Abdul-Gafar Oshodi: "Between (and beyond) Aisha Huang and Stonebwoy: Towards Understanding Non-State Actors and Chinese Environmental Footprints in Ghana"

MIASA Public Lectures Series

There has been renewed interest in Africa-China relations in the last twenty years – and among the areas that have attracted some attention in academic literature and popular media is Chinese environmental footprint in Africa. Although existing literature on this subset of Africa-China relations appears to predominantly overlook the role of non-state actors (NSAs), they have nonetheless remained a recurring element in the engagement of Chinese environmental footprints in Africa. Building on an earlier work on the role of NSAs in Africa-China encounter wherein they have represented a “point of engagement” sometimes in the face of the “points of exit” of the African State, Abdul-Gafar Oshodi will be discussing his approach to an ongoing research project entitled “Governance from below? Non-state actors and Chinese environmental footprints in Africa – The case of Ghana” at the Merian Institute of Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA). Aside the introductory section, the presentation will be broadly divided into three parts. The first part will use the case of Aisha Huang – a Chinese citizen that was arrested, released, expelled, and re-arrested in Ghana for illegal gold mining (or galamsey in the local parlance) – to illustrate the “point of exit” in Africa-China relations. The second section will interrogate “Greedy Men,” arguably the strongest criticism against Chinese environmental footprint (or galamsey) in Ghana, by Livingstone Etse Satekla (aka Stonebwoy), one of Ghana’s leading music stars, to illustrate not only “rhythmic opposition” but also a “point of engagement.” Beyond the episode of Aisha Huang and Stonebwoy’s rendition, however, the third part will raise important questions about concepts, shifts, reductionity, research ethics, positionality and beneficiality; all questions that will be discusses within the context of the ongoing MIASA project.

Siphiwe Dube is a Senior Lecturer and former Head in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is an author of numerous interdisciplinary articles and chapters (and also supervises) on a range of topics covering African politics and religion, decoloniality, feminisms, post-colonial literature, race, religion and masculinities, religion and identity politics, religion and popular culture, and transitional justice. His current two projects focus on African Political Theology and the Religious New Right in post-apartheid South Africa. He is a United World College (Atlantic College) alumnus, a former NRF-DST Scarce Skills Development Postdoctoral Research Fellow, a former Africa Fellow at IASH, University of Edinburgh and currently a Pan-African Scientific Research Council Fellow, NRF-rated scholar, and Senior Fellow at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana.

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