Journal of Humanities

Images of women: Prostitutes and bad/ unworthy women in Lughano Mwangwegho’s poetry

Jonas Zaithwa Chisi — 2023-02-02

The notion of prostitution in Malawian literature has been either avoided or misrepresented. The misrepresentation has mainly stemmed from conservative and patriarchal forces which have guided theory and practice in Malawi and many parts of Africa. Women have mostly been viewed in binary terms as either good or bad, constructive or destructive, civilised or backward. Only recently, there has been a change in approach to the subject of prostitution caused by the emergence of feminism and human rights bodies. Even though this change is moving towards recognition of the prostitute body as autonomous, there are still remnants of patriarchal forces that want to maintain or preserve the peripheral position of the prostitute body in Malawian literature. Apart from this prostitute body, another notion of a bad/unworthy woman has been rarely researched. It is mainly confused or included in the same bracket of prostitution. This paper dwells on these two bodies and how they have been (mis)represented in selected poems of Lughano Mwangwegho’s Echoes of a Whisper. The paper leans on sexuality by focusing on Josephine Donavan’s images of a woman in Beyond the Net: Feminist Criticism as a Moral Criticism. It also dwells on the notion of power relations expounded by Sylvia Tamale.

Repurposing the university in Africa against an explicit racist epistemology

Teboho J. Lebakeng — 2023-02-02

The university in Africa is, historically speaking, a function of its colonial history and this has had severe implications for knowledge production and the nature of such knowledge in Africa. Logically, the Europeans classified themselves as fully human and, therefore, they declared humanity to be in its greatest perfection in the race of whites. The thesis advanced in this essay is that while it is indisputable that European epistemology constitutes a pyramid of knowledge, it is equally valid that African epistemology also independently and rightfully includes another pyramid of knowledge. Thus, this conceptual essay, which methodologically uses desktop research, looks at the prospects and challenges of reasonably reversing epistemicide as an ethical imperative for epistemic liberation with social justice as a necessary complement for repurposing the African university for the renewal of the continent. Towards this objective, Africans will need to dispense with their status anxiety or worries stemming from considerations of what Western academic orthodoxy would think, especially in light of deceptions that repurposing the university to be relevant to the African condition will lower standards and assertions that efforts at indigenisation offer no
creative breathing space.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Alfred Msadala’s Exploration of Life Between Birth and Death in Malangano Book Review

Yoschabel Nkonosawa — 2023-02-02

No Abstract.