Hassim, Shireen. Fatima Meer : a Free Mind. Cape Town, South Africa: HSRC Press, 2019.

Fatima Meer, a South African academic, public intellectual, and activist, was a tireless fighter for social justice and human rights--for which she variously suffered banning and detention by the apartheid government. After the end of apartheid, she declined a parliamentary seat, choosing instead to continue her advocacy work. She did, however, subsequently serve the ANC government in several capacities. She died in 2010, at the age of 81. In Fatima Meer, Shireen Hassim deftly weaves a narrative in which Meer's distinctive individuality unfolds. This serves as an apt context for the second part of the book, which presents Meer's ideas in her own voice and makes palpable her belief in a common humanity.

Source: Books.google.ca

Hassim, Shireen. Women's Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. muse.jhu.edu/book/8613.

The transition to democracy in South Africa was one of the defining events in twentieth-century political history. The South African women’s movement is one of the most celebrated on the African continent. Shireen Hassim examines interactions between the two as she explores the gendered nature of liberation and regime change. Her work reveals how women’s political organizations both shaped and were shaped by the broader democratic movement. Alternately asserting their political independence and giving precedence to the democratic movement as a whole, women activists proved flexible and remarkably successful in influencing policy. At the same time, their feminism was profoundly shaped by the context of democratic and nationalist ideologies. In reading the last twenty-five years of South African history through a feminist framework, Hassim offers fresh insights into the interactions between civil society, political parties, and the state.

Source: muse.jhu.edu

Hayes, E. M. Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s Music. University of Illinois Press, 2010.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted at eight women's music festivals, Eileen M. Hayes shows how studying these festivals--attended by predominately white lesbians--provides critical insight into the role of music and lesbian community formation. She argues that the women's music festival is a significant institutional site for the emergence of black feminist consciousness in the contemporary period.

[Source: excerpt of book summary culled from worldcat.org].

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Jonathan Haynes

Professor, African film studies, Long Island University

jonathan.haynes@liu.edu

liu.edu/Brooklyn/Academics/Faculty/Faculty/H/Jonathan-Haynes

Haynes, Jeff. “Religion and Democratization in Africa.” Democratization, Vol.11, No. 4, August 2004, pp.66–89

Two main issues form the focus of attention in this study. The first is the relationship of senior religious figures to the state in Africa and the role of the former in the region’s democratization in the 1990s. The second is the political importance of ‘popular’ religions in Africa. The overall aim is to examine the relationship of religion and politics in Africa in the context of democratization, to: (1) establish the nature of the links between senior religious figures and state elites in Africa, (2) make some preliminary observations about the political nature of popular religions in the region, and(3) comment on the overall impact of religious actors on Africa’s democratization.

[Source: Article abstract].

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Haynes, Jonathan, and Onookome Okome, eds. Cinema and Social Change in WestAfrica. Nigeria: Nigerian Film Corporation, 1995.

In a not readily available volume, Onookome Okome and Jonathan Haynes examine film production in West Africa from the colonial period to the early 1990s in six uneven and overlapping essays.

[Source: excerpt from a review by Michael T. Martin published by Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (October 1998 and accessed from ProQuest.com).

Haynes, Jonathan. Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Nigeria’s Nollywood has rapidly grown into one of the world’s largest film industries, radically altering media environments across Africa and in the diaspora; it has also become one of African culture’s most powerful and consequential expressions, powerfully shaping how Africans see themselves and are seen by others. With this book, Jonathan Haynes provides an accessible and authoritative introduction to this vast industry and its film culture. Haynes describes the major Nigerian film genres and how they relate to Nigerian society - its values, desires, anxieties, and social tensions - as the country and its movies have developed together over the turbulent past two decades. Ashe shows, Nollywood is a form of popular culture; it produces a flood of stories, repeating the ones that mean the most to its broad audience. He interprets these generic stories and the cast of mythic figures within them: the long-suffering wives, the business tricksters, the Bible-wielding pastors, the kings in their traditional regalia, the glamorous young professionals, the emigrants stranded in New York or London, and all the rest.

[Source: The University of Chicago Press].

Romuald Hazoumè

Artist/Sculptor

Location: Republic of Benin