Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Nyamnjoh?s book about the heightened xenophobia that both exploits and excludes is an incisive commentary on a globalizing world that reaches down into the grassroots of so many societies with consequences for ordinary people?s lives that have received all too little attention. He meticulously documents the fate of immigrants and the new politics of insiders and outsiders in these Southern African societies, at the same time delivering a telling commentary on the global rhetoric of open societies in an era of increasing closures and exclusions.

"This volume brings together seven empirically grounded contributions by African social scientists of different disciplinary backgrounds. The authors explore the social impact of religious innovation and competition in present day Africa. They represent a selection from an interdisciplinary initiative that made 23 research grants for theologians and social scientists to study Christianity and social change in contemporary Africa. These contributions focus on a variety of dynamics in contemporary African religion (mostly Christianity), including gender, health and healing, social media, entrepreneurship, and inter-religious borrowing and accommodation. The volume seeks to enhance understanding of religion's vital presence and power in contemporary Africa. It reveals problems as well as possibilities, notably some ethical concerns and psychological maladies that arise in some of the these new movements, notably neo-Pentecostal and militant fundamentalist groups. Yet the contributions do not fixate on African problems and victimization. Instead, they explore sources of African creativity, resiliency and agency. The book calls on scholars of religion and religiosity in Africa to invest new conceptual and methodological energy in understanding what it means to be actively religious in Africa today."--Back cover.

Marginality does not mean isolation. In Africa where people are permanently on the move in search, inter alia, of a ëbetter elsewhereí, marginality means disconnection to obvious possibilities and the invisibility of the myriad connections that make life possible for the ordinarily sidestepped. This book is about the workings of networks of the mobile in Africa, a continent usually associated with the ëglobal shadowsí of the world. How do changes in the possibilities for communication, with the recent hype of mobile technology, influence the social and economic dynamics in Africaís mobile margins? To what extent is the freedom associated with new Information and Communication Technologies reality or disillusion for people dwelling in the margins? Are ordinary Africans increasingly Side@Ways? How social are these emergent Side@Ways? Contributions to answering these and related questions are harvested from ethnographic insights by team members of the WOTRO funded ëMobile Africa revisitedí research programme hosted by the African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands.

A Sweet-Footed African captures the sense of being James Jibraeel Alhaji; the milestones and challenges of his life and his reconciliation with emotions, decisions and circumstances of the past, and hopes for the future. James Jibraeel Alhaji's life is characterized by a diversity of personal ambitions, family commitments and economic motives, which lead him from his home in Cameroon to Cape Town, South Africa. The story situates the context of decisions that characterize the so-called quest for greener pastures, examining personal opportunities, triumphs and challenges before and beyond life as an immigrant in South Africa. The story explores what it means to move and to be mobile in Africa, the networks that fulfil and sustain mobile Africans during times of uncertainty, and the lineage to home that remains eternally active.