The ogbanje who wanted to stay: The occult, belonging, family and therapy in Sierra Leone

Schneider, Luisa

doi:10.1177/1466138116673381

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 55 publications

(57 reference statements)

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“…Ogbanjes are a recurring occurrence in Nigerian (Igbo) society, literature and culture, and have been explored from perspectives that range from their metaphysical and mystical nature (Achebe, 1986;Bastian, 2002;Ogunyemi, 1996) to their connection with different psychopathologies (Beneduce and Taliani, 2006;Ilechukwu, 2007;Schneider, 2017), or with high children's mortality rates (Ogunyemi, 1996). In "traditional" contexts, where lived experience is grounded on a circular vision of time, ogbanjes are read as children who come and go between the world of spirits and the world of the living.…”

Section: -Akwaeke Emezi: Freshwater (2018)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Black Wo/men: What has the Spirit got to do with it?

López Rodríguez

2023

Preprint

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This essay explores how, within the framework of African Indigenous Religions, Western notions of sex, gender and sexuality, and social and subjective constructions of identity are destabilized, when read against non-European onto-epistemologies that prioritize the realm of the spiritual and the sacred. My analyses of Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018); Black Bull, Ancestors and Me. My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma (2008), by Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde, and Flora Nwapa’s The Lake Goddess (1995), mostly undertaken in dialogue with black and African literary critics and theorists, also reveal the dynamism and intrinsic heterogeneity of contemporary African wo/men’s lives, texts and bodies. Outdoing (Eurocentric) accepted dichotomies between “tradition” and “modernity,” the “sacred” and the “secular,” the “human” and the “non-human,” or the “male” and the “female,” these texts invite us to think beyond an assumedly global discursive economy and to bring to the forefront the multiple possibilities of knowing and living in our transmodern pluriverse.

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Section: -Akwaeke Emezi: Freshwater (2018)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Black Wo/men: What has the Spirit got to do with it?

López Rodríguez

2023

Preprint

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“…On the other hand, anthropologists have shown that African spiritual practices often are characterised by reflected negotiations between actors navigating different social contexts (Ashforth 1998;Schneider 2017). This is not exceptional to Africa, although it might seem more explicitly evident in light of the uncertain realities experienced by many people on the continent (Ashforth 1998).…”

Section: The Absurd Othermentioning

confidence: 99%

The imagined Africa of the West: a critical perspective on Western imaginations of Africa

Larsen

Jensen

2020

Review of African Political Economy

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This debate piece discusses how exceptionalised images of Africa are reproduced in contemporary Western discourse and imagination, and argues that these exceptionalised depictions of Africa enable Western consciousness to escape a confrontation with its own dysfunctionalities, hereby projecting all the excremental features characterising human existence on to its African Other. This is interpreted as a way for Western subjects to alter themselves into a position of idealised and imagined advanced civilisationthus legitimising contemporary acts of neo-colonial exploitation in Africa.Africanist scholarship has long discussed how Western imagination up to now has contributed to a construction of Africa as the world's universal Otheran umbrella term that will be unpacked throughout the piece (Ferguson 2006;Mbembe 2001;Mbembe and Nuttall 2004;Mudimbe 1988). 2 One way Western discourse depicts Africa is as a romanticised 'primitive' entity bound to a past of harmonious engagements with 'nature ' (Mudimbe 1988;Wainaina 2006). This is in opposition to the Western self-imagination as a collection

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“You have to find a caring man, like your father!” gendering sickle cell and refashioning women's moral boundaries in Sierra Leone

Berghs

Dyson

Gabba

et al. 2020

Social Science & Medicine

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Most research on sickle cell disorders has tended to be gender-blind. This qualitative study undertaken in 2018, explores if and how sickle cell disorders become gendered in Sierra Leone through the analytical framework of a feminist ethics of care. It argues that women have to navigate moral blame when they have children with the condition. At the same time women refashion moral boundaries so that gendered norms around childhood and parenting for such children become suspended, in favour of creation of careful spaces. Parental fears of physical and sexual violence mean that gendered sexual norms are enforced for teenage boys as they are encouraged into early adulthood. In contrast, girls are kept in enforced ignorance about the consequences of sickle cell for reproduction and are encouraged to delay motherhood. This is because, as women relate, relationships and giving birth are fraught with embodied dangers and risks of violence.

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The ogbanje who wanted to stay: The occult, belonging, family and therapy in Sierra Leone

Cited by 6 publications

References 55 publications

Black Wo/men: What has the Spirit got to do with it?

Black Wo/men: What has the Spirit got to do with it?

The imagined Africa of the West: a critical perspective on Western imaginations of Africa

“You have to find a caring man, like your father!” gendering sickle cell and refashioning women's moral boundaries in Sierra Leone

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