Poop by Joshua Grace
For colonial officials in British East Africa, African excrement endangered public health because Africans were reckless defecators. The world was their toilet, and they simply went where they…
Tag: Africa
Dump by Anne Berg
South Africa, 1994. Apartheid before, democracy after. Nonetheless, obstinate continuities stretch across this important rupture. Bisasar Road Landfill, the largest registered landfill on the A…
Port by Jatin Dua
Indian Ocean port cities are worlds of coral and glass. Consider Lamu or Zanzibar on the East African coast with their labyrinthine old towns where ornate buildings made…
Urban by Claudia Gastrow
In July 2015 a Facebook campaign entitled selfie lixo (garbage selfie) was launched in Angola. It asked people to pose in front of piles of uncollected garbage in…
Detritus by Sharad Chari
I employed the category ‘detritus’ in the early 2000s to diagnose the different kinds of residues of racial capitalism with which people struggled in the shadows of South…
‘On paper’ and ‘having papers’: migrants navigating medical xenophobia and obstetric rights in South Africa by Tamuka Chekero
Chekero met Pauline at a local pharmacy in Giyani, a small town in the north-east of the Limpopo Province of South Africa. The area is best known to…
Waste by Jennifer Wenzel
Waste is a tricky word. In our meditations in Somatosphere, waste hews toward its concrete sense as discard: material byproducts of some transformative process, metabolic or mechanical; things…
Shifting Perspectives: The Man in Africa Hall at the American Museum of Natural History at 50
The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in NY circa 2000. Photo from Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. The “Man in Africa Hall” at the American Museum…
Toxicity by Danny Hoffman
1. Toxicity names forces for which there is no remediation. Ibrahim is a tour guide in the Senegalese capital, Dakar. His carefully crafted tour takes you around the…
Toxicity, Waste, Detritus: An Introduction by Pamila Gupta
Planet Earth has entered the time of the Anthropocene. For natural scientists, this means that human activity, taken as a whole, has come to rival geological and biophysical…
Mothers Matter: Developing the ‘Waiting Mother’ by Kylie Marais
“Waiting indicates that we are engaged in, and have expectations from, life; that we are on the lookout for what life is going to throw our way” (Hage,…
When the Bulldozer comes – Burning bridges or renaissance in the making?
Kai Roder, University of Leipzig For over a decade the Tanzanian state has tried to enlarge its share of mineral revenues generated by foreign large-scale mining (LSM) companies.…
Guest Post: An Encounter with Basket Traditions in Zanzibar City
I am very happy to here share a guest post by Kurt Dewhurst and Marsha MacDowell of the Michigan State University Museum, East Lansing, Michigan, USA. Traditions of handmade, woven…
Do All African Immigrants Arrive Sick, Desperate, and Empty-Handed on the Shores of Europe? Ask Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg!
The lives, status, and image of immigrants may constitute the single-most urgent human issue of our time. In an arresting and captivating new study of Cameroonian mothers now…
Transnational Scientific Projects and Racial Politics: The KEMRI Six Case Against the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Contemporary Kenya
Hide Press Release (2 Less Words) Denielle Elliott The Supreme Court of Kenya: Lawyer Ogutu, Sam Gwer, Lawyer Chigiti, Michael Mwaniki, and Moses Ndiritu (left to right), taken…
the congo dandies
Description by RT Documentaries: ““La Sape” is a unique movement based in Congo that unites fashion-conscious men who are ready to splurge money they don’t really have…
Some Baskets at Work in Zanzibar
Marsha MacDowell and Kurt Dewhurst kindly shared these photographs of work baskets in Zanzibar. The images were taken while they were visiting Tanzania as part of a large…
‘A bit of a compromise’: Coming to terms with an emergency caesarean section by Terena Koster
During the midwife-hosted antenatal class Cath attended in a private hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, where she would eventually give birth, pregnant women were encouraged to name…
Nigerian migrant women as subjects: Sex work in fiction
Anti-trafficking campaigners often single out Nigerian women as the worst case of what they call sex trafficking. I first wrote about this years ago and note that, despite…
Nigerian migrant women as subjects: Sex work in fiction
Anti-trafficking campaigners often single out Nigerian women as the worst case of what they call sex trafficking. I first wrote about this years ago and note that, despite…
The Refugee in Anthropological Perspective
Over the past decade, we have witnessed new and ongoing crises around the world that have forced many people to uproot their lives in order to seek refuge…
Book review: Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa by Damien Droney
Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa Paul Wenzel Geissler, Guillaume Lachenal, John Manton, and Noémi Tousignant, editors Intellect Ltd./University of Chicago Press, 2016,…
Stakes of Life: Science, states, policies, publics and ‘the first thousand days’ by Fiona C. Ross
Welcome back to the “First Thousand Days of Life” Somatosphere series. Here we continue to explore the ways that a global health initiative driven by new findings in…
Negotiating Mozambique’s new commodity frontiers from the perspective of a conservationist
By Kate Symons, University of Edinburgh. [C]onservation is not a priority….. they [Frelimo] want economic growth at any point. So if they find …… coal and gas and…