Transforming Innovations in Africa

Biographical note Readership Table of contents

Publication Type:

Book

Pages, Illustrations:

xii, 302 pp.

Imprint:

BRILL

Language:

English

Biographical note

Jan-Bart Gewald, (PhD), is a historian at the African Studies Centre in Leiden. His research interests include the history of the social relationship between people and technology in Africa. He co-edited The Speed of Change: Motor Vehicles and People in Africa, 1890-2000 (Brill, 2009), with Sabine Luning and Klaas van Walraven.

André Leliveld, (PhD), is a development economist at the African Studies Centre in Leiden. His research interests include (informal) insurance, and economic transformation and innovation in African economies. He co-edited Inside Poverty and Development in Africa: Critical Reflections on Pro-Poor Policies with Marcel Rutten and Dick Foeken (Brill, 2008).

Iva Peša is a historian and is currently doing her PhD at Leiden University on the social history of Mwinilunga District in northwestern Zambia. Her interests include the changing patterns of (agricultural) production, consumption, labour migration and social relationships.

Readership

All those interested in the social process how external innovations (products, technologies, services, institutions and processes) are appropriated and transformed in African societies. This volume is multidisciplinary with wide coverage of Africa.

Contents

Maps, figures, tables, boxes and photos
Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: Transforming innovations in Africa; explorative studies on appropriation in African societies
Jan-Bart Gewald, André Leliveld & Iva Peša

2 Who killed innovation in the Cape wine industry? The story of a stuck fermentation c. 1930-1986
Paul Nugent

3 Entrepreneurship, colonial monetary economy and the limits of creativity:
Appropriating trading stores in Northern Namibia, 1925-1980
Gregor Dobler

4 Frugal innovation in Africa: Tracking Unilever’s washing-powder sachets
Cees van Beers, Peter Knorringa & André Leliveld

5 Mobile cash for nomadic livestock keepers:
The impact of the mobile phone innovation (M-Pesa) on Maasai pastoralists in Kenya
Moses Mwangi & Marcel Rutten

6 From Gao: Sawaba and the politics of decolonization and insurrection in
the Songhay Zone of Mali and Niger (1957-1964)
Klaas van Walraven

7 From self-help group to water company: The Wandiege Community Water Supply Project (Kisumu, Kenya)
Samuel O. Owuor & Dick Foeken

8 ‘It is time to start my own farm’:
The unforeseen effects of two waves of resettlement on household formation in Zimbabwe
Marleen Dekker & Bill Kinsey

9 ‘Cassava is our chief’: Negotiating identity, markets and the state through cassava in Mwinilunga, Zambia
Iva Peša

10 The social cocktail: Weddings and the innovative mixing of competences in Botswana
Rijk van Dijk

11 Of labradors and libraries: The transformation of innovation on a farm in Kibale, western Uganda
Jan-Bart Gewald

12 Engine of change: A social history of the car-mechanics sector in the Horn of Africa
Stefano Bellucci & Massimo Zaccaria

13 Water innovations among the Maasai pastoralists in Kenya:
The role of outside interventions in the performance of traditional shallow wells
Moses Mwangi & Marcel Rutten

14 Stealing from the railways: Blacksmiths, colonialism and innovation in Northern Nigeria
Shehu Tijjani Yusuf

List of authors

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9789004217386

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Markets of Well-being

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Movers and Shakers

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Inside Poverty and Development in Africa

Edited by Marcel Rutten, André Leliveld and Dick Foeken

Thinking about development in Africa requires an appreciation of at least two sets of ideas. It is not sufficient to stress the ubiquity of failure, malnutrition, disease, predatory states and war; one also has to recognize that important aspects of the lives of millions of ordinary people have ...

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Crisis and Creativity

Edited by Piet Konings and Dick Foeken

At times of economic and political crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa, urban dwellers display a large degree of creativity in their survival strategies by developing social networks and constructing imaginative and original practices and ideas. This volume views the urban neighbourhood from two ...

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Edited by Jon Abbink and Ineke van Kessel

This book contains a range of original studies on one of the major challenges in Africa today: the controversial role of youth in politics, conflict and rebellious movements. The issue is not only the drafting of child soldiers into insurgent armies or predatory militias, as in Somalia, Sierra ...

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9789004131330

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Situating Globality

Edited by Wim van Binsbergen and Rijk van Dijk

Situating Globality explores the ways in which African societies are appropriating elements of an emerging global culture and economy, and analyses the significance of this appropriation in local struggles, the expression of critical thinking, ideologies and ritual styles of behaviour.

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Rethinking Resistance analyzes revolts from the nineteenth century and early colonial Africa, post-colonial rebellions and recent conflicts in African history by reinterpreting resistance studies in the light of current scholarly thought and linking them to new conceptual perspectives on the ...

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Mobile Africa

Edited by Mirjam de Bruijn, Rijk van Dijk and Dick Foeken

This anthology deals with the complexity, variety and experience of all the forms of mobility we witness today in Sub-Saharan Africa. Three sets of issues are being discussed. This book intends to turn the whole notion of mobility as a supposedly rupturing phenomenon on its head, emphasizing ...