by Wangari Kinoti and Fatimah Kelleher This article provides an analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on the lives of women in Africa and the extent to which government policies designed to respond to the social and economic shocks caused by the pandemic have addressed wider, persistent gender inequalities. We argue that while there have…
Category: Feature
Negotiating Spaces, Exercising Agency, and Managing Multiple Roles: The Lived Experiences of University of Ghana Women Academics under COVID-19
by Mjiba Frehiwot, Deborah Atobrah and Irene Appeaning-Addo This article interrogates the lived experiences of women academics at the University of Ghana (UG) between March 2020 and March 2021. It highlights their emotions and care decisions as they navigated through the multiple spheres of their lives – physical, emotional, and financial – while meeting the…
Gender Blind Spots in COVID-19 Containment and Mitigation Measures in Burkina Faso and Ghana
by Akosua K. Darkwah, Dorte Thorsen and Madeleine Wayack Pambè AbstractThis article unpacks the gendered impacts of the containment and mitigation measures adopted in many countries to deal with the pandemic. Based on detailed data on the inclusivity of measures taken to contain the outbreak of COVID-19 in Burkina Faso and Ghana and the mitigation…
“How to Save the World from Aliens, Yet Keep Their Infrastructure”: Repurposing the “Master’s House” in The Wormwood Trilogy
By Jenna N. Hanchey and Godfried Asante AbstractIn this essay, we examine the figure of Oyin Da in Tade Thompson’s The Wormwood Trilogy to demonstrate how Africanfuturism uses colonial infrastructure—or “the master’s house”—in queer ways to resist neocolonialism and produce decolonial contexts of queer and feminist African life. Drawing on Audre Lorde’s often cited quote,…
When the Lagoons Remember: An Afroqueer Futurist Reading of “Blue Ecologies of Agitation”
By Kwame Edwin Otu AbstractIn this essay, I conduct an afroqueer futurist reading of e-waste ecologies in postcolonial Ghana. I bring ethnographic observations undertaken at the Agbogbloshie e-waste dump, arguably the world’s largest e-waste dump, inconversation with Nnedi Okorafor’s feminist and Africanfuturist novel, Lagoon, which focuses on the environmental consequences of petrochemical capitalism in Nigeria….
“One Foot on the Other Side”: An Africanfuturist Reading of Irenosen Okojie’s Butterfly Fish (2015) and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018)
By Kelsey Ann McFaul AbstractThis essay argues that Africanfuturism is present in a much wider range of African literature than just those texts with science-fictional or speculative themes. Rather, Africanfuturism is a method of storytelling and of literary criticism that centres African ways of being and thinking and, against inherited traditions that render them science-fictional,…
Haunted Airports and Sexual Anxieties in Nana Nyarko Boateng’s “Swallowing Ice”
by Delali Kumavie AbstractThis essay argues that the airport is an international borderland where the nation attempts to position itself within the futural orientation of transit while also making gestures to cement its sovereignty. Drawing on Ghanaian writer Nana Nyarko Boateng’s short story, “Swallowing Ice”, which tells the story of two women Frenchkissing at the…
Africanfuturism and the Reframing of Gender in the Fiction of Nnedi Okorafor
By Arit Oku AbstractMarvel’s Black Panther movie, released in 2018, sparked renewed interest in the genre of science fiction (SF), particularly in Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism (AF) as SF subgenres that promote Black and African themes and heritage. This study delineates the similarities and differences between Afrofuturism and AF using two writings by Nnedi Okorafor to…
Contextualising Extractivism in Africa
By Charmaine Pereira and Dzodzi Tsikata AbstractThis article contextualises the phenomenon of extractivism in Africa, exploring the extent to which the different meanings of extractivism in the literature contribute to an understanding of its gendered character. We argue that extractivism is embedded in the changing dynamics of contemporary capitalism and configured differently in diverse social…
Reclaiming Our Land and Labour: Women’s Resistance to Extractivist Agriculture in South-eastern Ghana
By Gertrude Dzifa Torvikey AbstractNeoliberal development projects have invaded multiple spaces. In rural areas, women’s livelihood activities are targets for interventions in the name of poverty reduction and this is often conveyed through commercial agricultural production schemes. These initiatives have become the source of tension between householdbased production and capitalist production systems. This qualitative research…