This article engages North African Women's writing their unique identities in the epistolary form as depicted in the anthology, Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region. The epistolary or letter form is a unique genre. On one hand, the form of a letter is personal, and lays claim to private experiences whose content is the confidential lives of those who write them. And yet, on the other hand, the contents of an epistolary form can be thrust into the public domain where the lives on which it narrates is read by many people for the interest it can generate when the form assumes the figure of a metaphoric allegory. In the anthology, there are six letters written by women, touching on themes of slavery, sisterhood, marginality and the quest for political freedom in a patriarchal-dominated North African community. It is curious to observe that North African women who represented their experiences in the form of the letters did so against the repression of this form from the predominance of realism, song and political treatise. This article argues that the editors of Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region can be accused of bias in their selection that privileges literary forms ordinarily associated with men's preference for classical realism. Despite this literary imbalance, the epistolary form effects some form of resistance to ideological and literary enforcements. The epistolary form also attempts to manage contradictory identities revealed on the spectrum of differences in how women shape their identities. Thus, the epistolary form functions in an ambiguous way; it affirms as well as interrogates patriarchy and also critiques the writings on women by women who write for men or like men. OpsommingHierdie artikel handel oor vroueskrywers in Noord-Afrika wat in briefvorm aan hulle unieke identiteite gestalte gee, soos gevind in die bloemlesing Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region. Die briefvorm is 'n unieke genre. Enersyds is die briefvorm persoonlik; dit maak aanspraak op private ervarings, en skrywers se verborge lewens is die inhoud van hierdie ervarings. Tog kan die inhoud van 'n briefvorm andersyds in die openbare domein ontbloot word. Dáár word die lewens waarvan vertel word deur baie mense gelees omdat belangstelling geprikkel word as die vorm die gedaante van 'n metaforiese allegorie aanneem. Die bloemlesing bestaan uit ses Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:09 10 June 2016 JLS/TLW 106 briewe wat deur vroue geskryf is en temas aanroer soos slawerny, susterskap, marginaliteit en die stryd om politieke vryheid in 'n patriargale samelewing in NoordAfrika. Dit is interessant om waar te neem dat die vroue uit Noord-Afrika wat hulle ervarings in die vorm van briewe aanbied, dit doen teen die onderdrukking van die vorm vanuit die oorheersing van realisme, die lied en politieke verhandelings. Die artikel voer aan dat die samestellers van Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region beskuldig kan word van vooroordeel by hul seleksie, en dat hulle voorrang gee aan literêre vorme wat gewoonlik geassosi...
The role of regional economic communities in the development of trade in Africa is widely recognised. Currently, intra-African trade stands at 10 per cent. This is in sharp contrast to other developing regions of the world. In Asia and Latin America, the levels of intra-trade are 50 and 26 per cent, respectively. There are a number of reasons accounting for the low level of intra-African trade, including the weak mandate given to regional economic communities to monitor and enforce the commitments assumed by countries under regional trade agreements. The lack of integration has negatively impacted on African countries and affected their ability to attract foreign direct investment commensurate with their development needs. Had African countries been less exposed to external markets, they would have been minimally affected by the global financial crisis. The importance of boosting intra-African trade was highlighted by Africa’s Heads of State and Government when they devoted this year’s summit to this theme. In the run-up to the summit, the African Union Commission released a study that underscored the importance of regional economic communities in the process of economic integration in Africa. Currently, SADC member states are in the process of implementing the SADC Trade Protocol, which would create a fully-fledged free trade area and later a customs union, and at the same time engaged in tripartite negotiations aimed at merging the three (SADC, COMESA and the EAC) regional configurations. They are also engaged in the EPA negotiations with the European Union, which would create a free trade area and also the Doha negotiations under the auspices of the WTO. The main objective of this article is to estimate SADC countries’ bilateral trade potential, which may result in the improvements in trade facilitation.
Scholarship on African genocide by African scholars is still in its infancy. Spurred by studies on the Holocaust, African creative writers are slowly but increasingly rendering narratives of African genocide through their fiction. Steadily, new insights are being generated about the banality and evil that surround genocide in an African context and about the harms it causes. However, the original arguments that once made writing about genocide and the pain it inflicts a taboo, appear to continue to haunt the discipline of writing. First, there is the tendency to look down upon the act of writing about genocide experiences, the pretext being that it is in the nature of narrative to distort the density implied in the existential threat to humanity that genocide poses. Second, some literature of atrocity scholars are convinced that human beings who have not experienced genocide first hand are unable to live or even vicariously recreate the agony that genocide survivors experienced and might be able to relate. From this perspective, a genocide canon seems to have been authorised in which it is suggested that only survivors of genocide can produce authentic accounts of the pain that those who died went through. In recent times, critics and creative writers, some of whom are survivors, have challenged the idea of an absolute narrative of genocide by a survivor as the only true bearer of genocide pain and resistance to it. This article explores the panoply of meanings that a genocide survivor, Rupert Bazambanza, gives formal composition to through the genre of cartoon. The article argues that a genocide survivor is an embodiment of a witness and an archive of the experiences of someone who has survived and can tell the stories of the self and also of others who perished.
Many African youths can learn moral values through the oral tradition of folktales as these narratives are used as vehicles to communicate such values. In the past, the oral tradition was the main method of passing on beliefs from generation to generation by word of mouth. Technological and other developments, especially the invention of the book and the increase of literacy, have had an important effect on African oral traditions as previously unwritten folktales could be accorded permanent existence in the form of books. This has afforded African youths in different geographical locations the opportunity to access in their own time the oral folktale and the universal values that it communicates in the written form. Oral forms, such as folktales, are created and developed in specific contexts by individuals, and these can now be experienced by readers in different locations. The aim of this article is to highlight what African youths in different parts of Africa can gain from being exposed to folktales in their written form. For this purpose, four folktale stories by Greaves (1988) contained in the anthology, When Hippo Was Hairy: And Other Tales from Africa, were analysed. The selected stories are representative of certain thematic threads intended to impart certain moral values.
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