by Natacha Bruna Existing literature focuses primarily on the general impacts of land grabbing and their compensation mechanisms. However, pre-existing structures of inequality heavily condition and differentiate the outcomes of land expropriation and compensation mechanisms. With this in mind, this article addresses the differen- tiated impacts of such mechanisms on diverse segments of the rural…
Category: Feature
Women and Land Ownership in Zimbabwe: A Review of the Land Reforms with Particular Focus on the Fast Track Land Reform Programme
by Petronella Munemo, Joseph Manzvera, and Innocent Agbelie Mainstream scholarly debates on land ownership in Zimbabwe have long focused on racial and political divides, highlighting, in particular, the injustice and marginalisation of the black majority Zimbabweans against the white minority. For an equally long period, women’s rights to land ownership were limited by the land…
Challenging Gender Orders? Small Ruminant Husbandry Interventions in Ghana’s Upper West Region
by Patricia Abena Tawiah Aboe, Akua Opokua Britwum, and Ernest L. Okorley The popularity of development interventions as a tool for women’s empower- ment, notwithstanding their ability to achieve targeted goals, has come under scrutiny. Some researchers point out that interventions targeting empowerment tend to address women’s practical rather than their strategic needs, resulting in…
Bridging Development Interventions and Women’s Empowerment in Ghana. Reflections from Radical Feminist Perspectives
by Loretta Baidoo The popularity of development interventions as a tool for women’s empower- ment, notwithstanding their ability to achieve targeted goals, has come under scrutiny. Some researchers point out that interventions targeting empowerment tend to address women’s practical rather than their strategic needs, resulting in such interventions falling short in their attempts to transform…
COVID-19 Recovery and Beyond: An African Feminist Vision for Macroeconomic System Change
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…
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,…