Safundi

Engaging anticolonial psychiatrists Frantz Fanon and Thomas Adeoye Lambo, this paper explores the relationship between human psychology and decolonization in Africa. Through a close analysis of their clinical works in North and West Africa, the article delineates their respective approach to mental illness, reflecting on issues of culture, method, and knowledge production. The argument put forward is that their perspectives offer important methodological insights that expand and deepen the scope and understanding of decolonization process in Africa. The discussion illuminates that while both thinkers share common critiques about traditional psychiatry they differ on the value and viability of translating Western medical approaches into Africa. This divergence reflects the authors' historical and critical relation to Western medical epistemology and its colonial legacy. Above all, in exposing key issues and stakes of what is methodologically involved in doing decolonization, it illuminates the irreducibility of both psychic life and translation to effective liberation.

This paper theorizes racial proximity as the condition organizing relations between Black and white racialized subjects in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It demonstrates that proximity binds Black freedom to regimes of recognition grounded in whiteness, producing a paradox in which liberation is sought through structures that negate Black life. Du Bois's double consciousness names the enforced split between self-experience and social valuation produced by this denial of belonging. Fanon radicalizes this split under colonial Manicheanism, where recognition appears attainable only through assimilation into whiteness. This paper terms that intensified condition Salavinization, distinguishing it from double consciousness by its delirious, self-negating pursuit of salvation through the Other. Reading Lewis Nkosi's Mating Birds, it shows how Salavinization is narratively staged and juridically resolved as racialized desire becomes legal culpability, ending in trial and execution. It concludes that liberation requires a politics of life beyond recognition, assimilation, and revenge.

From Orientalist perspectives, the veil has been portrayed as an instrument of oppression against women. Through this narrative, Europeans have essentialized the women who wear it and reinforced the idea of the barbaric non-Western man who subjugates women. In doing so, dominant powers portrayed both Muslim women and men as uncivilized, ensuring the reproduction of asymmetric power relations. This discourse also perpetuates gender violence because it assumes that men can decide about women's bodies as if they had no agency. Besides, this narrative presents women's bodies as objects of male desire, legitimizing acts of harassment and reinforcing hegemonic masculinity. In many instances, women have used the veil to combat colonial and patriarchal oppressions, though these strategies evolve over time and territories. This article will examine the political instrumentalization of the veil in Algeria and Iran, demonstrating how resistance through veiling and unveiling challenges both colonial and patriarchal power.

In his postapartheid and posttransitional novel, A Thousand Tales of Johannesburg, Harry Kalmer uses the landscape of Johannesburg to encapsulate the socio-economic and political issues which characterize contemporary South Africa. This paper focuses on Kalmer's representation of postapartheid South Africa, and explores how his text functions as a critique of the rainbow nation. My argument is that, despite the official disintegration of apartheid, its legacies are still prevalent in postapartheid South Africa, as is evident in Kalmer's novel, and that the latter reflects current realities. In the novel, Johannesburg is represented as the new "Nineveh" due to the triple threat of poverty, unemployment and inequality, as well as xenophobia. This paper explores how the text reconceptualizes the relationship between space, place and transnational connectivity by exploring its representation of the setting of Johannesburg, and presents an analysis of Kalmer's narrative techniques, such as frame narration and intertextuality.

South African writer Richard Rive wrote and spoke about educational apartheid widely, famously in the US in his 1979 keynote address for African Literature Association conference titled "The Ethics of an anti-Jim Crow," included it in his autobiography Writing Black. This article reads Rive's work alongside a scrutiny of historic and contemporary educational disparities before, during, and following #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) and #FeesMustFall (#FMF). The questions addressed are: As a form of life writing, how does the autobiography depict the contradictions of an anti-Jim Crow stand in the author's embodied and cultivated blackness during his long educational and authorial career? Can we understand these contradictions through Rive's antiapartheid politics to advance a discussion on (de)coloniality of educational institutions in South Africa? Can the life and career of an iconic writer offer us ways of understanding how race works within educational structures in 2026, the year which marks Soweto@50?

This paper examines Johannesburg as a gendered space by looking at texts by Ivan Vladislavic, and performance artworks by Anthea Moys and Donna Kukama in counterpoint. If Johannesburg is positioned by several authors as a quintessentially African metropolis that is being refashioned in postapartheid in creative and emergent ways, what implications does this have for women's inclusion in the modernist project of 'the nation'? The construction of lived space is discussed from a perspective of performativity as theorized by Sara Ahmed, and Judith Butler, by reading for expressions of the desire for visibility and inclusion by women in urban space. The movement of persons, either by walking, or driving, is positioned as generative, whereby meaning is created. It follows that imagining, writing, and performing space is akin to movement, and are strategies by which individuals can inscribe new meanings to urban space.

In this article, we dissect Fanon's use of screens in The Wretched of the Earth as a metaphor for the intermediaries of neocolonialism in post-independence Africa. We argue that the origins of Fanon's use of screens lie in the Hegelian dialectic, through which the inertia Fanon observed in people under colonial conditions during his clinical sociotherapeutic studies reappears with the transformation of decolonization movements into neocolonialism. Fanon identifies three screens in Wretched which substitute themselves for the revolution: the national bourgeoisie, party, and leader, alongside a fourth screen which the people erect among one another in (neo)colonial conditions. Fanon's analysis contains not only a diagnosis of the screens but also a roadmap of an alternative path toward revolutionary democracy. We conclude by discussing how African social movements are grappling with the necessity of a second revolution to liquidate the screens that shackle the masses to neocolonial underdevelopment today.

This article offers a close reading of Achmat Dangor's stories "Skin Costs Extra" and "Goodbye, Midnight" from the perspective of masculinity studies and affect theory. It argues that Dangor's stories describe post-apartheid masculinities by exploring the lingering influence of patriarchal and hegemonic gender patterns on male-female relationships. Dangor's male protagonists adopt these notions of masculinity in the hope that it will give them a sense of agency. Attached to the privileges of hegemonic masculinity, they also feel the confines of this gender formation, even if they do not express this awareness in an overt way. This sense of limitation imposed by their masculinities is analyzed on the level of affect and emotion. To that end, the article juxtaposes those two notions by referring to chosen critical perspectives on affect studies, including those by Brian Massumi, Todd Reeser, Lucas Gottz & eacute;n, and others.