Bridging through “women’s work"
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298650 , vital:57724 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2020.1863158"
- Description: Bodomo’s bridge theory describes and predicts the long-term implications of African migrants’ activities and settlement in China. Drawing on research with African retail traders, university students, and corporate executives in China, I show that the bridge theory illuminates how African women and men rationalize their decisions to migrate to China within the context of the rise of Asia. Drawing on the literature regarding African women and work, I explain that structural economic conditions now force more Africans into economic sectors such as trade work that historically were dominated by African women. I demonstrate that African women’s roles as economic providers for their families and children in other sectors, such as university students and company executives, provide evidence of the continued “matricentric” nature of African households that rely on women’s economic productivity. I also examine the possibilities and limitations of building long-standing networks that shape African migrant settlement in China. I show that the historical theorization that characterizes global mobility as male – particularly regarding Africans – has contributed to the misrecognition of African women’s multiple activities in China.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298650 , vital:57724 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2020.1863158"
- Description: Bodomo’s bridge theory describes and predicts the long-term implications of African migrants’ activities and settlement in China. Drawing on research with African retail traders, university students, and corporate executives in China, I show that the bridge theory illuminates how African women and men rationalize their decisions to migrate to China within the context of the rise of Asia. Drawing on the literature regarding African women and work, I explain that structural economic conditions now force more Africans into economic sectors such as trade work that historically were dominated by African women. I demonstrate that African women’s roles as economic providers for their families and children in other sectors, such as university students and company executives, provide evidence of the continued “matricentric” nature of African households that rely on women’s economic productivity. I also examine the possibilities and limitations of building long-standing networks that shape African migrant settlement in China. I show that the historical theorization that characterizes global mobility as male – particularly regarding Africans – has contributed to the misrecognition of African women’s multiple activities in China.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
Sex, gender and Uvalo/Letswalo centred spirituality
- Magadla, Siphokazi, Magoqwana, Babalwa, Motsemme, Nthabiseng, Mohoto, Lieketso
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi , Magoqwana, Babalwa , Motsemme, Nthabiseng , Mohoto, Lieketso
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298663 , vital:57725 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2021.1909711"
- Description: In Male Daughters, Female Husbands (1987) Amadiume argues that the female orientation of Nnobi society and its emphasis on female industriousness is ‘derived from goddess Idemili – the ancestral religious deity’ (27). While Christianity dominates the outlook and conservatism of the post-colonial African state, we are seeing a growing public presence of African spiritual practitioners in southern Africa. The interview with Lieketso Gogo Mapitsi Mohoto reflects on her journey of becoming a healer. She uses the concept of ‘uvalo' to argue for deeper connected spiritual awareness within this practice of healing. Using the Nguni concept of uvalo, she refers to the fluid meaning of intuition also known as Umbilini among Xhosa-speaking people, while Sesotho speakers call it Letswalo. This intimate connection with the Divine can sometimes mean a sense of fear for ordinary people, while it promotes a deep sense of knowing for the spiritually conscious. Gogo Mapitsi's connections between spirituality and land, speak to Amadiume’s matrifocal understanding of productivity as linked to the goddess Idemili in Nnobi histories. Gogo Mapitsi reminds us that the multiple health, economic, psychological crises we face today are linked 'to how uvalo works.' She tells us that the 'cultivation of that inner knowing and the cultivation of trust in that knowing' is central to how a Sangoma understands and responds to the needs of their society.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi , Magoqwana, Babalwa , Motsemme, Nthabiseng , Mohoto, Lieketso
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298663 , vital:57725 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2021.1909711"
- Description: In Male Daughters, Female Husbands (1987) Amadiume argues that the female orientation of Nnobi society and its emphasis on female industriousness is ‘derived from goddess Idemili – the ancestral religious deity’ (27). While Christianity dominates the outlook and conservatism of the post-colonial African state, we are seeing a growing public presence of African spiritual practitioners in southern Africa. The interview with Lieketso Gogo Mapitsi Mohoto reflects on her journey of becoming a healer. She uses the concept of ‘uvalo' to argue for deeper connected spiritual awareness within this practice of healing. Using the Nguni concept of uvalo, she refers to the fluid meaning of intuition also known as Umbilini among Xhosa-speaking people, while Sesotho speakers call it Letswalo. This intimate connection with the Divine can sometimes mean a sense of fear for ordinary people, while it promotes a deep sense of knowing for the spiritually conscious. Gogo Mapitsi's connections between spirituality and land, speak to Amadiume’s matrifocal understanding of productivity as linked to the goddess Idemili in Nnobi histories. Gogo Mapitsi reminds us that the multiple health, economic, psychological crises we face today are linked 'to how uvalo works.' She tells us that the 'cultivation of that inner knowing and the cultivation of trust in that knowing' is central to how a Sangoma understands and responds to the needs of their society.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
Thirty years of Male Daughters, Female Husbands
- Magadla, Siphokazi, Magoqwana, Babalwa, Motsemme, Nthabiseng
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi , Magoqwana, Babalwa , Motsemme, Nthabiseng
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298685 , vital:57727 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2021.1926442"
- Description: This paper examines the legacy of Ifi Amadiume's Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (1987) to African gender theorisation three decades after its publication. We argue that Amadiume's detailed ethnography of the Nnobi society provides an example of what can be achieved when African scholars centre local histories, languages, and kinship ties to provide contextualised understandings of sex and gender. In southern African societies, we assess the ways in which gender fluidity, drawing from local languages, age, seniority and lineage do not strictly fix sex to gender, thus providing possibilities for flexible gender structures that allow women to access institutions of power through the lineage as first daughters (umafungwashe) and wives, among others. We further examine the ways conservative patriarchal discourses continue distorting African cultures and traditions, thus undermining women's rights and access to social, cultural, economic and political power. We argue that current Eurocentric attempts that aim to delink sex and gender do not move us beyond the universalised binaries of gender and sex. Through revisiting local social and linguistic histories that practised gender fluidity and tolerance, we can also begin to challenge the conservative attitudes towards the LGBTQIA+ communities. Given the continued sexual and gender diversities that are being challenged daily in the African continent, it is timely that we revisit the historical meanings along with their contemporary implications for sexual citizenship and gendered power relations today.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi , Magoqwana, Babalwa , Motsemme, Nthabiseng
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298685 , vital:57727 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2021.1926442"
- Description: This paper examines the legacy of Ifi Amadiume's Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (1987) to African gender theorisation three decades after its publication. We argue that Amadiume's detailed ethnography of the Nnobi society provides an example of what can be achieved when African scholars centre local histories, languages, and kinship ties to provide contextualised understandings of sex and gender. In southern African societies, we assess the ways in which gender fluidity, drawing from local languages, age, seniority and lineage do not strictly fix sex to gender, thus providing possibilities for flexible gender structures that allow women to access institutions of power through the lineage as first daughters (umafungwashe) and wives, among others. We further examine the ways conservative patriarchal discourses continue distorting African cultures and traditions, thus undermining women's rights and access to social, cultural, economic and political power. We argue that current Eurocentric attempts that aim to delink sex and gender do not move us beyond the universalised binaries of gender and sex. Through revisiting local social and linguistic histories that practised gender fluidity and tolerance, we can also begin to challenge the conservative attitudes towards the LGBTQIA+ communities. Given the continued sexual and gender diversities that are being challenged daily in the African continent, it is timely that we revisit the historical meanings along with their contemporary implications for sexual citizenship and gendered power relations today.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
Book Review: From the Outside In
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298628 , vital:57722 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10220461.2019.1610042"
- Description: From the Outside In: Domestic Actors and South Africa’s Foreign Policy presents an exciting collection of chapters that explore various and often-ignored domestic actors and their relationships within the state, including government departments and local government; and non-governmental organisations such as labour unions, big business and social movements. The editors evoke the imagery of the ‘chess game of foreign policy’, used by scholars such as Joseph Nye,1 to argue that power in international relations is distributed like a ‘three-dimensional chessboard’ consisting of military power, economic power and transnational relations.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298628 , vital:57722 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10220461.2019.1610042"
- Description: From the Outside In: Domestic Actors and South Africa’s Foreign Policy presents an exciting collection of chapters that explore various and often-ignored domestic actors and their relationships within the state, including government departments and local government; and non-governmental organisations such as labour unions, big business and social movements. The editors evoke the imagery of the ‘chess game of foreign policy’, used by scholars such as Joseph Nye,1 to argue that power in international relations is distributed like a ‘three-dimensional chessboard’ consisting of military power, economic power and transnational relations.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
Book Review: Democratic South Africa's foreign policy
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298617 , vital:57721 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10220461.2017.1361863"
- Description: Suzanne Graham's book reviews South Africa's voting behaviour in the United Nations (UN) over a 20-year period (1994–2014), focusing specifically on four themes that featured predominantly in both the policy and rhetoric of South African policymakers during this period: the promotion of human rights and democracy; disarmament and related non-proliferation issues; advancing African interests; and voting on reform of the UN.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298617 , vital:57721 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10220461.2017.1361863"
- Description: Suzanne Graham's book reviews South Africa's voting behaviour in the United Nations (UN) over a 20-year period (1994–2014), focusing specifically on four themes that featured predominantly in both the policy and rhetoric of South African policymakers during this period: the promotion of human rights and democracy; disarmament and related non-proliferation issues; advancing African interests; and voting on reform of the UN.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
Book Review: A Renegade called Simphiwe
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298595 , vital:57719 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0021909614533638"
- Description: A Renegade called Simphiwe is a “creative-intellectual portrait” of the public (and private) life of the musician Simphiwe Dana (p. 150). Gqola defines the book as “one writer’s engagement with the Simphiwe Dana of the South African public imagination [who]… troubles many categories of belonging in the South African public imagination in remarkable ways” (pp. 17, 32). The book comes at a poignant time as South Africa reflects on the success and challenges of the first 20 years of democracy. Fittingly, Gqola positions Dana within a long tradition of griots in Africa whose art always spoke truth to power.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298595 , vital:57719 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0021909614533638"
- Description: A Renegade called Simphiwe is a “creative-intellectual portrait” of the public (and private) life of the musician Simphiwe Dana (p. 150). Gqola defines the book as “one writer’s engagement with the Simphiwe Dana of the South African public imagination [who]… troubles many categories of belonging in the South African public imagination in remarkable ways” (pp. 17, 32). The book comes at a poignant time as South Africa reflects on the success and challenges of the first 20 years of democracy. Fittingly, Gqola positions Dana within a long tradition of griots in Africa whose art always spoke truth to power.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
Book Review: Global Governance and the New Wars
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298640 , vital:57723 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2015.1008676"
- Description: Mark Duffield's second edition of ‘Global Governance and the New Wars’ offers an important and biting critique of how different actors within the security and development discourse have adapted to the various transformations of war in the post-cold war era. In this picture drawn by Duffield, the power of states in the South continues to be eroded by an exclusionary market that is driven by the global political economy wherein state's development and security responsibilities are increasingly assumed by non-state actors (predominately constituted by Western aid agencies). Those who fall outside the bounds of the state, development and humanitarian aid agencies can be found operating in an expanding shadow economy that is also shaped by a global dynamics which make the conditions for ‘network war' possible. In this context, the lines between ‘war' and peace” are difficult to distinguish. Overall, the book paints a depressing picture on the lack of substantive changes in the livelihoods of the poor as attention has been directed to discussions about ‘new wars' or altered forms of violence that have characterized the post-cold war era. The book unforgivingly exposes the failures of the discursive changes post-cold war to reconceptualize development and security in terms that move beyond description and into substantive change especially regarding shifting the development discourse from its historic modernizing impulses.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298640 , vital:57723 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2015.1008676"
- Description: Mark Duffield's second edition of ‘Global Governance and the New Wars’ offers an important and biting critique of how different actors within the security and development discourse have adapted to the various transformations of war in the post-cold war era. In this picture drawn by Duffield, the power of states in the South continues to be eroded by an exclusionary market that is driven by the global political economy wherein state's development and security responsibilities are increasingly assumed by non-state actors (predominately constituted by Western aid agencies). Those who fall outside the bounds of the state, development and humanitarian aid agencies can be found operating in an expanding shadow economy that is also shaped by a global dynamics which make the conditions for ‘network war' possible. In this context, the lines between ‘war' and peace” are difficult to distinguish. Overall, the book paints a depressing picture on the lack of substantive changes in the livelihoods of the poor as attention has been directed to discussions about ‘new wars' or altered forms of violence that have characterized the post-cold war era. The book unforgivingly exposes the failures of the discursive changes post-cold war to reconceptualize development and security in terms that move beyond description and into substantive change especially regarding shifting the development discourse from its historic modernizing impulses.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
Women combatants and the liberation movements in South Africa
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298584 , vital:57718 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10246029.2015.1088645"
- Description: This article examines women's role as combatants in national liberation forces in South Africa. Three categories – guerrilla girls, combative mothers and the in-betweeners – are introduced to underscore the varied ways in which women have participated in combat within the national liberation movements. Factors such as age and one's ability to leave the country affected whether women could participate in combat as ‘guerrilla girls’ or if it limited them to fighting apartheid violence from home, or if there were women who can be defined as having fallen somewhere in between these categories. These categories are used to theorise women's combat roles in the anti-apartheid struggle, thus broadening and challenging the dominant notions of combat that often hide women's contributions in war. In this regard, different periods of struggle, physical location, as well as age, determined the methods of activism available to men and women.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298584 , vital:57718 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10246029.2015.1088645"
- Description: This article examines women's role as combatants in national liberation forces in South Africa. Three categories – guerrilla girls, combative mothers and the in-betweeners – are introduced to underscore the varied ways in which women have participated in combat within the national liberation movements. Factors such as age and one's ability to leave the country affected whether women could participate in combat as ‘guerrilla girls’ or if it limited them to fighting apartheid violence from home, or if there were women who can be defined as having fallen somewhere in between these categories. These categories are used to theorise women's combat roles in the anti-apartheid struggle, thus broadening and challenging the dominant notions of combat that often hide women's contributions in war. In this regard, different periods of struggle, physical location, as well as age, determined the methods of activism available to men and women.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
Book Review: Community of insecurity
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298606 , vital:57720 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2014.936174"
- Description: Laurie Nathan's Community of Insecurity is a thoughtful engagement with the ‘establishment, evolution and effectiveness of the regional security arrangements of the Southern African Development Community (SADC)’ (1). He argues that it is of ‘great significance and irony that many of the major disputes among member states have been around the orientation and strategies of peacemaking and regional security’. Nathan's empirical claims about the SADC security architecture are drawn from his ‘insider perspective’ due to his involvement in official efforts to design a common security regime in Southern Africa, which include his service as regional security advisor to the SADC Secretariat from 1992 to 1996, to the Foreign Minister of Mozambique Pascoal Mocumbi from 1994 to 1995, to the South African Minister of Defence Joe Modise and the Deputy Minister of Defence Ronnie Kasrils between 1994 and 1999 and to the Foreign Minister of Swaziland Albert Shabangu when he oversaw the SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation in 1999–2000 (12–13). This ‘insider’ view has allowed him to make a compelling challenge to current theoretical debates about SADC's status as a security community, that is, a community with an affinity amongst member states that is ‘so strong that they enjoy dependable expectations of peaceful change and thus regard the prospect of war among them as inconceivable’(129). While other commentators see SADC as either a ‘nascent’, ‘embryonic’ or ‘emerging’ security community, Nathan argues forcefully that ‘this perspective is mistaken’ as SADC continues to be demonstrative of a what he describes as a ‘community of insecurity’.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298606 , vital:57720 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2014.936174"
- Description: Laurie Nathan's Community of Insecurity is a thoughtful engagement with the ‘establishment, evolution and effectiveness of the regional security arrangements of the Southern African Development Community (SADC)’ (1). He argues that it is of ‘great significance and irony that many of the major disputes among member states have been around the orientation and strategies of peacemaking and regional security’. Nathan's empirical claims about the SADC security architecture are drawn from his ‘insider perspective’ due to his involvement in official efforts to design a common security regime in Southern Africa, which include his service as regional security advisor to the SADC Secretariat from 1992 to 1996, to the Foreign Minister of Mozambique Pascoal Mocumbi from 1994 to 1995, to the South African Minister of Defence Joe Modise and the Deputy Minister of Defence Ronnie Kasrils between 1994 and 1999 and to the Foreign Minister of Swaziland Albert Shabangu when he oversaw the SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation in 1999–2000 (12–13). This ‘insider’ view has allowed him to make a compelling challenge to current theoretical debates about SADC's status as a security community, that is, a community with an affinity amongst member states that is ‘so strong that they enjoy dependable expectations of peaceful change and thus regard the prospect of war among them as inconceivable’(129). While other commentators see SADC as either a ‘nascent’, ‘embryonic’ or ‘emerging’ security community, Nathan argues forcefully that ‘this perspective is mistaken’ as SADC continues to be demonstrative of a what he describes as a ‘community of insecurity’.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
The Personal Is the International
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298674 , vital:57726 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2013.856568"
- Description: The article reflects on why I opted for Political Science as my career. It tells of a society where once black women could only imagine themselves either as maids, teachers or nurses—this was my mother's world. The narrative shows how a racialised and gendered history shapes both my hopes for a particular kind of international relations theory and practice, as it shapes my frustrations and anxieties about my own future in the discipline. I also locate my place in the discipline within broader global ‘disruptions’ that see previously marginalised actors moving to the centre of international life. I also attempt to demonstrate that international relations today is located in globalised peace but within localised extremes of poverty and privilege. I make the case that the challenge to International Relations (IR) theory today is to find a language, a new language, in which to articulate the contradictions of a globalised peace that exists within localised extremes of poverty and privilege.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
- Authors: Magadla, Siphokazi
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298674 , vital:57726 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2013.856568"
- Description: The article reflects on why I opted for Political Science as my career. It tells of a society where once black women could only imagine themselves either as maids, teachers or nurses—this was my mother's world. The narrative shows how a racialised and gendered history shapes both my hopes for a particular kind of international relations theory and practice, as it shapes my frustrations and anxieties about my own future in the discipline. I also locate my place in the discipline within broader global ‘disruptions’ that see previously marginalised actors moving to the centre of international life. I also attempt to demonstrate that international relations today is located in globalised peace but within localised extremes of poverty and privilege. I make the case that the challenge to International Relations (IR) theory today is to find a language, a new language, in which to articulate the contradictions of a globalised peace that exists within localised extremes of poverty and privilege.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
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