acc

Africa

  1. Events
  2. Africa

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

Food and transnational gastronomic culture amongst Cameroonian migrants in Cape Town and The Hague

Studio 3 ENGEO Building, Upper Campus. University of Cape Town,, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

In this seminar, post-doctoral fellow at the African Centre for Cities, Dr Henrietta M Nyamnjoh will present a paper entitled, 'This Christmas I go ‘touch’ some fufu and eru”: Food and transnational gastronomic culture amongst Cameroonian migrants in Cape Town and The Hague'. Abstract Migrants’ relation to ethnic food and their experiences of migration are dynamic processes, experienced in a multiplicity of ways. This paper focuses on how mobility and migration are fast influencing the global food cultures and how increasingly foods are windows into the ways migrants live, think, and identify themselves. Foods are part of migrants’ cultural, historical and even emotional repertoires. Based on ethnographic research amongst Cameroonian migrants in Cape Town and The Netherlands, I explore how migrants travel with their gastronomic culture and/or improvise in the absence of ethnic foods. In the Netherlands, whilst migrants have found ‘home-away-from-home’ through the many shops that sell food from home they still manage to create transnational food chains/links when visiting home. While in Cape Town, despite these shops the absence of certain foods has prompted migrants to improvise and complement their foods, it has also given rise to specialised restaurants that provide Cameroonian cuisine. Through this ethnography I maintain that gastronomic culture can be thought of as a strong bond that affirms migrants’ Cameroonian-ness and keeps them attached to the home country. I question too the extent to which mobility and transnationality reconfigure food experiences amongst migrant communities and argue for multiple understandings of how migrants relate to food to the exclusion of their everyday experience. Bio Henrietta Nyamnjoh is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at African Centre for Cities and Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town. Her research focus is on migration, transnational studies, migrants and urban transformation and religion. She recently completed a study on the use of Information and Communication Technologies amongst Cameroonian migrants in South Africa, The Netherlands and Cameroon. The study (Bridging Mobilities: ICTs appropriation by Cameroonians in South Africa and The Netherlands) seeks to understand migrants’ appropriation of the new Information and Communication Technologies to link home and host country and the wider migrant community. She is also the author of “We Get Nothing from Fishing” Fishing for Boat Opportunities Amongst Senegalese Fisher Migrants (2010). She is currently working on transnational families and emotions amongst Cameroonians in Cape Town.

World-class city making in Africa – a view from Angola through the redevelopment of the Bay of Luanda

Seminar Room 1 Environmental & Geographical Sciences Building, UCT Upper Campus

The ACC is happy to announce the first academic seminar for 2016. Dr Sylvia Croese will be presenting a paper entitled, 'World-class city making in Africa – a view from Angola through the redevelopment of the Bay of Luanda'. Abstract This paper examines the redevelopment of the Bay of Luanda as the epitome of a process of world-class city making that has unfolded in the capital of Angola since the end of the war in 2002. In an era that has been marked by ‘Africa’s rise’, concomitant efforts towards the building of world-class African cities have generated growing research interest over the past years. However, often these efforts are seen as uncritically adopted or externally imposed imitations of global/world city models. This paper aims to take world-class city making in Luanda seriously by analyzing its dynamics on its own terms, thereby moving beyond accounts that either romanticize or demonize this process. Based on an analysis of the history of the Bay of Luanda and the actors, discourse and imaginaries involved in its redevelopment, the paper makes three interrelated arguments. Firstly, it argues that while discourses underpinning world-class city making may reflect external or economic drivers, such as a desire to attract international investment, the case of Luanda shows that this practice can be equally or even more strongly driven by internal or political objectives, such as the pursuit of national legitimacy and domestic stability. From this follows that world-class city making in Africa does not necessarily have to be externally imposed, managed or financed, but that it can also be ‘home-grown’ and led by national rather than city governments, especially in resource-rich and authoritarian states like Angola. Finally, the paper argues that while the mainstream world-class city literature tends to focus on the futuristic nature of world-class city aesthetics, the redevelopment of the Bay of Luanda shows how efforts to revive modernist colonial architecture may equally underpin world-class city making. The study of world-class city making should then not only consider ‘introspective’ vs ‘extrospective’ politics but also ‘retrospective’ rationales or the ways in which utopia and nostalgia intersect across time and space. Bio Dr Sylvia Croese is a post-doctoral research fellow at the department of Sociology at the University of Cape Town. She has written and conducted extensive research in and on Angola as a researcher and consultant and has an interest in issues related to housing and urban development, local governance and electoral politics in Africa.