'A beauty, extraordinary in every way', Naomi Klein, author of 'The Shock Doctrine'Shack-dwelling families in Cape Town who were evicted from their homes write about the vibrant community they created on the street and their anti-eviction campaign.

In present-day South Africa, urban development agendas have inscribed doctrines of desirable and undesirable life in city spaces and the public that uses the space. This book studies the ways in which segregated city spaces, displacement of people from their homes, and criminalization practices are structured and executed. Sara Dehkordi shows that these doctrines are being legitimized and legalized as part of a discursive practice and that the criminalization of lower-class members are part of that practice, not as random policing techniques of individual security forces, but as a technology of power that attends to the body, zooms in on it, screens it, and interrogates it.

Rethinking Sage Philosophy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on and beyond H. Odera Oruka discusses a variety of aspects of Henry Odera Oruka’s sage philosophy project, rethinking it with a view to current demands and recent debates in scholarship across several disciplines. Edited by Kai Kresse and Oriare Nyarwath, the collection engages perspectives and interests from within and beyond African philosophy and African studies, including anthropology, literature, postcolonial critique, and decolonial scholarship. The chapters focus on: studies of women sages; sage philosophy in relation to oral literature; an Acholi poem on 'being human' in context; takes on aesthetics and gender in Maasai thought; a comparative discussion of Oruka’s and Gramsci’s approaches to the relevance of philosophy in society; a critical review of method; a comparative discussion dedicated to the project of decolonization, with a South African case study; and a conceptual reconsideration of Oruka's understanding of sages, presenting the 'pragmatic sage' as typical of the late phase of the sage philosophy project.

This volume offers valuable anthropological insight into urban Africa, covering a range of cities across a continent that has become one of the fastest urbanizing geographic areas of the globe. Consideration is given to the structures, social formations, and rhythms that constitute the definition of an African city, town, or urban space, and to current concepts for thinking about African cities in the twenty-first century. The contributors examine topics including notions of belonging, the effects of globalization, colonialism, and transnationalism on African urban life, the cultural dimensions of infrastructure and public resources, mobility, labor issues, spatial organization, language, and popular culture trends, among other themes. The book reflects on how the ethnography of urban Africa fits within anthropology and urban studies, and on new theoretical concepts and methodologies that can be created through anthropological fieldwork in African cities. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students from anthropology, African studies and urban studies, as well as sociology and geography.

This book explores different emergent spaces where diverse urbanites spontaneously negotiate, make and remake urban spaces, create opportunities, produce social change, challenge urban life, culture, and politics, or simply ask for their right to the city. The focus of this book is on spaces and contexts where change is seeded, regardless of whether it was planned and whether it was or will be successful in the end. Contributors analyze the seeds of change at their very inception in diverse cultural contexts across four continents. How do small groups of ordinary and often also disenfranchised people design, suggest and implement ideas of change? How do they use and remake small urban spaces to better suit their purposes, voice claims to the city, create opportunities, and design better urban lives and futures? The emphasis of this volume is not on the nature of activities and change, but on the minute processes of initiating change.

Highlights the continuing social unrest and public protest occurring in South Africa’s poorest districts. Frequently praised for its democratic transition, South Africa has experienced an almost uninterrupted cycle of social protest since the late 1990s. There have been increasing numbers of demonstrations against the often appalling living conditions of millions of South Africans, pointing to the fact that they have yet to achieve full citizenship. A Turbulent South Africa offers a new look at this historic period in the existence of the young South African democracy, far removed from the idealistic portrait of the “Rainbow Nation.” Jérôme Tournadre draws on interviews and observations to take the reader from the backstreets of the squatters’ camps to international militant circles, and from the immediate, infra-political level to the worldwide anti-capitalist protest movement. He investigates the mechanisms and the meaning of social discontent in light of several different phenomena. These include, the struggle of the poor to gain recognition, the persistent memory of the fight against apartheid, the developments in the political world since the “Mandela Years,” the coexistence of liberal democracy with a “popular politics” found in poor and working-class districts, and many other factors that have played a crucial part in the social and political tensions at the heart of post-apartheid South Africa. Jérôme Tournadre is Researcher in Political Science at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and a member of CNRS’s Institut des Sciences sociales du Politique, both located in France.

How do government arrangements emerge? When and how does individual agency turn into collective agency? How do sensory experiences of violence, instability, etc affect the configuration of governance arrangements? When, why, and how are governance arrangements institutionalized? This book seeks to contribute to a non-normative conceptualization of the emergence and transformation of government arrangements, and addresses the under-theorization of actors and agency in conventional governance theories. The editors and contributors theorize the concept of governance more concretely by analyzing the key actors and arrangements that define states of governance across different places and by examining its performance and development in particular settings and time periods. Each contribution to the edited volume is based on a case-study drawn from Africa, though the book argues that the core issues identified remain the same across the world, though in different empirical contexts. The contributions also range across key disciplines, from anthropology to sociology to political science. This ground-breaking volume addresses governance arrangements, discusses how social actors form such arrangements, and concludes by synthesizing an actor-centered understanding of political articulation to a general theory of governance. Scholars across disciplines such as political science, development studies, African studies, and sociology will find the book insightful.