explores how the use of hybridised African languages lends support to ...
Journal of Namibian Studies : History Politics Culture, 2015
Namibia’s postcolonial nationalist imaginary is by no means homogeneous. Overall, however, it is ... more Namibia’s postcolonial nationalist imaginary is by no means homogeneous. Overall, however, it is conspicuous that as Namibia celebrates her twenty-fifth anniversary of independence, national identity is no longer defined primarily through the common history of the liberation struggle but through the tolerant accommodation, even wholehearted celebration, of cultural difference. This article attempts to understand the shifting politics and aesthetics of Namibian nationalism from two interconnected angles. On the one hand, it takes a historical perspective; it looks into shifting discourses and practices of nationalism over the past century, starting from the anti-colonial resistance at the turn to the 20th century through to the twenty-fifth anniversary of Namibian independence. On the other hand, the article investigates the cultural redefinition of the bonds between the Namibian people(s), which has been a significant aspect of the constructions of postcolonial Namibian nationhood a...
The article shows how the discourses of trauma, victimhood and silence regarding local agency con... more The article shows how the discourses of trauma, victimhood and silence regarding local agency contributed to the production of the nationalist master narrative in post-colonial Namibia. However, I point out repositories of memory beyond the narratives of victimhood and trauma, which began to add different layers to the political economy of silence and remembrance in the mid-2000s. Through revisiting visual forms of remembrance in northern Namibia an argument is developed, which challenges the dichotomy between silence and confession. It raises critical questions about the prominent place that the trauma trope has attained in memory studies, with reference to work by international memory studies scholars such as Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (1996) and South African researchers of memory politics, particularly the strategies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The fresh Namibian material supports the key critique of the TRC, which suggests that the foregrounding of pain...
This paper is centred on a conversation which I conducted with the Cameroonian artist and restitu... more This paper is centred on a conversation which I conducted with the Cameroonian artist and restitution activist Sylvie Njobati for the 2022 summer/ spring school of the International Research and Training Group ‘Transformative religion’, Njobati speaks about how she started the campaign to bring back the Ngonnso statue looted under German colonialisation from Cameroon, the significance of spiritual revitalization, and her and her comrades’ hopes for the future. The conversation is contextualised with notes on related initiatives of restitution and repair.
This article presents a set of arguments about decolonisation debates and practices in the South ... more This article presents a set of arguments about decolonisation debates and practices in the South African academy, and particularly efforts by anthropologists based at South African universities to reinvent their discipline from a 21 st century southern African perspective. I argue that the student movements of 2015-2016 were the primary cause of robust conversations about epistemological and pedagogical issues that had previously not been raised in the post-apartheid South African academy. Questions about the politics of knowledge and curriculum reform were forcefully put on the agenda by the massive movements and opened the space for intense debates about the decolonisation of academic institutions and knowledge production in teaching and research. The discussion starts with an appraisal of the student movements that called for decolonisation of teaching and research in South African universities. Debates and practical efforts of decolonising South African anthropology will be presented against the background of past and present anthropological practice in the country. Corresponding to my argument that while decolonisation is an indispensable response to colonialism and coloniality everywhere, the concepts of decolonisation have distinctive meaning in different contexts, I contend that in South Africa, as a grossly unequal society, social justice is inevitably a key element of any discussion of decolonisation. Inequalities likewise continue to manifest in and between post-apartheid universities, which I demonstrate through close descriptions of recent efforts to decolonise the production of anthropological knowledge in three South African institutions.
This contribution to the special issue on rethinking gender and time in African history (co-edite... more This contribution to the special issue on rethinking gender and time in African history (co-edited by Jonna Katto and Heike Becker) develops an argument about time and gender in African history in relation to historical sound recordings. Revisiting a case study from the Namibian sound archive I demonstrate innovative methodological strategies that open up new avenues of conceptual and theoretical thinking about gender and time in African history. Using the example of Nekwaya Loide Shikongo, a prominent woman from Ondonga in northern Namibia (the colonial 'Ovamboland'), and an epic poem on the deposed King Iipumbu yaShilongo that she performed in 1953, I discuss how gender was constituted and mediated in relation to colonial temporalities. The article presents a historical ethnography of how both the Christian mission's cultural discourse and the South African colonial administration's efforts to masculinize the 'native' political authority produced a gendered perception of Owambo women during the first half of the 20th century. However, it also demonstrates the performer's powerful, creative reappropriation of these discourses, which we can gauge by approaching the historical sound archive with a methodological strategy of 'close listening'. The argument thus extends to a broader reflection on the potential of historical sound recordings for challenging Eurocentric teleological narratives of gender and modernity. It also looks into the inherent limitations, and thus the opportunities and challenges, which the colonial sound archive presents for the development of decolonial methodologies in fields such as historical ethnography, cultural studies, and historiography.
This special issue seeks to problematize the way that time and gender-and their relationship to e... more This special issue seeks to problematize the way that time and gender-and their relationship to each other-is conceptualized in prevailing historical narratives about African pasts. Often we take these notions for granted in our practices of research and writing. Even today, histories about gender in Africa often continue to be framed by Eurocentric teleological narratives of modernity. In this special issue-that brings together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, focusing on different time periods, and using different methodological approaches-we ask what would happen if we brought the notions of time and gender into a more critical focus. How would this reshape the gendered histories we write?
This article portrays a recent movement towards intersectional activism in urban Namibia. Since 2... more This article portrays a recent movement towards intersectional activism in urban Namibia. Since 2020, young Namibian activists have come together in campaigns to decolonize public space through removing colonial monuments and renaming streets. These have been linked to enduring structural violence and issues of gender and sexuality, especially queer and women's reproductive rights politics, which have been expressly framed as perpetuated by coloniality. I argue that the Namibian protests amount to new political forms of intersectional decoloniality that challenge the notion of decolonial activism as identity politics. The Namibian case demonstrates that decolonial movements may not only emphatically not be steeped in essentialist politics but also that activists may oppose an identity-based politics which postcolonial ruling elites have promoted. I show that, for the Namibian movements' ideology and practice, a fully intersectional approach has become central. They consciously juxtapose colonial memory with a living vision for the future to confront and situate colonial and apartheid history. Young Namibian activists challenge the intersectional inequalities and injustices, which, they argue, postcolonial Namibia inherited from its colonial-apartheid past: class inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, and gender-based violence.
A few months short of the 25th anniversary of independence from South Africa in March 1990 Namibi... more A few months short of the 25th anniversary of independence from South Africa in March 1990 Namibia reached her Fanonian moment. As Achille Mbembe has explained this term with regard to the South African student movements of 2015, a new generation has entered the country’s social and political scene and has forcefully asked penetrating new questions. In Namibia this has come in the shape of the Affirmative Repositioning (AR) movement.
Global and african: Exploring Hip-Hop Artists in Philippi Township, Cape Town. In this article we... more Global and african: Exploring Hip-Hop Artists in Philippi Township, Cape Town. In this article we explore a set of issues related to the contemporary hip-hop culture in Cape Town. Firstly, we demonstrate how hip-hop as a form of popular culture and the construction of identity are linked to the specifics of ‘space and place’. We discuss different forms that the performance of hip-hop takes in different spaces in greater Cape Town. The discussion of space and the politics of culture are linked to two interrelated aspects that are particularly significant for the discussion of cultural flows and identities. In contrast to the common perception that hip-hop in Cape Town was primarily of interest among ‘coloured’ youth, our presentation focuses on young performers living in an ‘African’ township. We pay special attention to the use of language and the performance of hip-hop lyrics in African languages. Our discussion explores how the use of hybridised African languages lends support to ...
Journal of Namibian Studies : History Politics Culture, 2015
Namibia’s postcolonial nationalist imaginary is by no means homogeneous. Overall, however, it is ... more Namibia’s postcolonial nationalist imaginary is by no means homogeneous. Overall, however, it is conspicuous that as Namibia celebrates her twenty-fifth anniversary of independence, national identity is no longer defined primarily through the common history of the liberation struggle but through the tolerant accommodation, even wholehearted celebration, of cultural difference. This article attempts to understand the shifting politics and aesthetics of Namibian nationalism from two interconnected angles. On the one hand, it takes a historical perspective; it looks into shifting discourses and practices of nationalism over the past century, starting from the anti-colonial resistance at the turn to the 20th century through to the twenty-fifth anniversary of Namibian independence. On the other hand, the article investigates the cultural redefinition of the bonds between the Namibian people(s), which has been a significant aspect of the constructions of postcolonial Namibian nationhood a...
The article shows how the discourses of trauma, victimhood and silence regarding local agency con... more The article shows how the discourses of trauma, victimhood and silence regarding local agency contributed to the production of the nationalist master narrative in post-colonial Namibia. However, I point out repositories of memory beyond the narratives of victimhood and trauma, which began to add different layers to the political economy of silence and remembrance in the mid-2000s. Through revisiting visual forms of remembrance in northern Namibia an argument is developed, which challenges the dichotomy between silence and confession. It raises critical questions about the prominent place that the trauma trope has attained in memory studies, with reference to work by international memory studies scholars such as Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (1996) and South African researchers of memory politics, particularly the strategies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The fresh Namibian material supports the key critique of the TRC, which suggests that the foregrounding of pain...
Namibia was South Africa’s testing ground for its ambitious apartheid dreams. South Africa’s colo... more Namibia was South Africa’s testing ground for its ambitious apartheid dreams. South Africa’s colonial connection with Namibia, then the mandated territory of South West Africa (SWA), is today often either ignored or dismissed, even by historians of apartheid. The Namibian-born and bred anthropologist Robert J. (Rob) Gordon’s latest book aims to redress this fault by demonstrating the significance of colonised Namibia for the development of apartheid. The narrative revolves around the role of so-called ‘native’ experts.
AFRICA - Journal of the International African Institute , 2020
Review of Elaine Salo's posthumously published monograph on personhood and gender in Manenberg t... more Review of Elaine Salo's posthumously published monograph on personhood and gender in Manenberg township
Reviewing Robert J. Gordon's biography of Max Gluckman, which points out the context and importan... more Reviewing Robert J. Gordon's biography of Max Gluckman, which points out the context and importance of early radical anthropology in South and Southern Africa
Review of the collection "Postcolonial African Anthropologies", ed. by Rose Boswell and Francis N... more Review of the collection "Postcolonial African Anthropologies", ed. by Rose Boswell and Francis Nyamnjoh
Review of "National liberation in postcolonial Southern Africa: a historical ethnography of SWAPO... more Review of "National liberation in postcolonial Southern Africa: a historical ethnography of SWAPO's exile camps" by Christian A Williams
Identity, Inc. :A critical review of publications in identity-talk and market research in South A... more Identity, Inc. :A critical review of publications in identity-talk and market research in South Africa
A substantive review of African Gender Studies; reviews a collection of iconic texts in African G... more A substantive review of African Gender Studies; reviews a collection of iconic texts in African Gender Studies, edited by Andrea Cornwall
Student Protests in the Global South: Annotated sources (1918-2018), 2019
A unique reader containing annotated sources on student protests in the Global South (1918-2018).... more A unique reader containing annotated sources on student protests in the Global South (1918-2018). The focus os on primary sources that voice and perform critique and protest in Latin America, Africa and South Asia. Also includes introductory articles on the question of how global was "1968", on university reform and student movements in Latin America, on Africa's 1968: Protests across the continent, and on South African student protests, 1968-2016.
Uploads
Papers by Heike A Becker