Abstract: At every stage of Italian colonialism in Somalia, that is, from the period of company rule to that of direct administration, the colonial state grappled with the existential question of how to mobilize the labor of colonized subjects. The commodification of labor to meet the needs of the colonial state, as well as those of settler and metropolitan capital, developed in pace with the expansion of colonial occupation. While the first administrations’ labor policies were often haphazard and contingent on immediate needs, by the early 1930s, the state developed a centralized system of labor recruitment built upon the racialized hierarchy of the colony. This paper examines how the labor system engendered a kind of colonial subjecthood based on noble and non-noble labor or free and forced labor. The two main categories of recruited workers—military/police and agricultural labor—mapped onto the colonial state’s racialized division of the colonized: the warrior and servile races.
Iman Mohamed is a doctoral candidate in History at Harvard University. Her dissertation project, “Racializing Soomaalinimo: Labor and Race in Somalia Italiana,” examines the formation of Somali categories of belonging under Italian rule, tracing it through the afterlife of slavery, post-emancipation labor regimes, and colonial race science. Iman holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an A.M. in history from Harvard University. Her work on Italian colonialism in Somalia, architecture, and memory has been published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and The Drift. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Harvard Center for European Studies, and the Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
MARCH 25: Danson Sylvester Kahyana
Presenting: Uganda’s Anti Homosexuality Act (2023) as a Threat to Political and Artistic Freedoms
Abstract: On May 26, 2023, Uganda’s President, General Yoweri Museveni, assented to the Anti-Homosexuality Act (2023), thereby bringing into force a law that has been considered perhaps the most severe in the world, what with its provision for the death penalty and long prison sentences for certain homosexual acts. In this paper, I examine the threats to political and artistic freedoms that the law poses. I argue that while the law claims to defend African morality, its actual intent is to curtail political dissent by punishing people who are targeted not just for their sexuality, but also for their critical views. The data I work with come from different sources – the experience of a former student of mine (whose Undergraduate project was pulled down the University library website because the librarians were afraid its homoerotic content would get them into trouble); interviews with some writers and political activists, and a close reading of the law and relevant literature. In my analysis, I draw from Michel Foucault’s book, Discipline and Punish (to underline the repressive aspects of the law) and Homi K. Bhabha’s essay, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation” (to tease out the paradoxes inherent in the law – producing one morally upright Uganda while scattering several minorities).
Danson Sylvester Kahyana is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literature, Makerere University, Uganda. He holds a PhD in English Studies from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. His critical work has appeared in English in Africa, Journal of African Cultural Studies, and Social Dynamics, among others. He is a recipient of the Social Science Research Council’s African Peacebuilding Network (APN) Individual Research Fellowship (2022), the Fulbright Research Fellowship (2020), and the American Council of Learned Societies’ African Humanities Programme Postdoctoral Fellowship (2015), among others. He is President Emeritus, Ugandan PEN, and a former Board member, PEN International. He is currently a scholar at risk at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.
APRIL 8: Bintu Zahara Sakor
Presenting: Breaking Barriers? Armed Conflict and Women’s Labor Force Participation in Mali
Abstract: Do gender relations and, in particular, women’s labor force participation changes during armed conflict? How does the interactions between armed conflict processes and prewar norms shape the trajectory of women’s participation in the labor force? This article uses a mixed method design to examine these propositions. Building on the result from the statistical analysis of the correlation between armed conflict and female labor force participation, the article further draws on analysis from interviews and focus-group discussions from fieldwork in Bamako, Mali between April and May 2022. It finds that the interaction of armed conflict processes such as the intensity and existing patriarchy has resulted in a lack of positive changes in labor force participation among women in Mali, and with them the possibility of exerting greater economic autonomy and contributing to attain a potential gender dividend. This research sheds light on the role of ordinary women as actors whose access to workforce opportunities is challenged in the context of a security crisis, despite their aspirations. Bridging a gap in the literature, the article describes how gender relations and roles are intertwined into a complex web of cause and effect in which armed conflict can be seen as a ‘pattern of conflict and patriarchies’.
Bintu Zahara Sakor is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and University of Oslo (UiO)’s Department of Political Science, Norway. Her key research areas include Political and Economic Development of Sub-Saharan Africa, and she is particularly interested in Demography, Youth bulges, Gender and Conflict Dynamics in West Africa (and Sahel region). Her dissertation titled: “Unlocking Sub-Saharan Africa’s Demographic Dividend: Youth bulges, Human Capital and Insecurity” focuses on how SSA countries can effectively channel their youth human resources into development and avoid the security pitfalls. Zahara received her B.A. in International Relations and Quantitative Methods (2016) and MSc in Conflict Resolution (2017) from University of Essex, United Kingdom, and is currently a visiting fellow at Harvard University Center for African Studies.
APRIL 22: Bulelani Jili
Presenting: Making Digital Development
Abstract: This work examines the nature of faith in the technological fix and the consequences of Kenya’s global engagements with corporate and foreign partners in the pursuit of digital development. Amidst a range of various kinds of technical artifacts, I focus here on Information and Communications Technology (ICT), which has been the focal point of the most extravagant hopes for enhancing state capacity to maintain social order and catalyze development. As such, it has also been a generative site, which has inspired the greatest trepidation over its capabilities to augment Chinese state espionage, enhance the control of authoritarian states, and expand Beijing’s imperial reach. Thus far, a limited number of studies have drawn attention to the multiple uses, proprieties, and meanings of Chinese ICT in African local environments. Put more concretely, this work explores how digital tools are constructed as modalities of social intervention. These modalities, I show, obfuscate the local contingents that maintain development challenges, but also add to the fiction of technology as a smoothly functioning instrument that accords a reliable solution to development’s tardiness in Africa. In this view, the object of postcolonial thought is in part about disrupting the teleological presumptions of modernity. Accordingly, problematizing the entangled peripheral and core (Wallerstein, 1979), contingencies that make neocolonialism resilient. Scholars like Bhabha (1994) call for intellection to be derivative of observations made from the periphery. As such, this peripheral angle of vision seeks to provincialize Europe and demystify China in Africa as a way to recover endogenous ways of seeing whose genealogies do not simply stretch back to the Enlightenment. To critique presuppositions surrounding technologies’ promises and the speculated futures that are embedded in its installation, it offers a decentered or “ex-centric” way of seeing that unpacks the work of technology while also making possible an ethnographic exercise to capture African experiences of digital development.
Bulelani Jili is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, where he is a Meta Research PhD Fellow. His research interests span Africa-China relations, cybersecurity, ICT development, law, and more. He is also a Fellow at Yale Law School, the Atlantic Council, and the Belfer Center, and he is conducting research with the China, Law, Development project at Oxford University, aiming to understand the nature of the order that underlies China’s new globalism. He has advised leading think tanks and governments, and his writing has appeared in publications including African Affairs, Nature, South China Morning Post, The Economist, Mail and Guardian, and Politico. Prior to attending Harvard, Bulelani worked at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in South Africa as a Visiting Researcher. He earned an M.Phil. from Cambridge University, an M.A. in Economics from Yenching Academy of Peking University, and an A.B. honors, in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Wesleyan University, where he was a Pfeiffer scholar.
APRIL 29: Stefan Chavez-Norgaard
Presenting: Repurposing and Contesting the ‘Territorial-Scale Peri-Urban’ in Mahikeng, South Africa
Abstract: This paper looks territorially at present-day Mahikeng, South Africa in relationship to Johannesburg and Pretoria, finding longstanding patterns of peripheralization and dependency that are dynamic, contested, and ongoing. That contestation is expressed in part through residents’ repurposing of apartheid-era built sites. Mahikeng was a receiving site of apartheid-era “displaced urbanization” (Mosiane and Götz, 2022) as part of Mmabatho, pre-planned capital of the Bophuthatswana ‘Bantustan.’ South African ‘Bantustans’ were created in the 1960s and 1970s through forced relocation and dispossession to ‘Native lands,’ and illegitimately declared self-governing entities or ‘independent republics’ until the end of apartheid. In contrast to scholarship framing these spaces mainly as ‘dumping grounds,’ I seek to humanize enclaves of dispossession as sites of city living by exploring repurposings. I define “repurposings” as actions to transform urban space in accordance with visions or vernacular uses of space other than those originally anticipated by professional planners. Ordinary South African residents leverage changing planning processes when repurposing. What emerges are heterogenous aesthetic and symbolic forms of “displaced urbanism” (Mosiane and Götz, 2022). Focusing on institutional and relational planning in Mahikeng, I ask: how and why do residents repurpose space? With what consequences? Methods include archival research, semi-structured interviews, and in situ analyses of built structures. I find that across institutional moments, Mahikeng’s built form is informed by relationships with sites of surplus accumulation. Residents’ reappropriations of apartheid-era spaces are themselves ‘classed’ and divergent phenomena, and are culturally and socioeconomically grounded, revealing multiple ambiguous meanings to ‘territorial-scale peri-urban’ spaces today.
Stefan Chavez-Norgaard is a PhD Candidate in Urban Planning at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP). For the 2023–2024 academic year, Stefan is an in-resident scholar at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, supporting the Institute’s work in Africa, and a Democracy Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center. Stefan’s research interests include urban and planning theory, local-government and planning law, and mixed-methods research focused on planning practice and urban governance in the related but distinct late-liberal contexts of South Africa and the United States. Stefan is passionate about participatory democracy and how cities’ public/private arrangements affect equitable and sustainable urban development. His dissertation examines areas of apartheid-era forced relocation in South Africa and how master plans have been implemented and repurposed in these geographies by residents and planners.