Research Articles (Anthropology and Sociology)

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Africa after apartheid: South Africa, race, and nation in Tanzania
(Routledge, 2016) Becker, Heike
South African economic and political expansion into the African continent has been a controversial feature of the post-apartheid era. Now human geographer Richard Schroeder has taken up the matter in an ethnographic study based in Tanzania, a preferred destination for South African business. The country presents a particularly interesting example of the post-apartheid social, cultural and political dynamics of "South Africa in Africa" since Tanzania had been one of the apartheid regime's staunchest enemies. Schroeder starts off with observations of white South African expatriates he met in Tanzania; the book's core theme, however, is the country's and the wider African region's dilemma in an era that saw both the rise of neoliberalism and the fall of apartheid.
Against trauma: silence, victimhood, and (photo-) voice in Northern Namibia
(UFS, 2015) Becker, Heike
The article shows how the discourses of trauma, victimhood and silence regarding local agency contributed to the production of the nationalist master narrative in postcolonial Namibia. However, I point out repositories of memory beyond the narratives of victimhood and trauma, which began to add different layers to the political economy of silence and remembrance in the mid-2000s. Through revisiting visual forms of remembrance in northern Namibia an argument is developed, which challenges the dichotomy between silence and confession. It raises critical questions about the prominent place that the trauma trope has attained in memory studies, with reference to work by international memory studies scholars such as Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (1996) and South African researchers of memory politics, particularly the strategies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The fresh Namibian material supports the key critique of the TRC, which suggests that the foregrounding of pain and victimhood, and rituals of therapy and healing entailed a loss of the political framings of the testimonial moments.
The burden of history: Namibia and Germany from colonialism to postcolonialism
(Taylor & Francis, 2017) Becker, Heike
When former German Foreign Minister Joseph �Joschka� Fischer visited Windhoek in October 2003, he went on record to say that there would be no apology that might give grounds for reparations for the first genocide of the 20th century, which was committed by German colonial troops in Namibia in 1904�1908. Fischer�s rather undiplomatic words are indicative of the intense and heated historical and present relations between Germany and her erstwhile colony.
Changing urbanscapes: Colonial and postcolonial monuments in Windhoek
(Nordic Journal of African Studies, 2018) Becker, Heike
This article investigates how recently-constructed sites that anchor memories of anti-colonial resistance and national liberation have changed the urban landscape of the Namibian capital, Windhoek. The discussion is focused on the Namibian Independence Memorial Museum and the Genocide Memorial. These North-Korean-built monuments in a prominent hilltop position central Windhoek have significantly altered the city�s skyline with their massive aesthetics of Stalinist realism. Built in a particular position, they have replaced an infamous colonial memorial, the �Windhoek Rider�, and dwarf the �Alte Feste� fort and the �Christuskirche�, iconic German colonial remnants of the built environment.
Dissent, disruption, decolonization: South African student protests 1968 to 2016
(Center for Economic Research and Social Change, 2018) Becker, Heike
Fifty years after student protests shook much of the Cold War world, in the �West� and in the �East,� �Global 1968� has become the catchword to describe these profound generational revolts. We hear a lot about West Berlin, Paris, Berkeley, London, and then the Prague Spring, even occasionally the 1968 events in Mexico City may be mentioned; in contrast, none of the relevant overviews bring events to the fore that happened on the African continent in general, and in South Africa in particular. This beckons a number of questions: Was there something �1968� on the continent that matched the activism of the generation in revolt elsewhere? And as indeed there was, as we have shown in an overview article, how did students in African countries contribute to the global uprising with their own interpretations, and why have these been largely �forgotten� in the global discourse? And what do they mean today when we talk about protests of students and youth? After all, Africa has recently become again a hotbed of significant protests of young people who share a great desire for democracy and social justice. From Senegal and Burkina Faso to Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, young Africans have hit the streets in their hundreds of thousands. South Africa for one has seen a massive revolt of university students during 2015 and 2016. This article looks at South African student movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, following some notes on the wider continent, specifically the May 1968 protests in Senegal, the only African 1968 event that has found marginal attention. Then the focus shifts towards the recent South African student protests of 2015�2016 to explore the ways in which the revolt of the generation that has come of age after the end of apartheid may relate to past uprisings in ideology and activist practice.
From �to die a tribe and be born a nation� towards �culture, the foundation of a nation�: the shifting politics and aesthetics of Namibian nationalism
(Otjivanda Presse, 2015) Becker, Heike
Namibia�s postcolonial nationalist imaginary is by no means homogeneous. Overall, however, it is conspicuous that as Namibia celebrates her twenty-fifth anniversary of independence, national identity is no longer defined primarily through the common history of the liberation struggle but through the tolerant accommodation, even wholehearted celebration, of cultural difference. This article attempts to understand the shifting politics and aesthetics of Namibian nationalism from two interconnected angles. On the one hand, it takes a historical perspective; it looks into shifting discourses and practices of nationalism over the past century, starting from the anti- colonial resistance at the turn to the 20th century through to the twenty-fifth anniversary of Namibian independence. On the other hand, the article investigates the cultural redefinition of the bonds between the Namibian people(s), which has been a significant aspect of the constructions of postcolonial Namibian nationhood and citizenship. The argument highlights urban social life and cultural expression and the links between everyday life and political mobilization. It thereby emphasizes the nationalist activism of the developing Black urban culture of the post-World War II era and the internal urban social movements of the 1980s.
A hip-hopera in Cape Town: The aesthetics, and politics of performing �Afrikaaps�
(Taylor & Francis, 2017) Becker, Heike
This paper looks into the aesthetics and politics of the �hip-hopera� Afrikaaps. Afrikaaps was produced in 2010 by a group of musicians and spoken-word artists from Cape Town and the rural Western Cape Province of South Africa. The show premiered at an annual Afrikaans cultural festival; it then had a three week-run at a theatre, located in a predominantly white, English-speaking part of Cape Town, followed by different sets of performance in South Africa and abroad and the documentary by a Cape Town film maker. Dylan Valley�s (2011) film follows this group of local artists creating the stage production as they trace the roots of Afrikaans to Khoi-San and slaves in the Cape. The production aimed to �reclaim and liberate Afrikaans from its reputation as the language of the oppressor, taking it back for all who speak it.� (Valley 2011) The paper presents an analysis of how visual and musical aesthetics converge in the performed production of history, as creolization, and ethnically-specific �heritage�, and how the self-stylization is employed in attempts at authenticating a recently asserted linguistic and cultural �identity�.
Namibia�s moment: youth and urban land activism
(Taylor & Francis, 2016) Becker, Heike
A few months short of the 25th anniversary of independence from South Africa in March 1990 Namibia reached her Fanonian moment. As Achille Mbembe has explained this term with regard to the South African student movements of 2015, a new generation has entered the country�s social and political scene and has forcefully asked penetrating new questions. In Namibia this has come in the shape of the Affirmative Repositioning (AR) movement.
The politics and aesthetics of commemoration: national days in southern Africa
(Taylor & Francis, 2013) Becker, Heike; Lentz, Carola
The contributions to the special section in this issue study recent independence celebrations and other national days in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They explore the role of national days in state-making and nation-building, and examine the performativity of nationalism and the role of performances in national festivities. Placing the case studies in a broader, comparative perspective, the introduction first discusses the role of the state in national celebrations, highlighting three themes: firstly, the political power-play and contested politics of memory involved in the creation of a country�s festive calendar; secondly, the relationship between state control of national days and civic or popular participation or contestation; and thirdly, the complex relationship between regional and ethnic loyalties and national identifications. It then turns to the role of performance and aesthetics in the making of nations in general, and in national celebrations in particular. Finally, we look at the different formats and meanings of national days in the region and address the question whether there is anything specific about national days in southern Africa as compared to other parts of the continent or national celebrations world-wide.
Remembering Marikana: Public art intervention and the right to the city in Cape Town
(Taylor & Francis, 2018) Becker, Heike
This article investigates the role played by cultural initiatives in urban struggles in South Africa, and the emergence of public art to assert the right to the city. I explore how artistic� activist interventions engage an understanding of social justice and the right to the city in provocative visual and performance art. I demonstrate how such interventions reflect Lefebvre�s conceptualisation of the city as a space to be inhabited in an active process, which critically includes its re-imagination. The paper focuses on creative interventions in Cape Town that confronted the city�s genteel public space with the second and third anniversary of the shooting of 34 striking miners at Marikana on August 16 2012. I argue that bringing the commemoration of the massacre into the public urban space � where post-apartheid Cape Town exhibits its claim to cosmopolitanism � challenges the politics of space in South Africa. I asked, how these cultural initiatives articulate claims through reimagining the city how they engage with the intertwined politics of culture and class followed by both the city and the nation�state, and how the artistic practices contest urban citizenship in contemporary South Africa.
South Africa's May 1968: decolonising institutions and minds
(Taylor & Francis, 2016) Becker, Heike
Throughout 2015 students at South African universities rose up in a mass revolt. They made their voices heard from their campuses, from the streets, from the grounds of Parliament in Cape Town, and the lawns of the Union Buildings, the seat of national government in Pretoria. Students brought down a symbol of colonialism and exploitation, they fought against fee increases in higher education, they called for the end of racism and of neo-liberal outsourcing practices of support services at universities. Students demanded free education in more than one sense. As students are returning for the new academic year, and tensions have already flared up again at some universities it is appropriate to mull over the movement�s practice and theory.
South Africa: anthropology or anthropologies?
(American Anthropological Association, 2015) Becker, Heike; Spiegel, Andrew D.
A direct result of South Africa�s specific history has been the extraordinary significance of its contested, if not conflicting, political and ideological positions on anthropology�s South African trajectories. This was particularly true for the apartheid era between 1948 and the early 1990s when, as Robert Gordon and Andrew Spiegel (1993:86) have observed, South African anthropology had largely succumbed to apartheid as the dominant power in the country and in the region as a whole, with �its discourse perniciously dictating what should be written by both its supporters and, significantly, its opponents.� Yet, as we demonstrate in this article, sociopolitical historical circumstances were momentous factors in the development of the discipline from its beginnings in South Africa in the early 1920s, and they continue to influence contemporary debates and practices.
Un/making difference through performance and mediation in contemporary Africa
(Taylor & Francis, 2017) Becker, Heike; Schulz, Dorothea
This special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies grew out of a panel we organized at the European Conference on African Studies in Lisbon in June 2013. Our starting point was the observation of a massive revival of cultural and religious identities across the African continent, stretching from post-apartheid South Africa to Islamist groups in parts of West Africa. In the early twenty-first century, Africa appears to be witnessing a historical moment characterized by a resurgence of a politics of difference that, regardless of the heterogeneous forms in which it materializes, shares an uncanny ability to produce and sustain identities based on a politics of difference.
Un/making difference through performance and mediation in contemporary Africa
(Routledge, 2017) Becker, Heike; Schulz, Dorothea
This special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies grew out of a panel we organized at the European Conference on African Studies in Lisbon in June 2013. Our starting point was the observation of a massive revival of cultural and religious identities across the African continent, stretching from post-apartheid South Africa to Islamist groups in parts of West Africa. In the early twenty-first century, Africa appears to be witnessing a historical moment characterized by a resurgence of a politics of difference that, regardless of the heterogeneous forms in which it materializes, shares an uncanny ability to produce and sustain identities based on a politics of difference.
�Youth speaking truth to power�: Intersectional decolonial activism in Namibia
(Springer, 2022) Becker, Heike
This article portrays a recent movement towards intersectional activism in urban Namibia. Since 2020, young Namibian activists have come together in campaigns to decolonize public space through removing colonial monuments and renaming streets. These have been linked to enduring structural violence and issues of gender and sexuality, especially queer and women�s reproductive rights politics, which have been expressly framed as perpetuated by coloniality. I argue that the Namibian protests amount to new political forms of intersectional decoloniality that challenge the notion of decolonial activism as identity politics. The Namibian case demonstrates that decolonial movements may not only emphatically not be steeped in essentialist politics but also that activists may oppose an identity-based politics which postcolonial ruling elites have promoted. I show that, for the Namibian movements� ideology and practice, a fully intersectional approach has become central.

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