Labor strategies in Northern Rhodesian copper mines, 1926—1935

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 2

The "labor aristocracy" thesis considered once again: the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt 1926-1966

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 5

Gender, ideology and power: Marriage in the colonial copperbelt towns of Zambia

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented March 1991The state of African marriage in colonial Zambia has been a matter of discussion, research and policy debate since the colony developed in the late 19th century. The outline of these discussions is well known. Chanock (1985) has described the initial repugnance by missionaries and colonial rulers towards "barbaric" African marriage customs, and the provision of jura! rights to African women to counter this tendency. The resulting flood of marital litigation alarmed colonial and African (male) authorities, and consequently, in the 1920s, the discourse on African marriage changed. Researchers, missionaries and colonial officials expressed alarm about the "crisis in African marriage", particularly in the new urban centers. Traditional marriage customs, especially those strengthening control over women, began to be seen as a solution rather than a problem, and efforts to shore up traditional African marriage intensified (Richards 1940; Wilson 1942). During World War II the debate began to change, and concern for development spawned a renewed interest in marital stability, but this time in conjunction with support for the new developmental elite, the urban working and middle classes. Thus the debate came full circle- Once again colonial officials advocated a more interventive approach to African institutions, particularly marriage and the family, which were seen as central to issues of social and economic development as well as public order. While the outline of this debate is well known, there has been a tendency to present colonial discourse an marriage as a monolithic entity, lacking internal contradictions. The importance of these internal contradictions, and the contribution by African men and women to this debate, has been underestimated. The role of emerging class forces in the African community has also been largely ignored. This article is an attempt to achieve a deeper understanding of the debates around African marriage in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia, with particular attention to the towns that grew up around the copper mines in the 1920s. The article intends to investigate the various strands of the debate around African marriage, and the possibility that contending interpretations of the crisis over colonial marriage in Africa, both in the European and African communities, may have provided openings for African women to influence the discourse on African marriage and the reality of their lives in town

Heuristics as Bayesian inference under extreme priors

Simple heuristics are often regarded as tractable decision strategies because they ignore a great deal of information in the input data. One puzzle is why heuristics can outperform full-information models, such as linear regression, which make full use of the available information. These "less-is-more" effects, in which a relatively simpler model outperforms a more complex model, are prevalent throughout cognitive science, and are frequently argued to demonstrate an inherent advantage of simplifying computation or ignoring information. In contrast, we show at the computational level (where algorithmic restrictions are set aside) that it is never optimal to discard information. Through a formal Bayesian analysis, we prove that popular heuristics, such as tallying and take-the-best, are formally equivalent to Bayesian inference under the limit of infinitely strong priors. Varying the strength of the prior yields a continuum of Bayesian models with the heuristics at one end and ordinary regression at the other. Critically, intermediate models perform better across all our simulations, suggesting that down-weighting information with the appropriate prior is preferable to entirely ignoring it. Rather than because of their simplicity, our analyses suggest heuristics perform well because they implement strong priors that approximate the actual structure of the environment. We end by considering how new heuristics could be derived by infinitely strengthening the priors of other Bayesian models. These formal results have implications for work in psychology, machine learning and economics

‘Because it’s our culture!’ (Re)negotiating the meaning of lobola in Southern African secondary schools

Payment of bridewealth or lobola is a significant element of marriage among the Basotho of Lesotho and the Shona of Zimbabwe. However, the functions and meanings attached to the practice are constantly changing. In order to gauge the interpretations attached to lobola by young people today, this paper analyses a series of focus group discussions conducted among senior students at two rural secondary schools. It compares the interpretations attached by the students to the practice of lobola with academic interpretations (both historical and contemporary). Among young people the meanings and functions of lobola are hotly contested, but differ markedly from those set out in the academic literature. While many students see lobola as a valued part of ‘African culture’, most also view it as a financial transaction which necessarily disadvantages women. The paper then seeks to explain the young people’s interpretations by reference to discourses of ‘equal rights’ and ‘culture’ prevalent in secondary schools. Young people make use of these discourses in (re)negotiating the meaning of lobola, but the limitations of the discourses restrict the interpretations of lobola available to them

Challenging empowerment: AIDS-affected southern African children and the need for a multi-level relational approach

Critics of empowerment have highlighted the concept's mutability, focus on individual transformation, one-dimensionality and challenges of operationalisation. Relating these critiques to children's empowerment raises new challenges. Drawing on scholarship on children's subjecthood and exercise of power, alongside empirical research with children affected by AIDS, I argue that empowerment envisaged as individual self-transformation and increased capacity to act independently offers little basis for progressive change. Rather it is essential to adopt a relational approach that recognises the need to transform power relationships at multiple levels. This analysis has implications for our wider understanding of empowerment in the 21st century. © The Author(s) 2013.This research was funded by DFID

Hearing the silences: adult Nigerian women’s accounts of ‘early marriages’

‘Early marriage’ is a relatively common, but under-researched global phenomenon, associated with poor health, mental health, educational and occupational outcomes, particularly for young girls. In this article, we draw on qualitative interviews with 6 Nigerian women from Sokoto State, who were married between the ages of 8 and 15. The interviews explored young women’s experiences of the transition to marriage, being married, pregnancy and their understanding of the marital and parental role. Using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, we explore women’s constrained articulations of their experiences of early marriage, as they are constituted within a social context where the identity of ‘woman’ is bound up in values and practices around marriage and motherhood. We explore the complexity of ‘hearing’ women’s experiences when their identities are bound up in culturally overdetermined ideas of femininity that function explicitly to silence and constrain the spaces in which women can speak