Doctoral Research emerging from the Anthropology Department at UWC
Maja Jakarasi:
Maja Jakarasi is focused on the reformation or transformation of healing rituals for mental illness among the Korekore Shona-speaking people. Particularirly, the responses of these rituals in the aftermath of second chimurenga, war of national liberation through to the Structural Adjustment programme (neoliberal regime) in Rushinga district, Zimbabwe. Their aim is to try show how colonial regimes stifled African spiritual and religious situated knowledge by highlighting the incompleteness or insufficiency of Western biomedicine in the mental health sector. Maja is trying to push the colonial epistimologies understood as only legitimate and formal, while traditional healing as superstitious African constructions.
Mustapha Desire Kazadi:
Mustapha Desire Kazadi is a a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of the Western Cape. They describe themselves as an activist-
researcher who focuses on grassroots-driven engagements with vulnerable migrants and refugees in South Africa. Mustapha aims to empower them to demand better services and greater rights in South Africa.
Mustapha’s thesis title: ‘Congolese refugees’ precarity and political mobilisation in Cape Town, South Africa;. Their research project, explores refugees’ solidarity, extending from community mobilisation to urban protests against precarity in South Africa and at the transnational level of politics in their homeland. Their university work experience includes research assistance with collecting and analysing qualitative data. They have also worked as a researcher with the Belhar community as a researcher, as part of their studies for their master’s degree, in their capacity, they have also collaborated with the City of Cape Town on behalf of the community on the issues of youth unemployment. Their additional work experience includes being an administrator at the finance department in the library at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and as a Coordinator, Assistant, and Livelihood officer at different NGOs in Cape Town.
Publications:
- Kazadi, M. and Koskimaki, L., forthcoming. Engaged research and reflexive methodologies:(auto) biographical narratives of forced migrants in Cape Town. H. Ghorashi, E. Ponzoni, T. Fiorito, P. K. Mbasalaki, ed, In the IMISCOE book proposal: Transformative engaged scholarship: Towards a co-creative, caring, and reflexive migration studies: IMISCOE (in press).
- Koskimaki, L.,Ngonidzashe F. and Kazadi, M., forthcoming. Migrant livelihoods and strategies in urban South Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic: A case study of Congolese and Zimbabwean migrants in two Cape Town neighbourhoods. Edward Elgar Handbook of Migration, COVID-19 and Cities edited by S. Irudaya Rajan, Vandana Chandra and Gül Tuçaltan (in press).
Kagiso Nko:
Kagiso is a Johannesburg-based scholar and broadly study Black life and life-making. Their PhD project is an intervention on how we can better understand and make sense of township life and Black subjectivities in post-apartheid South Africa. The project seeks to add to an already burgeoned scholarship on townships by rather looking at ways in which black people in townships experience joy, pleasure and leisure. Through this project they explore embodied practices of joy making, pleasure seeking and leisure practices that residents of Munsieville township partake in. This project seeks to understand what these embodied practices mean for the residents especially facing daily incessant precarity and structural violence. The intervention of this project is to reframe township Black life from its popular and current understandings – as a place of trauma, violence, poverty, and social and economic inequality. The project seeks to represent black people in townships holistically, as bodies which can simultaneously face trauma, violence, poverty, and structural issues such as unemployment and access to basic services, the scourge of HIV/AIDS and at the same time experience community, joy, pleasure, and leisure. This project will be a critique to Black people and their bodies as political subjects, economic subjects to capitalism, and subjects to traumatic pasts and realities – and how exploration of joy, pleasure, happiness, and leisure allows Black people full personhood that scholarship on Blackness never allows them. I broadly believe that we as Black people constantly reconfigure and reconcile our humanity through different practices that render our lives full despite vicious experiments of dehumanization and anti-blackness.
They are currently in the writing stages of this project.
Keywords: joy, pleasure, happiness, leisure, township, Black people, embodiment, embodied practices, the body
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Blackness, township life, township studies, Black Studies, precarity, structural violence, Afro-pessimism; post-coloniality, political economy, labour, popular cultures, Black popular cultures, decoloniality, the post-apartheid South African state, race, class, gender, joy, pleasure, leisure; sub-Saharan Africa, Johannesburg and the greater Witwatersrand area
Zuko Wonderfull Sikhafungana:
“Black aesthetics and theatre: An ethnography of contemporary South African theatre— creators, spaces and institutions”
Zuko Wonderfull Sikhafungana, born in Matatiele, Eastern Cape, South Africa, is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). A versatile artist, Zuko is a film and theatre maker- playwright, director, and co-founder of Back Stage Theatre Production (BSTP). His research interests focus on the intersection of ‘community’ and mainstream theatre, with his work critically examining the current state of contemporary post-apartheid theatre in South Africa.
Zuko believes that the performance art and theatre scene in South Africa has a potential of serving as a form of enactment for artists and their communities including its audiences which forms their cultural and social position. However South African performance arts spaces still render black bodies invisible. Black art makers are using their work to reject, confront and dismantle systems, structural knowledge, skills and attitudes of power. Zuko’s work aims at looking at established institutions, and the growing new performance spaces that have emerged for instance within black marginalised communities, popularly known as shack theatres, or through process of requalification of pre-existing buildings in ruin. Interrogating how performing arts today confronts and challenge toxic remains and oppressive legacies of apartheid— marginalisation, inequality, violence and racialised separation—while forging a new aesthetics, transforming and reclaiming exclusionary spaces.
Terence Fontoh Fru:
Thesis title: Our dead, our belonging: Burial practices of Cameroonian migrants living in Cape Town South Africa.
Terence Fontoh Fru’s research lays particular focus on the experiences of a certain segment of the Cameroonian community living in Cape Town, and thereof explores the complex relationships between migrant death (includind associated human remains, on the one hand and wide ranging questions of identity, encompassing claims of ethnic, cultural, social, religious and political belonging and or exclusion, on the other). Their research seeks to shift critical attention away from the needs and interest of “living” immigrants to “dead” immigrants, thereby illuminating a dimension of the experience of immigrants that is yet to receive sufficient and critical attention. The study will equally show how “death” within migrant communities becomes a context of transnationalism, as responses to death as well as the management of the dead by the Cameroonian immigrants in South Africa generate processes that break down the borders between Cameroon and South Africa. In a nutshell, their study seeks to investigate how the bodies of the dead are turned into “political objects” that allows the grieving and community at large to make comments about citizenship and nationality.
Zikhona Kokoma:
Ancestral Expeditions: Ethnographically reframing the socio-cultural biography of Ancestral spirits through healers
Abstract
Spirit possession is considered an alien and an exotic practice. However, in the South African context among Amagqirha this phenomenon is ubiquitous and found in their everyday life. It is also a crucial component of ritual healing and a channel for constant communication between healers and their ancestors. It allows them to travel through a sensory experience enabling healers to see, feel, hear and encounter different energies thus unveiling different ways for healing bodies. It is worth noting that scholarly engagement on the topic of possession focuses on host/medium experiences of possession, there are few ethnographic accounts which attempt to focus on exploring the past lives of the spirits. This study is a historical ethnography which seeks to fill this gap by narrating the stories of the spirits that possess healers. Rituals are a significant lens in this study as they create a substantial understanding to spirit manifestations and their occurrences. How do healers become spirit mediums? How do ancestors possess healers? What role do rituals play in the pathway of possession? What are the stories of the spirits that possess healers? Mostly, what do these stories reveal about the different understandings of time, history and being? I argue that spirits are in transit beings- never settling- as they travel through different healer mediums over generations. Lambek’s (1998) notion of ‘poiesis of history’ is crucial in this study as it will unpack the spirits as beings and explore their agency both in the past and present.
Key words: spirits, possession, Amagqirha (healers), rituals, journeys, history, South Africa