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- Convenors:
-
David O'Kane
(Nelson Mandela University)
Dmitry Bondarenko
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- Chair:
-
Winfred Nyokabi Kiranga
(NomadIT)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
- Location:
- Historicum, 3.19
- Sessions:
- Thursday 23 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
Short Abstract
Global polarisation threatens today's changing Africa with new shocks from without and within. This panel invites papers from any subfield or African region that deal with the uses of tradition and neotraditionalism in response to such challenges. Both contemporary and historical cases are welcome.
Long Abstract
The concepts of "tradition" and "neotraditionalism" are as diverse as the realities they define: implied in the concept of the invention of tradition is the idea that traditions can evolve and change, even if such changes imply that traditions are not handed down from the past in pristine form or condition. In the case of Africa, the exogenous shocks of colonialism and imperialist partition presented a particular challenge to the transmission of tradition from past generations to future ones, with particular implications for local cultures: today, as the world becomes, at the same time,increasingly polarised and multipolar, new and unpredictable shocks may threaten the continent from without and within. This is especially so given the superpower rivalries that may make Africa, once again, a zone of geopolitical competition, with unpredictable outcomes for the continent and its peoples. Our panel invites papers that deal with the uses of tradition and neotraditionalism in responding to those challenges. Since the beginning of political decolonization of Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, tradition has been seen as a source of cultural and ideological decolonization, or as a major obstacle to independent nation-building. Attempts to deploy tradition for political purposes may overlap with religious or other social uses of tradition: and tradition may well become a tool of political action in a multi-polarising world, and whose challenges for Africa may not yet be fully understood. Papers submitted for this panel may deal with these issues from any theoretical perspective, and may do so from the ground-up level of the grassroots, or from the point of view of nation-states and the political elites who control them. Papers submitted for this panel may come from any subfield of anthropology, may deal with any location in Africa, and may be concerned with contemporary or historical cases.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Thursday 23 July, 2026, -Paper long abstract
Drawing from a Bachelor thesis and Regional Development paper titled "Tourism evolution from urban settlements to sub-urban and rural communities: A case study on the regional development of South African tourism".
The focus of this research was to use qualitative research approach in examining the perceptions and ideologies of local sustainable development in specific South African townships of Alexandra and Kathorus (Vosloorus, Thokoza and Katlehong). The paper concentrates on stakeholders that actively have businesses in these townships which are service centred. Tourism sector relevancy (e.g., hospitality, events) was used to centralise the focus study including municipalities which cover these townships.
Providing an intensive understanding of the grievances faced by township locals as shared by stakeholders, necessity of state involvement in local sustainable development, stakeholder contribution to township societies, and the suggestions including goals which these businesses seek to see and achieve through township tourism and community engagement.
Paper short abstract
Issues of "tradition" and its political role are often implied in debates over nationalism and nation-building. This paper considers the Sierra Leonean experience of these issues via a discussion of the relationship between language, class and nationalism in Sierra Leone's post-colonial context.
Paper long abstract
Language, Class and Nationalism: this triad has played a key role in contemporary political phenomena. In the case of Africa, nation-building has often been perceived as difficult due to the heterogeneity of African populations, which includes linguistic heterogeneity. Development, has meanwhile, been considered a matter of class, whether in the Marxian sense, or in the sense implied in the hypothesis that new "middle classes" will provide a basis for politically stable and economically growing nation-states. This paper, which is part of a work in progress, will discuss the real complexities involved in the language-class-nationalism triad, with regard to the specific case of Sierra Leone. In that West African state, over 12 languages exist in a "language ecology", emerging issues of social class coexist with older forms of social identification and stratification, and the project of building a Sierra Leonean nation-state continues as the country moves into an uncertain future. This paper will contend that possible outcomes of this project cannot be understood by models imported from other contexts, but that the nature of that outcome will be shaped by the particular nature of the language-class-nationalism relationship.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how moral economies of care are negotiated amid everyday violence in diasporic and transnational contexts. It advances a theory of diasporic ethics, in which the pervasive structures of inequity and neglect underpin everyday ethical decision among post-colonial communities.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how the moral economies of care are negotiated amid the slow erosion enacted by everyday violence in diasporic and transnational contexts. It advances a theory of diasporic ethics, in which aspirations, orientations, imaginations, and translations of values are entangled with the pervasive structures of inequity and neglect that underpin everyday ethical decision among post-colonial communities.
Drawing on long-term anthropological fieldwork with Yoruba women and their families in London and Nigeria, the paper explores how mothers’ narratives of loss generate shifting alignments and polarisations in moral judgment. It centres on one Yoruba woman who loses her firstborn child to the consternation of religious female peers, and a decade later, deliberates whether to attend the funeral of a female pastor’s son. “That Oyinbo land has changed her”, is a third-person narrative the mother projects onto herself, voicing collective judgment while simultaneously resisting it. The utterance reveals how collective moral voices inhabit the everyday (Mattingly 2014) through narrative (Das 2012) and practice.
At the same time, the narrative demonstrates how violence is recast through a ‘new lexicon of moral sentiments’ (Fassin 2012), in which structural inequities are translated into personal moral failings, and community alienation for perceived moral wrongs is construed as care. By combining ethnography with attention to narrative and ethical entanglements lived and enacted, this paper reveals how moral economies of care emerge within, and in response to, structural violence, and how judgment and moral repair among post colonial communities are underpinned by a recognition of shared precarity.
Paper short abstract
This paper seeks to interrogate the definition of development as seen from the experience and livelihood of the pastoralist communities in Laikipia, Kenya. Indigenous communities have often times been viewed as rejecting development projects, however, this is not mutually real.
Paper long abstract
Although millions of dollars are poured into "developing" pastoralists by NGOs and governments, often the results are not as expected. Is it that they can't be developed or is it that their definition of developed does not fit into contemporary capitalism? Or is it that they can only be developed and no one seems to know how to do it or is it that many of them are actually "developed" but the focus is only on those seen to be less developed? There has been a continuous fight between the natives in Laikipia, and parts of Samburu with the white settlers in recent years. The narrative has always been that the indigenous people are ‘savages’ who cannot coexist with other locals. This principate another issue; Kenya was colonized from 1920 until 1963, which is only forty years under foreign governance.