African Languages and Societies Commons^™

Kofifi/Covfefe: How The Costumes Of "Sophiatown" Bring 1950s South Africa To Western Massachusetts In 2020, Emma Hollows

Masters Theses

This thesis paper reflects upon the costume design process taken by Emma Hollows to produce a realist production of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company’s musical Sophiatown at the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts in May 2020. Sophiatown follows a household forcibly removed from their homes by the Native Resettlement Act of 1954 amid apartheid in South Africa. The paper discusses her attempts as a costume designer to strike a balance between replicating history and making artistic changes for theatre, while always striving to create believable characters.

Le Conte Africain Dans L’Enseignement Du Francais : Aspects Socio-Educatifs Et Exemples Pratiques, Maguette Diame

Masters Theses

Ce mémoire explore le rôle du conte dans l’enseignement de la langue française. L’étude se focalise sur les aspects culturels, socio-éducatifs et didactique des contes en se focalisant sur le conte Africain d’expression française. Pour ce faire, l’étude a d’abord revu des articles et ouvrages pertinents à la littérature africaine d’expression orale y compris le conte avant d’explorer la place du conte dans la littérature africaine d’expression française. Cette revue de la littérature montre différentes approches utilisées par les écrivains pour inclure les contes dans la littérature. Le recueil de contes et l’intertextualité sont les formes les plus présentes dans …

Food Justice And Practices In The Five Points Community Of Knoxville, Tennessee: A Survey Of Residents Living In An Urban Food Desert, Sylvia Isabel Duluc-Silva

Masters Theses

This thesis identifies the views related to traditional and alternative food systems and practices among residents living in East Knoxville, Tennessee, which has been designated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) as a food desert. These views were obtained from a mail survey sent out to adult residents living in the community who were responsible for obtaining food for their household. Its foundation is based on general place-based theory and findings associated with environmental and food justice literature. It builds upon this work by identifying and describing key variables and how they may be related via a theoretical …

A Multidimensional Analysis Of The Great Green Wall: The Environmental And Social Effects Of Reafforestation In Senegal, Anna Eugenia Alsobrook

Masters Theses

The north-central region of Senegal is home to the Great Green Wall (GGW)—a reafforestation project aimed at restoring decades–old, degraded land conditions by establishing tree belts and community gardens. Its presence on the ground has changed the local landscape and altered the social institutions governing the daily lives of the people it aims to protect.

My study is an in-progress assessment of the GGW towards its two major goals: 1) improving the lives of the people of the Sahel and increasing their capacity to adapt to climate change and drought, and 2) improving the state of the ecosystem and increasing …

Credit Card System In Ghana: An Investigation Of Why Credit Cardsare Not Widely Used In Ghana And How Widespread Use May Be Implemented, Emmanuel Andoh

Masters Theses

Credit card systems offer economic advantages to many families and individuals across the globe. In economically developed countries and most emerging ones, the credit card system helps individuals, businesses, and even government agencies, speed up business transactions and access to short term loans. However in developing countries such as Ghana this is not the case. The result is that many people find it very difficult to buy goods and services without having cash at hand. Moreover a vast majority of people have to carry bags of money to travel across cities, towns and villages in the country to trade and …

"The World Adrift In Emptiness": Crossing The Abyss Of Transition In Four Tragedies By Wole Soyinka, Michael H. Lake

Masters Theses

1986 Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, Nigerian dramatist, poet, essayist and novelist, names the Yoruba god, Ogun, as his tragic muse for ritual theatre in "The Fourth Stage," his early artistic manifesto. In this essay Soyinka maintains that in contrast to Dionysus, Nietzsche's hero in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Ogun balances within himself elements that could be described as Dionysian, Apollonian, and Promethean. Archetypally, Ogun thus constitutes a destructive-creative unity which overcomes the dyad of good-versus-evil of Europe's Christian civilization.

For this reason, Soyinka upholds Ogun not only as a natural patron of tragedy …

Oedipal Identity And The Freudian Construction Of Orality In Okot P'Bitek's Song Of Lawino And Song Of Ocol, Paul Kent Oakley

Masters Theses

In Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, Ocol and Lawino, presenting themselves as a university-educated man and his non-literate village wife, argue the various merits and failings of traditional, Acholi village life and modern, Westernized life. Accompanying this sociopolitical argument is the personal, emotional conflict between the two: Ocol is rejecting Lawino in favor of a Westernized second-wife, but Lawino refuses to leave him, trying instead to coerce him into returning, body and soul, to her bed. The scenario seems straightforward. But below this superficial reading is a more complex one in which Lawino is Ocol’s …