African Languages and Societies Commons^™

Kabou Dechire Le Certificat D'Innocence De L'Afrique? (Review Of Et Si L'Afrique Refusait Le Développement By Axelle Kabou), Kasongo Mulenda Kapanga

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Pourquoi I' Afrique est-elle sous développée? En repondant a cette question, Axelle Kabou fait d'une pierre deux coups. D'abord, elle émet une thèse d'après laquelle I'Afrique refuserait de se développer à cause de sa léthargie. Ensuite, elle fait un réquisitoire severe en désignant du doigt I' Africain lui-meme comme source de son retard. Le refus de développement, explique-t-elle, vient d'une fausse conception manichéiste qui voit en I' Afrique une antithèse de I' Europe. Par consequent, tout emprunt des valeurs européennes indispensables au développement est vu avec méfiance. C'est ainsi qu' «à peine sortie du monde manichéiste pré-colonial, I' Afrique a …

Book Review: Geometry From Africa: Mathematical And Educational Explorations By Paulus Gerdes, Claudia Zaslavsky

Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal

No abstract provided.

Cross Racial Preferences In Viewing Sexually Explicit Material: A Comparison Between African-American And Caucasian Males, Boyd Randal Horton

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present study investigated that extent to which the race of actors in an erotic video affected sexual arousal in African-American and Caucasian heterosexual males. It was hypothesized that the two racial groups would be significantly more sexually aroused while watching their respective homoethnic erotic video. The hypothesis was grounded in the modeling effects of Bandura's Social Leaning Theory (1977), the Matching Hypothesis (1982) and worldview differences between African-Americans and Caucasians (Baldwin and Bell, 1985). Thirty-four African-American and Caucasian males were shown homoethnic and non-homoethnic erotic videos while penile circumference, systolic and diastolic blood pressures, and self-report ratings of sexual …

African Film: A Dynamic Medium For A High School French Class Cultural Curriculum, Denise Elizabeth Dunn Barstow-Girel

MA TESOL Collection

Culture can be an integral part of the French foreign language class when students learn French language and Francophone culture through a content-based approach using the medium of African films. Founded on the pedagogical value of a thematic study of issues aimed at raising linguistic, cultural, and global awareness in adolescent, fourth or fifth year high school French students, I developed this cultural curriculum focused on Francophone African culture. While learning the French language, students will gain knowledge of West African cultures including historical aspects, and the role of the French language in this region.

Survey Of Nigerian University Student Affairs Services: A Comparison Of Students' Perceived Service Importance And The Students' Level Of Satisfaction, Michael Adewale Adeniyi

Dissertations

Problem. Nigerian university student-affairs serviceshave been characterized by negative campus activism, violent demonstrations, and the destruction of lives and properties, the result of which led to the closing down of many Nigerian universities. Thus far, little empirical data exist regarding the student personnel servicesavailable to students at Nigerian universities, the importance of student-affairs services, or the level of student satisfaction with these services.

Methods. A quantitative survey methodology was used to assess 35 student-affairs services. A developed and validated survey instrument, the Student ServicesQuestionnaire (SSQ), was administered to collect data from currently registered undergraduate and graduate students of …

Reviewed Work: The Housemaid By Amma Darko, Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith

Goodrich Scholarship Faculty Publications

A relative newcomer to the Ghanaian fiction-writing scene, Amma Darko is the author of a 1991 novel published in German and then issued in 1995 in its original English as Beyond the Horizon (see WLT 72:2, p.468).

Nadine Gordimer's Fictional Selves: Can A White Woman Be At Home In Black South Africa?, Nancy Topping Bazin

Women's & Gender Studies Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) Growing up in South Africa where only 5.6 million people are white out of a population of 37.9 million, Nadine Gordimer became increasingly conscious of her whiteness¹. The colour of her skin instantly signaled 'oppressor' to black South Africans. Her whiteness imposed upon her a social and political identity that she rejected; yet, it was like a face she could not wash off, a mask she could not take off. As she said in a 1978 interview, 'In South Africa one wears one's skin like a uniform. White equals guilt' (Bazin & Seymour 1990:94). She often …

Colonial Violence And Trauma In The Works Of Michèle Lacrosil And Ken Bugul, Marie-Chantal Kalisa

French Language and Literature Papers

To what extent can we say that both Lacrosil and Bugul rewrite Fanon? Through the study of Cajou and Ken, respectively the Guadeloupean and the Senegalese female protagonists, this article proposes a way to derive a specifically female perspective on colonial violence. The essay focuses on the two novels, Cajou and Le baobab fou, and examines the effect of colonial epistemological violence and its specific impact on the black female’s subjectivity. The protagonists Ken and Cajou revisit their initial trauma in a quest for knowledge of their historical heritage and engage in a dialogue with Frantz Fanon, representative of black …

Art And Symbolism In Ewe Religion: Ritual Objects Of The Yewe And Tro Mami Worship In Klikor, Ghana, Coleen Wright

African Diaspora ISPs

This project investigated the symbolism represented through art in the Yewe and Tro Mami Worship in Klikor, Ghana. The research questions were what are the symbols expressed through art of the two religions and how do these symbols serve the religions. In order to do this I conducted informal interviewing, participant and non participant observations on several different occasions. Through this I was able to learn about the various relics and the function that they play in worship. The material I collected suggests that art symbolism play a vital role in religion.

Product Of The Past: An Examination Of Ashanti And Dagari Proverbs As A Means Of Exploring The Cultural And Societal Effects Of The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade On The Dagaaba People And The Ashanti People, Melanie Kawano

African Diaspora ISPs

An examination of Asante and Dagari proverbs was conducted to see if the different role of the Dagaaba and Ashanti peoples in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade affected each respective society. Proverbs, culturally embedded statements, are derived from common experiences of the people and drawn from the whole of society. Therefore they capture and reflect each aspect of society as well. Thus proverbs are an ideal means of exploring the complex and sensitive issue of how the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade affected the people and vice versa. It was hypothesized that there would be proverbial differences in several categories: War and courage, …

Word And Image: A Synthesis Of Twi Proverbs And Photographs, Mana Borenstine

African Diaspora ISPs

Word and Image: A Synthesis of Twi Proverbs and Photographs intended to give background on the final product of an independent study project, a photographic essay combined with Twi proverbs. This paper briefly describes the product. There is a discussion of proverbs and photographs as methods of communication. Some information about the functions of proverbs is included, as well as a list of proverbs, in both Twi and English, not used in the final product.

Under The Tongue By Yvonne Vera, Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith

Goodrich Scholarship Faculty Publications

"Grandmother says it is sometimes good to forget, to bury the heavy things of now, the things which cannot be remembered without death becoming better than life." But survival lies in the speaking of silence, in the silence of voices beaten and lost, in the silence of "the many words a woman must swallow before she can learn to speak her sorrow and be heard," in the silence of grandmothers, mothers, and daughters.

Book Announcement: Women, Art And Geometry In Southern Africa, By Paulus Gerdes

Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal

No abstract provided.

Africa: An Integrated Curriculum Unit, Grades 2-4, Institute For The Development Of Gifted Education, Ricks Center For Gifted Children, University Of Denver

Ricks Curriculum Units Series

An integrated curriculum is an instructional approach that connects the disciplines to an underlying theme or topic. Immersing students in an integrated-thematic unit provides the backdrop for experiences to occur across the disciplines. Shaping coursework around integrated themes is especially appropriate for gifted students, however using an integrated-thematic curriculum is appropriate for all learners as it develops students' abilities to make connections, to solve problems by looking at multiple perspectives, and to integrate information from different fields of experience. An integrated-thematic curriculum permits students to be active participants in their own learning as they design their own explorations and take …

Le Héros Sonyien À La Croisée Des Principes Sartriens Et Nietzschéens, Kasongo Mulenda Kapanga

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Sony Labou Tansi s'est créé une réputation de maître de la parole mordante par sa dénonciation des pouvoirs abusifs de l'ère postcoloniale. Que ce soit dans le théâtre ou dans le roman, «l'enfant prodige de Brazza» use d'une verve castigatrice et d'un style incendiaire qui lui ont valu dans les lettres francophones africaines une réputation de censeur. Même si on mettait cette agressivité verbale au compte de l'afropessimisme, le malaise que la pléthore d'écrivains africains ont décrié, il se profile dans la floraison langagière de Sony une tension entre deux modes de pensée et deux philosophies complémentaires. II y a, …

Review Of Congo-Meuse By Celibeco, Kasongo Mulenda Kapanga

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Congo-Meuse est une revue des lettres belges et congolaises francophones, organe d'expression du CELIBECO (Centre d'études des littératures belge et congolaise de langue française) dont le siège est à Mbuji-Mayi, en République démocratique du Congo. Dans cette parution inaugurale, la revue nous présente la direction de cette recherche qui se donne pour objectif de relier les deux rives, lointaines certes, mais étroitement liées par l'histoire. La distance sera aisément surmontée par l'élégante girafe, symbole de la revue. Cette entreprise, bilatérale dans ses origines, jouit d'une collaboration internationale ne fût-ce que par la diversité des auteurs vivant aux quatre coins du …

O Lenço Da Minha Mãe...A Reflection, Alicia Veiga

The Griot

A young Cape Verdean woman reflects on the head scarf worn by her mother. The head scarf serves as a symbol of her mother's strength, culture and constant presence in her life despite a move from Cape Verde to the United States.

The Meanings Behind The Marks: Scarification And The People Of Wa, Lauren Cullivan

African Diaspora ISPs

My research on scarification took place in Wa, the capital of the Upper West Region of Ghana. By interviewing some of the different ethnic groups in Wa, I came to understand the varying purposes scarification serves. Additionally, I discovered some of the culture beliefs, values and myths of the Wala people. The following report looks into four main aspects of scarification: marks of identification, medicine, protection, and decoration. Furthermore, it investigates the impacts of the slave trade on the practice of tribal marking. Lastly, this paper will describe current opinions and the future implications of the practice of scarification in …

Folk Songs Of Ghana: The Mosomagor Song Book, Julia Christensen

African Diaspora ISPs

This project is focused on the traditional songs of Moscmagor, a village at the Eastern entrance to Kakum National Park. I was interested in learning to sing the songs, the meanings of the songs, as well as their histories and origins. I was also very interested in the singing techniques that are used, and how the singing of the songs is naturally effected by the fact that they have been learned within this oral culture. The fact that these songs are rarely written down gave me the idea of attempting to do so, using the Western process of notation. This …

Adowa: Funeral Dance Of Asante As A Vehicle To Express Ethnic Identity, Katherine Moss

African Diaspora ISPs

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of Adowa as a vehicle to express ethnic identity in Asante society. First, background information regarding African music is presented, bringing to light the concept of African music as an integrated, 'total art' and highlighting the distinction between traditional and contemporary African music. Traditional music is discussed in terms of its defining features, continuity through enculturation, and imitation of natural patterns of African speech. Based on such conceptions of African music as both 'total' and traditional (as the section heading suggests), Adowa as a socio-music form is introduced and detailed …

Review Of Ruth Finnegan's Oral Traditions And The Verbal Arts: A Guide To Research Practices, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

Review of Ruth Finnegan's Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research Practices. (ASA Research Methods in Social Anthropology Series, no. 4.) xviii, 284pp. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

"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 …

Democratic Transitions In Africa, Shaheen Mozaffar

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.

Japan And Ethiopia: An Appraisal Of Similarities And Divergent Courses, Messay Kebede

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The idea of a comparison between pre-1935 Ethiopia with Japan before and during the Meiji Restoration arouses contradictory reactions among students of Ethiopia. Some find the idea indefensible, others judge it quite reasonable and instructive. Those who reject the parallel do so by emphasizing the social gap which separated Japan and Ethiopia, while those who welcome the idea base their arguments on historical similarities and on the identity of objectives of their respective modernizing circles. Thus, among the first group, Shiferaw Bekele contests the seriousness of a parallel between Japan and Ethiopia, arguing that the Ethiopian leaders had only a …

The Art Of Fasting: Benin's Ague Ceremony, Kathy Curnow

Department of Art and Design Faculty Publications

Part of a special issue on the Great Benin Centenary, which marks the British invasion and conquest of Benin in 1897 (see also summer 1997 issue). The writer discusses Benin's Ague ceremony. She notes that formerly a ceremony of critical importance, Ague has received little scholarly attention. This could be, she explains, because its full celebration ceased during the reign of Oba Eweka II (ca. 1914–33). Among the topics she discusses are how the ceremony changed substantially under various monarchs, the significance of yams in the ceremony, and the role of fasting.

Ebonics: The Political Process Through A Glass Darkly, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

The author discusses the ebonics (black English) controversy.

The Seasons Of Beento Blackbird By Akosua Busia, Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith

Goodrich Scholarship Faculty Publications

As the African diaspora continues to define its own unique position and global contributions, African diaspora studies are necessarily asserting themselves as essential to the cultural-diversity and multiculturalism discourse in the U.S. and, most important, as an indispensable part of the current discourse on pan-Africanist consciousness, global identity, and the new world order.

Predicate Clefting In Kisi, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper examines the focus construction of Kisi, an Atlantic language (Niger-Congo) spoken by some half a million people primarily in Guinea but also in nearby Sierra Leone and Liberia. The data come from work done in 1983-84 on the southern dialect spoken in the Foya area of Upper Lofa County, Liberia. Of particular interest is the presence of what has been known in the literature as "predicate clefting'', e.g., DeGraff 1996. Its interactions and complementarity with negation, an inherently focusing construction (Marchese 1983), evince some complexity. Despite some superficial similarity, however, substantial syntactic differences exist. More similarities exist in …

Zenzele: A Letter For My Daughter By J. Nozipo Maraire, Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith

Goodrich Scholarship Faculty Publications

"A luta continua," the slogan for the revolution in much of southern Africa, is a befitting theme for Nozipo Maraire's mother-to-daughter clarion call to "remember" in order to know and be, for it is in knowing what makes one that one then knows how to be how to absorb "multiple frames of reality." Thus the essence of a mother's legacy to her daughter as she enters a new world, leaving her native Zimbabwe to study at Harvard, in the USA.

Policy Recommendations For A Multicultural Curriculum For All Elementary Schools In The Republic Of South Africa, Motladi Angeline Setlhako

Graduate Research Papers

This literature review explored the system of education in South Africa. The exploration provided the background information about the unequal and segregated system of education which led to student uprisings in 1976. The curriculum became an area of contestation, and was thus attacked by leading educators, parents, teachers, and students. The people of South Africa called for a single, national, unitary system of education for all South African students. A multicultural education was proposed to unify a deeply divided nation and to support the new nation being born.

Multicultural literature was reviewed. The barriers to implementing a multicultural curriculum include …