This paper reports findings from a study examining Rwandans’ attitudes towards Swahili across different occupational groups. The study hypothesized that there would be a relationship between Rwandans’ occupations and their attitudes towards Swahili. Data were collected from 252 respondents representing six occupations: teachers, civil servants, traders, journalists, Catholic priests, and Muslim leaders. The respondents’ attitudes were elicited using a questionnaire containing ten Likert-scale statements (e.g., “Swahili is the language best suited for administration”), with responses ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. For analysis, “agree” and “strongly agree” were classified as positive, “disagree” and “strongly disagree” as negative, and “can’t tell” as neutral attitudes. A chi-square test was conducted to evaluate the hypothesis. It yielded a value of 450.5 with 10 degrees of freedom, significant at both p < .05 and p < .01, thus confirming a relationship between occupation and attitudes towards Swahili. Comparatively, 53% of overall attitudes were negative, 21% were neutral, and only 19% were positive. Traders were the only occupational group with more positive than negative attitudes towards Swahili.
By the mid-2000s, the contribution of Tanzania’s pharmaceutical industry to local drug circulation was low compared to imports, with the latter mostly coming from India. The situation had mainly stayed the same since independence in 1961, despite a political desire to develop a local, self-sustaining drug supply pipeline. However, global developments affecting the pharmaceutical industry in the late 20th century around drug quality, safety, and availability to the majority of the poor of the Global South would later galvanize different actors, led by the World Health Organization (WHO), to respond. Among the interventions was the introduction of a set of evolving regulations, codes, and guidelines known as Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP). An archive located at the Tanzania Medicine and Medical Devices Authority (TMDA) provides a first-hand account, presented here for the first time, of the entanglements between selected local manufacturers and the regulator as GMPs were introduced into the country in the late 1980s. The TMDA archive’s files offer insights into the response of local manufacturers in this early period of GMP’s implementation. The archive facilitates a study of how the introduction of GMPs should be seen in connection with global economic and political events when, around 1990, the country’s socialism-inspired policy of health and drugs provision was challenged by mandatory global free markets that rescinded governments’ monopoly within the sector. The paper argues that while GMPs were a vital regulation to ensure drug quality and safety, their introduction caught local manufacturers off guard and stifled local drug production capacity while offering a favourable opportunity for imports, mainly from India, to dominate the markets, as the same rules did not initially apply to them locally. However, GMPs did offer an opportunity for the country’s drug regulatory infrastructure to be strengthened.
This paper presents a discussion of Akan noun-noun compounds and a Construction Morphology account of their properties. Noun-noun compounds are the most studied type of compounds cross-linguistically, with studies revealing interesting issues about their nature, including their productivity, the variable semantic relations between the constituents, and the overall interpretation of the compounds. However, there is currently no study dedicated to the morphological and semantic properties of noun-noun compounds in Akan. Existing studies focus mainly on the phonology of the compounds and on other features like exocentricity in relation to which aspects of noun-noun compounds are discussed. Based on a dataset of over 200 Akan noun-noun compounds, this paper identifies various classes, including endocentric and exocentric types based on whether or not a head constituent is present, showing that the endocentric types are predominantly right-headed, consistent with observed crosslinguistic patterns. The range of possible interpretations of newly formed Akan noun-noun compounds also varies, depending on the semantic relation between the constituents and the pragmatic context, although for established compounds, there seem to be generally recognized fixed relations between the constituents that mediate their conventionalized interpretation. However, even they may be subject to other context-specific interpretations on occasion. Thus, for the Construction Morphology account, the relation between the constituents is specified as R at an abstract level, and spelt out concretely for compounds individually.
Fela Anikulapo Kuti (1938–1997) distinguished himself as one of the foremost Nigerian musicians in the Afrobeat genre by identifying with the masses in Africa. He achieved a populist appeal by critiquing social ills and advocating for the establishment of an egalitarian society. He also identified aspects of social decay and challenged tyranny in the corridors of power. However, while many scholars have focused on the potency of his music as a profound, revolutionary artistic penetration of the African socio-political space, its theatrical components have not received sufficient attention, despite some scholars having researched this area. This article contributes to the growing body of literature on the role of theatre in the success of Fela’s Afrobeat music. Through the framework of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, the article argues that, in addition to activism and social change, Fela’s music achieved artistic immediacy by adopting all the appurtenances of theatre, such as drama, audience participation, storytelling, costuming, and improvisation. The success of Fela’s Afrobeat music derives from a combination of artistic flourishes primarily achieved through various theatrical components, which the new generation of Afrobeat musicians in Africa continues to utilize for the success of their art.
This study focuses on the syntactic and pragmatic functions of the isiXhosa auxiliary verbs za ‘come’ and ya ‘go’ when followed by subjunctive or past consecutive lexical verbs. Analysis of the auxiliaries’ occurrence in a 60,000-word database reveals that both auxiliaries introduce new predicates into the discourse. Za links a new predicate to a discourse old predicate in coordinated clauses. By contrast, ya introduces new predicates involving discourse old constituents. The study presents new insights into the grammaticalization paths of itive and ventive semantics of verbs of movement within the area of information structure.
G & itilde;k & utilde;y & utilde; (E.51) exhibits several verbs that can be used both as lexical verbs and as auxiliary verbs. We compare the lexical and auxiliary usages of four verbs and show that all auxiliary verb usages display uniform restrictions concerning valency-related morphology (object marking, voice morphology). We interpret these as signs of decategorialization. Furthermore, we compare the auxiliary verbs with other desemanticized verb usages-light verbs-and argue that they differ in that light verbs do not exhibit decategorialization (compared to the corresponding lexical verb). From this, we conclude that decategorialization is a valid criterion-at least in G & itilde;k & utilde;y & utilde; - for distinguishing different types of desemanticized verbs.
This article discusses the subclass of Tswana auxiliaries that cannot be analysed as resulting from the grammaticalization of regular forms of verbs also used predicatively in the present state of the language. It describes the general characteristics of the dedicated auxiliaries, their individual properties and their possible etymologies. No generalization is possible about the way dedicated auxiliaries may depart morphologically from the regular inflection of synthetic verb forms, and there is a sharp contrast between a group of three auxiliaries ocurring in a variety of tense forms each, and the other ones, which have a very limited number of possible tense forms. Each of the auxiliaries selects particular forms of the lexical verb (either infinitive, circumstantial, sequential, or subjunctive). The negation of the analytic tenses formed by means of auxiliaries can often be obtained by putting the lexical verb in the negative form without modifying the auxiliary, but never by putting the auxiliary in the negative form without modifying the lexical verb.
Kihehe (G62) has a rich inventory of auxiliary constructions (> 120) grounded in different forms of BE: copula -li and --va 'be'. This paper addresses those constructions in which the auxiliary is marked for one of three pasts-hodiernal, pre-hodiernal, or remote-or one of two futures-near and remote-comparing the differences in use and distribution. The study investigates both single and double auxiliary constructions in which the main verb is in the simple perfective form: sM-B(ase)-i not subset of-e. I describe two evolutionary paths of auxiliary forms derived from these recent and remote past forms of BE: sM-ka-li > sM-ke > ke= and sM-aa-li > sM-ee, all of which continue in use, although having different senses at different times. The 18 past constructions all have an English translation of 'had vERBed', the four future constructions a translation of 'will have vERBed'. In addition, there are three double auxiliary constructions with-ke/ke= or -ee plus the future of -va that induce a modal interpretation, 'would have vER-Bed'. The study analyses the differences noted above in the Domains and Regions framework (Botne 2025), elucidating the differences between these constructions in tense/tenor and the referential/indexical roles of the auxiliary verbs.
The Kagulu auxiliary verb ng’hali appears in a variety of auxiliary verb constructions and has several phonological realizations (ng’hali, kali, and ng’hati). Unlike other auxiliary verbs in the language, ng’hali occurs with limited morphology and is not used as a main verb. As in many Bantu languages, ng’hali has phasal polarity properties (see van Baar 1997; Kramer 2021): it yields ‘still’ and ‘not yet’ interpretations. The goal of this paper is to describe the morphophonological, morphosyntactic, and morphosemantic properties of ng’hali. We explore the development of ng’hali into an aspect marker and its co-occurrence with more complex auxiliary verb constructions consisting of other Kagulu verbs, namely the auxiliary uwa ‘be’ and gendelela ‘continue’. In addition to being the first detailed description of these underdocumented properties of ng’hali, this study contributes to our understanding of the role that auxiliaries play in languages with reduced tense/aspect morphology, as well as the grammaticalization paths of auxiliaries in Bantu languages.
Southern Bantu languages have extensive auxiliary inventories with functions that sometimes go beyond typical tense/aspect/mood/polarity meanings. This article examines areal semantic patterns of auxiliaries in 16 Southern Bantu varieties, identifying functions that are regularly encoded by auxiliary forms. In addition to tense, aspect, modal, and negation meanings, these include sequentiality functions (‘until’, ‘after’, ‘furthermore’, and ‘meanwhile’, among others) and adverbial-like functions such as ‘quickly, soon’, ‘do well’, ‘do in vain, fail’, ‘nevertheless’, ‘rather, preferably’, and ‘just, merely’. This article aims to give a systematic overview of auxiliary functions and where they are attested across Southern Bantu, allowing for further targeted studies and cross-linguistic investigations and leading, ultimately, to a better understanding of the origins of Southern Bantu auxiliary systems.
This paper studies the grammaticalization of possessive predicates into negative auxiliaries expressing main clause negation in the Bantu languages of the Middle and Lower Zambezi River region. Drawing on a convenience sample of languages from this linguistic area, the study identifies four distinct types of ‘have’ predicates that function as negative auxiliaries in a little-known pattern of asymmetric main clause negation in Bantu languages. Focusing on patterns of interlingual and intralingual variation, the paper considers the functional and conceptual homogeneity of the auxiliary constructions versus their formal heterogeneity, taking into account the sociolinguistic context of sustained language contact through migration, trade, and the movement of soldiers. The attested variation is moreover suggestive of a ‘negative possessive cycle’ highly reminiscent but still different from a better known ‘negative existential cycle’ which has been connected to long-standing contact situations among Bantu languages. The findings contribute to our understanding of negative auxiliary systems in Bantu, while at the same time offering insights into the mechanisms driving linguistic innovation in the region.
Auxiliary constructions in Southern Bantu exhibit a feature in which two or more auxiliaries appear alongside a single lexical verb. We term this construction ‘auxiliary stacking’. The goal of the paper is to outline the phenomenon of auxiliary stacking in Southern Bantu and raise questions about its features and limits. We focus on what we currently know in terms of features of variation associated with auxiliary stacking, namely a) ordering of stacked auxiliaries, b) number of auxiliaries permitted, c) subject marking properties, and d) the semantics of these auxiliary stacking constructions. We also look at other features such as tense-aspect-mood, as well as modality and negation. The article then sets out areas for further investigation via a systematic study of auxiliary stacking constructions in Southern Bantu and serves as a call for future targeted research on these constructions.
Northwestern Bantu (NWB) languages differ from Eastern/Southwestern Bantu languages in that their verb forms are more often analytic, with pre-stem inflectional material appearing in a complex that may be unbound from the main verb. This has resulted in NWB languages being described as having Aux V word order, where ‘Aux’ stands for ‘auxiliary’. At the same time, some verb forms are analysed as synthetic, and authors vary widely in their use of terminology and their orthographic representation of pre-stem material, even for the same language. In this paper, I first review the different terminology used for NWB predicates, highlighting the corresponding variation in wordhood analyses. I then review the structure of the pre-stem ‘auxiliary’ complexes. First, I discuss the internal structure of NWB pre-stem complexes, with regard to the order of elements. Secondly, I discuss the external structure of these complexes, reviewing diagnostics for considering them as independent from the main verb (analytic) or as bound to it (synthetic). The results show variation in the degree of separation between the pre-stem material and the lexical verb across NWB Bantu languages and constructions, consistent with them being in intermediate stages of a recurrent diachronic change between analytic and synthetic verbal predication.
Communitarian socio-cultural practices 'from below' that involve the sharing of material and non-material items play a vital role in the lives of refugees. However, these support practices are rarely discussed, documented, or acknowledged for their contribution to refugees' protection, livelihoods, and well-being. This article examines communitarian socio-cultural support practices among South Sudanese refugees in Uganda. The article is based on fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2023 in Bidibidi Refugee Settlement and Uganda's capital city, Kampala. The objectives of this article are threefold. First, to document the practices that remain invisible in humanitarian discourses but are deemed valuable by refugees to get by in their everyday lives. Second, to examine how communitarian socio-cultural support practices change in contexts of displacement. Third, to discuss the lessons that can be learned from the ethical and philosophical principles informing communitarian socio-cultural support practices in the pursuit of more contextually oriented and inclusive humanitarian practice that recognizes, supports, and builds on the existing capacities of refugees themselves. By documenting the multiple and intricate socio-cultural support practices, we conclude that these practices have the potential to fill gaps in humanitarian practice, such as drawing on resources among refugees to save lives and alleviate suffering, and that the theoretical foundations that inform these practices, such as togetherness, industry, solidarity, hospitality, and ethical and philosophical principles such as responsibility, reciprocity, honesty, humanity, empathy, and so on, can contribute towards expanding the ethical register of humanitarianism. This has the potential to inform debates and discussions on a broadened and more pluralist humanitarian understanding and practice.
This article examines the historical trajectory of Denkyira, a once-dominant Akan kingdom in Ghana. It challenges the prevailing narrative that the legacy of Denkyira ended with its defeat by Asante in 1701. Despite its significance as a precolonial West African powerhouse, the Denkyira kingdom remains largely absent from mainstream historical discourse. This paper fills this research gap by presenting a much-needed analysis of how Denkyira transformed into a resilient commonwealth that adapted to Asante rule and colonial power and even navigated the path to Ghana's independence. By employing a qualitative historical analysis, I integrate a variety of primary and secondary sources, including colonial records, oral histories, archival documents, newspapers, and historical narratives, to explore Denkyira's military, political, and economic institutions, as well as its strategic adaptations after its defeat in 1701. My analysis underscores Denkyira's active engagement with shifting power dynamics and demonstrates how the kingdom retained significance and influence, despite the predominant assumptions of a linear decline. In doing so, I contribute to broader debates on the dissolution and survival of pre-colonial states, emphasizing the role of historical memory in postcolonial Africa.
This study critically examines (post)colonial ideologies within the Nollywood epic Jagun Jagun (2023), directed by Adebayo Tijani and Tope Adebayo and produced by Femi Adebayo. Through a colonial reading, the film gives form to a narrative that critiques systems of power, exposes the enduring legacies of colonialism, and accentuates the urgency of African self-determination and youth empowerment. Set against the historical canvas of colonial exploitation and its lingering socio-political impacts, Jagun Jagun knits together a narration of war, love, and betrayal; this study positions the film as presenting a colonial narrative rooted in an African Indigenous framework, explored through its key characters. By situating Jagun Jagun within the evolving landscape of African cinema, this research highlights Nollywood's role as a medium for confronting historical injustices, promoting cultural resilience, and inspiring African youth to reclaim agency in the face of (post)colonial challenges. It presents the potential of African cinema as a space for artistic expression and as a platform for socio-political critique and the collective reimagining of the continent's future.
This article explores how the popular Icelandic Nordic Noir series, Trapped Season 2, provides a nuanced perspective on the deeply rooted concepts of Icelandic and Nordic exceptionalism and homonationalism in popular culture. It offers a complex discourse on the portrayal of the foreign other through representational practices that exoticize individuals from the Global South. In the series, Iceland is depicted as a cosmopolitan utopia for others (such as Africans), while simultaneously maintaining a narrative of undesirable foreign influence that reinforces an exclusionary view toward the Global South. We employ the notions of Nordic exceptional-ism and homonationalism to illustrate the dichotomies present in Season 2 of the series and to examine how popular media can reinforce harmful and exclusionary discourses.
In September 2020, a video circulating on social media plunged he country of Mozambique into a deep moral crisis. The video showed five young men, dressed in the uniform of the Mozambican army, cruelly whipping a naked woman along a road and eventually riddling her with bullets. The clip came from the war zone of Cabo Delgado, in the north of the country, where an insurgency labelled as Islamist has raged since October 2017. It was the sixth video of its kind leaked in the space of a few weeks-and the most brutal, because it depicted violence against a harmless civilian. Immediately, the internet was abuzz with grief. Various versions of the circumstances of the shooting emerged. A fierce debate erupted about the morality of the war. Pressured by Amnesty International to institute an inquiry into the matter, the Mozambican government dismissed the video as "subversive propaganda" and "montage".By engaging in a micro-analysis of the harrowing incident of the "mother of Awashi" - the crossroads village where the woman was shot dead-this article aims to reflect on the entanglement between violence and virtuality in the "new war" being fought in Cabo Delgado.
This study explores how lexical tone interacts with intonation in Akan, focusing on pitch reset as a prosodic cue in complex declaratives. Pitch reset - an upward shift in fundamental frequency (f0) following declination - has been documented in various African languages, and in Akan analysed embedded and coordinated clauses, using a controlled production experiment with five native speakers of Asante Twi, we analysed conditional and temporal subordinate clauses to determine whether pitch reset signals prosodic boundaries. Results show that Akan speakers employ pitch reset before subordinate conjunctions, often accompanied by a pause, to mark clause boundaries, while in K & uuml;gler's study pitch reset was not attested at all with coordinated clauses and was attested in complementizer sentences after the complementizer. Speakers preplan utterances by initiating the main clause at a higher pitch to maintain declination, and the degree of reset is influenced by lexical tone: resets are more pronounced on High tones and smaller on Low tones. These findings advance understanding of tone-intonation interaction in Akan and suggest that pitch reset functions as a robust cue to prosodic phrasing in tone languages. Limitations include sample size and potential effects of language attrition; future research should examine other conjunctions, matrix clause types, and dialectal variation.
Studying gender in African Union and national politics, I came across a scenario in which my interview requests were ignored until someone from the donor community vouched for me. As field-based researchers, we often rely on our networks to facilitate access to interlocutors. How should we interpret situations where the relationship between the facilitator and the desired interlocutor is characterised by a degree of dependency and asymmetrical power relations? In this article, I build on autoethnographic vignettes of moments when consent was refused; when consent was given upon international donors' intervention; when consent was given upon intervention by a "gender and development" community member; and finally, when consent was given upon intervention by national staff of a development partner. Theoretically, I grapple with how decolonial approaches to "studying up" may inform the notion of "authentic consent", interrogating race and nationality, professional communities, and gender in knowledge production. By examining the implications of skewed North-South power relations for negotiating consent, the article examines the challenges of implementing decolonial research strategies when "studying up" in Ethiopia and Kenya. Drawing on my fieldwork experiences and the scholarship outlined above, I argue that authentic consent is both relational and steeped in complex and context-specific power relations.
