Browsing by Author "Nyamnjoh, Francis"

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    A return to the ground: movement, land, and modes of existence in Nkambeni, South Africa
    (2025) Visser, Jacobus; Nyamnjoh, Francis
    This dissertation explores the role of land in Nkambeni, a rural chieftaincy in northeastern South Africa with a history of colonial and apartheid displacement and enclosures, to engage the question of being – approached here, following Bruno Latour, as modes of existence. Based on two months of ethnographic fieldwork, with farming and gardening as entry points, the dissertation argues that land reveals movement – conceptual, spatial, and relational – as central to the shaping of reality in Nkambeni. These movements are traced through the flows of knowledge, soil, and water, foregrounding tensions between modernist and otherwise ways of being. Such entanglements point to a compositeness, building on Francis Nyamnjoh's articulation of the concept, where existence does not emerge through commensurability but through continuous movements across difference. In response, the study proposes a methodological framework grounded in movement itself – not only as an analytic but as a moral and ethical orientation, where participation demands a form of ‘becoming with' that entails an obligatory, often messy, and even violent reciprocity. Anna Tsing's ‘multispecies attunement' is central to this approach, evoking a sensitivity to human and more-than-human entanglements through that which lay just beyond perceptibility in this ever-shifting landscape. It unsettles hegemonic framings of space and place as fixed, knowable, or enclosed, offering instead a methodology that remains accountable to the frictions and uncertainties of the field. To this end, the dissertation rethinks land not as a passive backdrop but as an active participant in shaping being, revealing the limits of modernist dualisms that separate subject from object, human from non-human, substance from medium, real from symbolic, fixed from fluid. Here, two modes of existence emerged as central to this analysis: indebtedness and metamorphoses. The mode of indebtedness, revealed through the soil, animated ongoing movement across the compositeness of give and take, life and death, pointing to an entangled form of sustenance that unfolded in a polyphony of times. The mode of metamorphoses, revealed through, with, and as water, pointed to how power shifted and enabled transformation, transfiguration, and transubstantiation beyond fixed hierarchical binaries. These modes demonstrate – however partially sensed – how existence in Nkambeni, through movement, was shaped in ways that exceeded what modernist articulations of the world can encapsulate, even as it remained fixed within it. Thus, the study critically reflects on the ontological categories of space and place, time, and ideas of power embedded in fixed binary hierarchies. Here, the title, A Return to Ground, becomes a discursive and recursive motif that continuously questions the starting point from which to theorise being in a world, or worlds, where aspects of reality persistently remain just beyond reach. Ultimately, the research contributes to emerging decolonial scholarship in the humanities by offering a recursive account of movement and compositeness as both method and encounter, enabling an exploration of ontological questions in postcolonial Africa. This study is not a mere rejection of modernity; it attends to its enduring effects while tracing how existence in Nkambeni exceeds its binary logics through composite, more-than-human engagements with land. Following land's generativity – through practice, weeds, soil, and water – it rethinks how difference and sameness are lived in composition. This intervenes in broader discourses on decolonial thought, the ontological turn, pluriversality, and ethics, by pushing the boundaries from which ontological and epistemological claims can be reimagined – not as fixed, but as moving and entangled in compositeness.j
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    Cell phones in social transformation in Africa: insights from ongoing research in some African countries
    (2012) Nyamnjoh, Francis
    Cell phones have proved to be as accommodating as they are accommodated by those who embrace them. They shape their users as much as they are tamed by their users. For anyone interested in gaining a wider perspective on the situatedness of mobiles in African contexts, the social appropriation of technology and new configurations of marginality.
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    Conviviality in Bellville: an ethnography of space, place, mobility and being
    (2013) Brudvig, Ingrid; Nyamnjoh, Francis
    This study provides insight into the experiences of mobility and migration in contemporary South Africa, contributing to a field of literature about multiculturalism and urban public space in globalizing cities. It is a study of how the mystique of conviviality configures amongst a diverse migrant and mobile population that frequents Bellville's central business district surrounding the train station - an area located approximately 25 kilometres from Cape Town, and a prominent destination for informal trading, shop keeping, and other ad hoc livelihoods. Understanding the emergence of conviviality and the forms it takes in this particular locality lies at the heart of this thesis. I argue that conviviality emerges out of shared understandings of Bellville as a zone of mobility, of safety and of livelihood opportunities; and of negotiated meanderings within particular spaces of the Bellville central business district. Bellville's migrant networks become convivial when individuals innovatively sidestep away from tensions broiled in rhetoric of the "outsider" and instead negotiate space - both physical and social - to derive relations that often result in mutual benefits. This study also takes into consideration the greater international political and local socio- economic factors that drive migration, relationships and conviviality, and how they are intertwined in the everyday narrative of "insiders" and "outsiders" in Bellville. The Bellville central business district demonstrates the realities of interconnected local and global hierarchies of citizenship and belonging and how they emerge in a world of accelerated mobility. Ethnographic research in Bellville further demonstrates how the emergence of conviviality in everyday public life represents a critical field for contemplating contemporary notions of human rights, citizenship and belonging.
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    De-creating Language Borders at the University of Cape Town: “The Fall of English” and the Rise of African Languages in Education
    (2021) Botes, Inge-Ame; Nyamnjoh, Francis
    The salience of English as the main language of instruction at tertiary institutions across South Africa has not been without critique. At the University of Cape Town, henceforth UCT, conversations surrounding language and academic success have become bolstered by the rhetoric of decolonisation, necessitating a review of policy and practice. This in turn has opened up research opportunities pertaining to student and staff experiences of language at the institution. This thesis is a response to the urgent need for ethnographic focus on the language situation at UCT and higher education institutions countrywide, where increasingly light falls on the language question within quests for decolonisation and social justice. Focusing the language question within frameworks of decoloniality, glocalisation, translanguaging and the development of African languages in education, this thesis distills ethnographic data to argue that language borders need to be reevaluated in a quest for conviviality informed by the universality of incompleteness, where fluidity, interconnection, and interdependence are prioritised over the current dominance of English. Grounded in rich ethnographic evidence in the form of student interviews and reflections, meeting at the intersection of social and linguistic anthropology, this thesis grapples with the critical questions: “What is language at UCT? And what does language do?”
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    ICTs and the reconfiguration of 'marginality' in Langa Township: A study of migration and belonging
    (2014) Powell, Crystal; Nyamnjoh, Francis
    Mobility and migration are survival tactics for long-term security and sustainability within Africa and South Africa is perceived as offering opportunities to those seeking greener pastures. South Africa's history of 'selective immigration' has made many local South Africans, particularly the disadvantaged black population, reluctant to welcome African immigrants or 'outsiders' seeking to integrate. This poses considerable difficulties for many migrants attempting to negotiate acceptance. African migrants often end up living on the margins of South Africa, ultimately disconnected from mainstream populations. Langa Township in Cape Town, South Africa, the site of this study, is located at the margins of the city. Its residents, local South Africans and African immigrants, are considered a marginalized population and therefore face multiple challenges of belonging within and outside the township. Such challenges are intertwined with and complicated by the complex realities of marginality. In exploring the role of new Information and Communication Technologies in negotiating migration and belonging, this study focuses on the mobile population of Langa Township. As a settlement initially established by migrants from other South African provinces, Langa residents are able to historicize the significance of communication technologies in the lives of migrants. Ethnographic approaches were used to investigate the role of new communication technologies in Langa, exploring the ways that technology has provided opportunities for development, facilitated the negotiation of various marginalities, and offered new ways of belonging for residents. Fieldwork included extensive participant observation and informal interviews. Concluding that Langa's marginality is not as obvious fixed as generally assumed, the study shows that new communication technologies have both mitigated and exacerbated some complexities of marginality for residents within and outside the township. It reveals that mobile phones (1) manipulate residents – to the extent the residents allow – as much as residents manipulate mobile phones; (2) provide new ways of belonging inside and outside the township; (3) mitigate distance for some residents while burdening others with meeting social obligations against their wishes; (4) provide opportunities for development; and (5) are not used to redefine socio-political relations among residents. These findings are significant for (a) assessing the impact of mobile phones for social, economic and political development, while (b) cautioning against undue euphoria associated with the presumed benefit of mobile phones for underprivileged populations, and (c) challenging stereotypical representations of townships and marginality.
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    (Im)mobility, digital technologies and transnational spaces of belonging: an ethnographic study of Somali migrants in Cape Town
    (2019) Brudvig, Ingrid; Nyamnjoh, Francis
    This study draws on ethnographic research with Somali migrants in Cape Town to explore the intersection of (im)mobility, physical and virtual space and new configurations of belonging in a digital world. It investigates the gendered politics and ethics of being and belonging in a world of mobility and migration where digital technologies have become significant to social organisation and sociality, both within and across borders. The dissertation presented probes the reasons why policies and technologies that were expected to create more fluid movement and more open societies have been met with the hardening of national borders, and a parallel rise in global trends towards anti-immigration, control of identities and fear of difference, which have manifested in South African society. This dissertation concludes that a combination of legal frameworks related to migrants and refugees, public infrastructures and cultural factors exert a strong influence on Somali migrants’ access to rights in South Africa, identity and social reproduction, and transnational belonging. Social exclusion may be a catalyst for Somali migrants’ transnational engagements in which digital technologies are a significant driver of heightened group consciousness and belonging. In many ways, the rise of online social networks and information capital have taken off among Somali migrants because of their tremendous social organising power in the absence of formal institutions, limited political and social belonging in host countries, and in the context of vastly integrated transnational diaspora networks which sustain economic and social lives. As such, Somali migrants live at the margins of (im)mobility – in-between physical and virtual spaces – leading to the navigation of “frontier-ness”, challenging taken-for-granted identities. While most studies about mobility and migration focus on citizenship and belonging from a legalistic or deterministic standpoint – solidifying prescribed notions of “Somaliness” or other factors of identity affiliated with nationhood or citizenship – there is a need to dig deeper to understanding what it means to navigate and, indeed perform, belonging via gendered technologies of mobility. Participation in social life through online networks and in transnational spaces often challenges common assumptions that identity is necessarily linked to particular places. However, this research simultaneously demonstrates the ways in which nations and borders continue to be emphasised in a world of flows. Contrary to popular assumptions that the internet is transnational, borderless and disassociated with place, this research argues that nation-places – enacted through hubs and nodes – continue to be salient. In this context, it is important to understand how digital technologies intersect with identity, culture and socialnorms offline and online among diverse communities to support new configurations of agency and empowerment in an increasingly digital world. In this light, this dissertation looks at how digital technologies, such as the internet, emerge as a force of mobility, situated in contrast to stark forces of immobility which seek to limit the movement of people. Not only does the internet close distance between geographies, it also closes distances in access to information and networks of support, such as financial assistance, social capital and caregiving. Experiences of mobility (offline and online) have been both empowering and liberating. However, mobility is also circumscribed and limited by new forms of social control and manipulation at all levels of society. Despite the profoundly transnational and borderless context of the internet, “traditional” cultural frameworks and identities, such as nationality and gender, continue to be salient markers of online identity, just as they are offline. This study argues that digital technologies are culturally constituted frontier spaces characterised by various layers of (im)mobility through which belonging is navigated and performed.
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    Intimacies and distances: mobility, belonging and the use of information and communication technologies by young Cameroonians in Cape Town
    (2014) Jackson, Kate; Nyamnjoh, Francis
    Advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are making it increasingly easy to build and maintain social links across distance, by effecting a compression of space and time, and allowing friends and family members to remain in ever-closer contact, even though they may live geographically far apart. These distanced relationships facilitated by ICT represent an important site of anthropological inquiry, even as they present methodological challenges to the accepted conceptions of fieldwork and the field. In this thesis I present the results of an ethnography of the use of ICT by Cameroonian students living in Cape Town, South Africa between June 2011 and June 2013. The research question guiding my work reads as follows: "Do (and if so, how do) Cameroonian students in Cape Town transcend geographical and social boundaries through their use of information and communication technology?" I argue that the Cameroonian students who I met during my fieldwork in Cape Town used ICTs to build and maintain relationships within their community (or multiple communities), and to draw upon their social networks to (re)negotiate and transcend geographical and social boundaries. I also argue that while they do this they simultaneously contest and reinforce hierarchies of various forms, be they politico-geographical, social or economic. In the course of my fieldwork, it became increasingly evident that the young people who helped me in my inquiries used these technologies to intimately entangle, as well as distance, themselves from others in their communicative environment and relationships. I draw on my fieldwork to illustrate the ways in which they do this. I argue that these people negotiated relationships of marginality, belonging, obligation and responsibility through the ways in which they used ICTs, and that they drew on the functions of ICTs, particularly the social networking site, Facebook, to actively construct their identities. I conducted the main body of my fieldwork between June 2011, and June 2012. However, at the time of submitting the draft of my thesis in July 2013, I was still in contact with the people who helped me in my research, and therefore was engaged in fieldwork throughout the course of the research and writing process. This study forms part of a larger project entitled: "Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), mobility and the reconfiguration of marginality in South(ern) Africa". I hope to contribute to this larger project with this ethnographic study of the use of ICTs by Cameroonian students in Cape Town in the context of their mobility, varying levels of marginality, and their social networks and community relations, by seeking to answer the research question.
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    Investigating how women negotiate and navigate relationships through use of cell phones: a case study of Basotho women in Maseru
    (2014) Sello, Kefiloe; Nyamnjoh, Francis
    This study is a guise at how cell phones are becoming power, identity and trend tools, through which women navigate and negotiate intimate relationships, particularly romantic and family relationships. I explore the threads that weave together the materiality of presence, space and the constantly changing definition of culture. This study also explores identity and authentication of personhood, which come along as relationships are being negotiated and navigated. All these are traced through three Basotho women from Maseru based in Cape Town, whose lives I shadowed for three months. I argue that cell phones provide women a stance to negotiate and navigate relationships through offering them a space and position that goes beyond and challenges norms that have been in place before. Cell phones are placed in the theoretical framework of domestication and, more particularly, of cultural appropriation. They are regarded not only as devices to communicate, but also as material objects which cause economic problems and may affect social relations through the uneven disposition over such objects. As in many other African countries, the growth of cell phone usage in Maseru is higher than in Western countries, reflecting the particular appreciation of these devices. I also argue that personhood is authenticated through and by use of cell phones which have offered women the stage to showcase their lives without necessarily being present in the showcase. This argument is particularly valid for my case study because of the new ground that it breaks into as far as women and cell phone technologies are concerned in Maseru. Not only does this lead to understanding the 21st century woman in Maseru, but I believe it can lead to other studies such as negotiating power relations between men and women via cell phones .
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    Mauritianism or the mitigated euphoria of the rainbow nation
    (2013) Dewoo, Moshumee Teena; Nyamnjoh, Francis
    Extensively hailed as an economic miracle, an irrefutable ile durable that even defies until today the extrapolations and predictions of the greatest of writers such as Trinidadian V.S. Naipaul about the economic status of the country after it achieved independence, Mauritius has also grown to be known as the archetypal independent state, nurturing a rainbow nation, enn nation larkansiel. Indeed, one cannot deny such glimpses of Mauritianism, where all come together, "as one people, as one nation", as enn sel lepep, enn sel nation to celebrate the island and to celebrate their Mauritianism, their perhaps-hybrid identities and their unique modes of identification. It is undeniable that, to a certain extent, lines of ethnic and cultural differences have become indistinguishable through cultural assimilation, national events, inter-ethnic marriages and post-independence socio-economic relationships, giving Mauritians the appearance of being "one people". However, whilst the island's movement to a stable and successful economy is obvious, observable and is recognised around the globe, the official discourse of a peaceful multiethnic space, a unified multicultural nation proves limited, is mostly mystical, is outdated, if not deceptive of national Mauritian realities: Mauritianism (the rainbow nation) is not described in its authentic, scientific and complete form, but is interpreted and represented, is mystified, kept romantic, euphoric, poetic, inexplicable, and remains narrow. The Mauritian aspiration to the rainbow nation, as well as progressive co-habitation, reciprocal exchanges and the related socio-economic and political matters (what Mauritians experience) seem to have been simplified, if not misidentified as accomplished non-ethnic and future-oriented national unification and homogeneity (what is depicted of the Mauritian people in much of foreign – and archaic - scholarship and other narratives about the island's social stature). The multicultural Mauritian nation and its development, known to Mauritians and explained by local authors, are far more nuanced and complex than the hypothetical, the imagined, exultant, extraordinary and completed rainbow nation' that is praised by many within and beyond Mauritius, and that is envied by those larger nations that have not yet made their multicultural origins a socio-economic asset towards progress and prosperity. It can be argued, therefore, that although not completed, Mauritianism is a possibility sustained mainly in the imaginaries, especially those of non-Mauritians, that the idyllic Mauritian nation is an imagined community. Writing from an experiential point of view, a Mauritian perspective15, would thence contribute to the understanding and explanation of the 'less euphoric', the actual, the physical, the tangible Mauritian nation, perhaps not in its entirety, but at least in its progression, its other realities, its various waves, its challenges and its complexities. Mauritianism, as will be explained in this thesis, is not (yet) a fait accompli, at least not to Mauritians. It remains in many regards an aspiration. What is also interesting, following this logic, is not to look at the consequences of the myth of and the constant aspiration to Chazalian nationalism, but to explore what it claims and possesses, what it interprets and refigures, and what it silences and suppresses.
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    Mobility, space and urbanism: a study of practices and relationships among migrants from African countries in Cape Town, South Africa
    (2023) Chekero, Tamuka; Nyamnjoh, Francis; Ross Fiona
    This study examines the ways in which migrants' diverse experiences in urban Cape Town are mediated by their mobility, movement, and circulation of necessary livelihood objects and ideas. I explore how social formations are individually and collectively created and co-created by migrants' daily interactions, encounters, experiences, and social dynamics in the city. The research is innovative in its deliberate option not to classify migrants based on their country of origin (except where necessary to explain the experiences of actors), thereby challenging stereotypes and preconceptions about African migrants and migration as “people out of place”. Data for this study were gathered using a multi-sited ethnography between 2019 and 2021. Numerous visits in various Cape Town neighbourhoods, observations, interactions, and participation in migrants' social activities, as well as formal and informal interviews and group discussions with a sample of Cape Town's migrant population, were used. The data gathered were analysed using the framework of incompleteness and conviviality, to understand how migrants in Cape Town foster and sustain social networks, such as hushamwari (friendship) and mutuality inspired by ubuntu. The empirical data reveals that the category “migrant” generates and reinforces particular kinds of “borders” and “boundaries” that limit and restrict the mobility potential, access to space and livelihood opportunities of the people so categorized. Some of these obstacles consist of profiling based on belonging and non-belonging, roadblocks set up by law enforcement and local hostilities that implicitly or overtly target them. Due to the precarious nature of their situation, migrant women are confronted with a greater number of challenges. In addition to these challenges, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic added another layer of difficulty to the problems that migrants face. Their livelihoods, sources of income, and as a direct result, remittances were all negatively impacted. In coping with the challenges, migrants form connections with diverse people and embrace various social networks, such as hushamwari, inspired by ubuntu and conviviality. Social networks are an important factor in assisting migrants in gaining access to opportunities for livelihood, sending available money and goods home (during the COVID-19 lockdown) and developing sociality. Even though social networks exist, they are not easily accessible to everyone and will not last indefinitely. They may suffer and strain since they are not immune to conflicts, friction and tension. Conflicting religious practices, beliefs, and values have been demonstrated to strain and pose challenges to migrant social networks. Though social networks may be disputed among migrants as a result of conflict, the social bonds made through conviviality, mutuality, hushamwari and ubuntu appear to be strong and promising. By embracing these concepts, this study portrays migrants as rational individuals who rely on numerous interconnections and creative interdependencies to survive in Cape Town. In conclusion, this study underscores that more than nationality, networks such as hushamwari, which are built on incompleteness, ubuntu, and conviviality are more important in the everyday interactions, encounters, and livelihood struggles of migrants, and it is important to foreground this in research on urbanism and its cosmopolitan imperative.
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    Negotiating whiteness: a discourse analysis of students' descriptions of their raced experiences at Rhodes University, Grahamstown,1 South Africa
    (2020) Msomi, Zuziwe Nokwanda; Nyamnjoh, Francis; Garuba, Harry
    Questions of the dominance of cultures of whiteness are pre-imminent issues in historically white South African universities. Even when historically white universities – such as Rhodes University, the site of study for this thesis – have a predominantly black student body post 1994, there are still reports of students experiencing such institutions as alienating and excluding due to the privileging of whiteness. This thesis draws on the significant role played by discourse in how the world is constructed and reconstructed, to better understand how whiteness may continue to be produced and reproduced in everyday interactions at a historically white South African university, and how some students may feel less at home than others within such institutions. The thesis seeks to answer the following research question: what discursive strategies do Rhodes University students use to describe their raced experiences, and what role do these strategies play in either reinforcing and or challenging a culture of whiteness? The thesis engages with and is informed by literature on whiteness as constitutive of both social aspects and phenotypical essence. Drawing primarily from discourse analysis tools, and from interviews with Rhodes University students completed between 2014 and 2015, the thesis argues that whiteness is far from being a zero-sum game of winners and losers. Rather, there are gradations of whiteness where speakers draw upon whatever capital (social, phenotypical or a combination of both) to attain the best possible outcome for themselves. The thesis therefore takes seriously the idea that whiteness is a social construct which can, through socialisation be acquired, lost and, in some cases, decanted partially into other vessels. Whiteness, the thesis argues, is ever incomplete and subject to change as the context changes in order to ensure that it remains associated with privilege, opportunity and power. If whiteness is not limited to white bodies only, as suggested by both the data and literature review, then it must be studied in relation to blackness as well. The interactional, inter-relational and inter-racial construction and use of whiteness both methodologically and conceptually is one of the key contributions to the field of whiteness studies made by this thesis. This open-ended, permanent work in progress approach to whiteness can be the beginning of conversations about race that are not necessarily bounded by phenotype or essence – especially in South Africa, where race and a fixation of rigid social categories continue to be a central part of how South Africans navigate and understand the world around them.
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    Running Ahead - Understanding the possibilities and Challenges of Belonging and Identity through the Nimble-Footed Joburg Runner in Times of Precarity
    (2023) Nyarhi, Thelma; Nyamnjoh, Francis
    This research reviews the possibilities for livelihoods to emerge through the acts of ‘trying'. It centers itself in the Johannesburg CBD and shares stories of Zimbabwean migrants residing within the metropolis. These stories were collated through the Joburg runners (who consist of female migrants who take it upon themselves to shop, pack, and source transport for their client's consumables). Additional respondents were sought through the runner network systems which included wrappers, and transporters. Literature has largely focused on male migrants. However, the trend of feminized migration continues to rise. This invites the telling of stories of the lived experiences of these women in a place where they are considered as vulnerable ‘soft targets'. Hence the present study traces the nimble footedness of the female migrant in knowing when to cross, recross and crisscross borders and boundaries. The research contributes an added perspective to conventional themigration narrative, within which women are frequently portrayed as the inaudible voices and passive actors and frequently appear as accompanying social actors who moved to join their spouses or merely remain at home and await remittances. Through the prism of the Joburg runners as female migrants, this study invites conversations around (im)mobility, reimagination of belonging and identity. Consequently, what emerged were conversations around borders and boundaries, fear, friendship, familyhood, motherhood, conflict, suffering, trauma, belonging, identity, endurance, and tactical thinking. As wives, mothers, and daughters, with fascinating nimbleness, the Joburg runners always found ways to navigate social boundaries and physical borders in the quest of securing livelihoods for their families. This required the application of kungwara (being clever and calculating) in carrying out their work as Joburg runners. This was no easy task and required the acceptance of incompleteness thereby enabling the openness to social encounters. The conceptual framework employed was one of ‘trying' (kuzamazama) and incompleteness (Nyamnjoh, 2015) which challenges the idea of boundedness and fixity in being, becoming and belonging in contexts where multiple encounters generate myriad interconnections and interdependencies. These encounters through conviviality contest the ideas of rigid prescriptiveness and binary oppositions and enable the migrant to go about their livelihood operations in pragmatic and accommodative ways. Social networks are birthed and result in social cohesion and community building which reimagines the ways of existence, resistance, and endurance through an open disposition to sociality.
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    The silent frontier: deaf people and their social use of cell phones in Cape Town
    (2012) Van Pinxteren, Myrna; Nyamnjoh, Francis
    This thesis seeks to understand the ways in which the Deaf negotiate and embrace the cell phone socially. The Deaf, who can be seen as a linguistic and sensory minority within the predominant hearing society, use the cell phone to negotiate their marginalised position as people living with a hearing impairment. By doing so, the Deaf are able to extend and intensify their social relationships, which are used to overcome language barriers.
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    Street as the place for conviviality?: relationships between people, products, and place in Cape Town CBD
    (2025) Nakamura, Matsuri; Nyamnjoh, Francis
    This ethnographic study explores the dynamics of encounter and interaction within a shared urban space, focusing on St. George's Mall in Cape Town Central Business District. This vibrant street, lined with stalls operated by migrants and a few South African traders, is a nexus of diverse flows—locals, migrants, and tourists—all circulating within a space of ‘multiple and unforeseen encounters'. Drawing insights primarily from street vendors, who have become ‘street-wise' through their long-term presence and interactions, the study examines how relationships are forged and negotiated within this fluid environment. These vendors form close-knit bonds with neighbouring vendors and those working around them, creating a “family” that transcends traditional boundaries of gender, religion, race, and nationality. This mutual support system, encompassing both business and personal life, is vital for their survival and success. However, this ‘family-like' relationship is not utopian. Tensions exist due to business competition and interpersonal conflicts, necessitating ongoing negotiation, sharing responsibilities, and respecting established norms. Despite these challenges, the vendors' interdependence fosters a sense of “being together” amidst difference and disagreement, highlighting the complexities of convivial urban relationships. The study also examines the constant circulation of people and goods that characterises St. George's Mall. This fluidity underscores the street's open-ended structure and intrinsic connections to the surrounding urban environment and transnational networks. The vendors, amidst this mobility, forge connections and develop a contingent sense of belonging to the space—a belonging that is fluid, pluralistic, and living with difference and tension. St. George's Mall thus emerges as a metaphor for open-ended belonging in the face of mobility and difference. It challenges the narratives of exclusion and xenophobia prevalent in South Africa, reimagining ‘others' as individuals with names and faces. By examining the encounters, mobility, and circulations on St. George's Mall, this study explores the extent to which this urban space fosters convivial relationships, offering a glimpse into the possibilities for ‘fulfilment-seeking incompleteness' in the city.
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    The ‘Nasyon': a critical exploration of the ‘Nasyon's' persisting dissociation from political power in Mauritius
    (2023) Dewoo, Moshumee Teena; Nyamnjoh, Francis; Nstebeza, Lungisile
    The ‘Nasyon', persons of (imagined, claimed, and proclaimed unmixed) black African ancestry in Mauritius, have always stood at the lowest rungs of the Mauritian socio-political hierarchy, persistently dissociated from political power therein. In this thesis, I set out to uncover and explore the reasons for this through the prism of historical ethnography and from the following question: What are the modes of action (x) that give rise to the ‘Nasyon's' persisting dissociation from political power in Mauritius (y)? From and through this prism, I find the ‘Nasyon' to have been fixed as permanently incomplete humans, if human at all, and their incompleteness to have been institutionalised toward keeping them at the margins of the country as non-citizens thereof. Naturally, they could not access or should not be allowed access to political power. To get to political power, they would need to be complete or be made so, as per the claims and requests of political observers and activists on the matter of the marginalisation of persons of black African ancestry. This is the quest for completeness. But this quest is problematic because completeness is unreal, and incompleteness is the normal order of things in the socio-political world. I take from the works of Amos Tutuola and Francis Nyamnjoh to explain this, putting incompleteness forward as a more wholesome lens from and through which to read the case of the ‘Nasyon's' persisting dissociation from political power in Mauritius: the ‘Nasyon' are incomplete humans, but this is not a problem to be solved.
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    (Un)papering the cracks in South Africa : the role of 'traditional' and 'new' media in nation-negotiation around Julius Malema on the eve of the 2010 FIF World Cup
    (2011) Rodrigues, Erika; Nyamnjoh, Francis
    In April 2010, amidst the nation-unifying discourses prevalent during the preparation for the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup™ to be hosted in South Africa, a series of events gave rise to the revitalization of other discourses in the national media: those of racial polarization and the possibility of a race war.
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    Upholding civility towards diversity in urban public space: exploring the makings of conviviality and belonging in Cape Town's city centre
    (2016) Adoné, Kitching; Nyamnjoh, Francis
    This study is concerned with the makings of conviviality in the market spaces in Cape Town's city centre. It investigates the strategies through which diverse actors in the Church Street Antique Market, Greenmarket Square and St George's Mall negotiate - even celebrate - difference. In doing so the study offers an ethnographic account of everyday life in the market spaces, and considers the ways in which prosaic actions and interactions contribute to the cultivation of habits of accommodation. The study shows that conviviality emerges out of everyday negotiations of space, where actors recognise their shared interest in securing livelihoods. Furthermore, it argues that conviviality is not only rooted in the recognition of a basic sameness, but also in the acknowledgement that interconnections with diverse others are necessary for the achievement of individual and collective goals. Finally, this work brings attention to the significance of habits of accommodation for experiences of belonging and citizenship.
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    Open Access
    Water and sociality in Khayelitsha: an ethnographic study
    (2022) Kongo, Minga Mbweck; Nyamnjoh, Francis; Chitonge, Horman
    This study examines forms of social relationships created around unequal municipal water distribution in South Africa. Using the case of Khayelitsha, the study investigates residents' use of water to sustain their livelihood and build personhood. Water mobilises the formation of relationships in myriad ways. How residents, collectively and individually, imagine, negotiate and construct their future pathways around resources available to them in a social group is explored. Ethnographic tools are used to address how social formations are created around municipal water in Khayelitsha. The study looks into how inequalities related to access to water in Cape Town are produced with inequitable development patterns. Using incompleteness and conviviality as framework, the study seeks to understand how ideas of social formation, belonging, marginality, and physical and social mobility are produced, reproduced and contested around water. By focusing on the strategies deployed by residents, this study also seeks to describe the challenges of inadequate water access experienced by residents in less- provisioned areas. The multiple relations with, and complexities of, municipal water are chronicled, as well as how Khayelitsha residents think about, relate and respond to water. The empirical data reveal several structural issues characterising the formation of social relations: incompleteness, impoverishment, marginalisation, water access and minimal opportunities. Despite many challenges, frustration, and heavy reliance on communal taps, tanks, water trucks, and hydrants, shack dwellers particularly cherish an ideal of self-sufficiency with the limited amount of water they access. In this quest, they maintain social relations and resistance to the political economy of water. They achieve this by mobility from one settlement to another, maintaining a strong sense of community, belonging, social relationships, and household interdependence, connected to a sense of incompleteness and, to a more considerable extent, Ubuntu. This social practice is manifested in various forms: neighbourliness, water usage at communal points, land occupations, and strikes, amongst others. By combining the structural issues and aspects of social practices provided above, water is seen as a substance that constructs social formations through the phenomena of incompleteness and conviviality. The data were collected during several field visits between February 2020 and March 2021 through observation of interactions and participation in residents' social activities and formal and informal interviews and group discussions with a representative sample of residents in Khayelitsha.