Access to housing and to housing finance remains a challenge in African cities. This study examines the housing finance strategies of informal settlement dwellers in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and identifies a range of factors that enable or constrain actors to make investments in housing. Based on ethnographic, qualitative and quantitative research, this study provides detailed insights into individual housing biographies, and explains why some actors invest in housing, while others do not. It finally challenges widely accepted development concepts like the provision of housing microfinance,...

This study explores the dialogical relation between technologies and societies with a focus on cultural and socio-technical appropriation of mobile phone use in Ethiopia. It dovetails mobile technology related issues; how and why mobile phones are shared among users; how relations are mediated between married couples; what opportunities the mobile technology offers for repair men and women in the country. Informed by the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approach, the study represents mobile phone users as "relevant social groups." It compares the meanings that come out of these groups...

'There is no justice in Guinea-Bissau' many people lament in this West African country. Impunity and legal uncertainty tend to mark their interactions with judges, regulos (chiefs), police officers, or imams when they have become involved in a dispute. Based on case analysis, this book analyzes dispute settlers' self-presentations, stories told of them, and aggrieved parties' agency in semi-rural Guinea-Bissau. By introducing a typology of dispute settlers, as well as the concepts of person-bound dispute settlement and supporter activation, this book contributes to debates in legal...

In tourism, strangers meet face to face. What do Tanzanian Maasai and Western tourists think when they meet? Using a combination of methods that has never been tried in anthropology, or in the field of tourism studies, this work provides novel theoretical insights into the images hosts and guests have of each other, and how their views relate to the interactions they experience. This compelling reflexive study uses video and Q method to contribute to the epistemology of anthropological research in tourism settings, and the construction of a new, more symmetrical anthropology. Dissertation....

Regionalization of higher education in Africa is the least researched topic in the field of Social Science. In this regard, this book is a pioneer in terms of exploring both the historical and theoretical dynamics of regionalization processes within Africa. This book raises fundamental questions that focus on context and formation, operationalization and implications, and challenges and prospects of these regionalization processes. In doing so, it gives both the analytical contexts of the evolution of higher education regionalization and the current initiatives by the African Union....

In this remarkably meticulous work, Gilbert Shang Ndi succeeds in bringing together the aesthetic and political dimensions of the texts and in broadening interpretative perspectives in very convincing analyses. Each author is handled in his peculiarity and the theoretical ambitions of the project contribute to fruitful and innovative readings of major African literature texts by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ahmadou Kourouma, Ayi Kwei Armah and Sony Labou Tansi. --Prof. Xavier Garnier, U. de Paris-Sorbonne III **This title is based on a Dissertation. (Series: Contributions in African Research / Beitr ge...