Book Review
Nordic Journal of African Studies
Author: Joanna Woods
From Scandinavia to Soweto
Black metal, a genre known for its radical musical and ideological transgressions, originated in the early 1980s and consolidated in Norway during the 1990s. While traditionally linked to a raw sound, Satanic themes, and a misanthropic world…
The Industrial Wastelands of Tabacoop
Industrial wastelands resulting from the decline of industries from the colonial period are now an industrial heritage and a major challenge for urban renewal in Algerian cities. These wastelands are characterized by long transitional phases…
Rwandans’ Attitudes Towards Swahili
This paper reports findings from a study examining Rwandans’ attitudes towards Swahili across different occupational groups. The study hypothesized that there would be a relationship between Rwandans’ occupations and their attitudes towards …
Akan Noun-Noun Compounds
This paper presents a discussion of Akan noun-noun compounds and a Construction Morphology account of their properties. Noun-noun compounds are the most studied type of compounds cross-linguistically, with studies revealing interesting issue…
Beyond the Frontiers of Activism and Social Change
Fela Anikulapo Kuti (1938–1997) distinguished himself as one of the foremost Nigerian musicians in the Afrobeat genre by identifying with the masses in Africa. He achieved a populist appeal by critiquing social ills and advocating for the es…
Asian Drug Import, Local Production, and Regulatory Capacity in Tanzania, 1970–2005
By the mid-2000s, the contribution of Tanzania’s pharmaceutical industry to local drug circulation was low compared to imports, with the latter mostly coming from India. The situation had mainly stayed the same since independence in 1961, de…
Auxiliaries and Analyticity in Northwestern Bantu
Northwestern Bantu (NWB) languages differ from Eastern/Southwestern Bantu languages in that their verb forms are more often analytic, with pre-stem inflectional material appearing in a complex that may be unbound from the main verb. This has…
The Development of Negative ‘have’ Auxiliaries in the Bantu Languages of the Middle and Lower Zambezi
This paper studies the grammaticalization of possessive predicates into negative auxiliaries expressing main clause negation in the Bantu languages of the Middle and Lower Zambezi River region. Drawing on a convenience sample of languages fr…
Auxiliary Verb Constructions and Decategorialization in Gĩkũyũ
Gĩkũyũ (E.51) exhibits several verbs that can be used both as lexical verbs and as auxiliary verbs. We compare the lexical and auxiliary usages of four verbs and show that all auxiliary verb usages display uniform restrictions concerning val…
BE Auxiliary Verb Constructions in Kihehe
Kihehe (G62) has a rich inventory of auxiliary constructions (> 120) grounded in different forms of be: copula -li and -ʋa ‘be’. This paper addresses those constructions in which the auxiliary is marked for one of three pasts – hodiernal,…
The Pragmatic Functions of the Auxiliary Verbs za ‘come’ and ya ‘go’ in isiXhosa
This study focuses on the syntactic and pragmatic functions of the isiXhosa auxiliary verbs za ‘come’ and ya ‘go’ when followed by subjunctive or past consecutive lexical verbs. Analysis of the auxiliaries’ occurrence in a 60,000-word databa…
Dedicated Auxiliaries in Tswana (Bantu S31)
This article discusses the subclass of Tswana auxiliaries that cannot be analysed as resulting from the grammaticalization of regular forms of verbs also used predicatively in the present state of the language. It describes the general chara…
Auxiliary Stacking in Southern Bantu Languages
Auxiliary constructions in Southern Bantu exhibit a feature in which two or more auxiliaries appear alongside a single lexical verb. We term this construction ‘auxiliary stacking’. The goal of the paper is to outline the phenomenon of auxili…
Southern Bantu Auxiliary Functions and Their Distributions
Southern Bantu languages have extensive auxiliary inventories with functions that sometimes go beyond typical tense/aspect/mood/polarity meanings. This article examines areal semantic patterns of auxiliaries in 16 Southern Bantu varieties, i…
Introduction to the Special Issue
Bantu languages are notoriously “verby” (Nurse 2008, 21), referring to the highly agglutinative nature of the inflected verb, whose complexities have sparked extensive research. Now that Bantu verbal morphology is much better understood, the…
On the Morphology, Interpretation, and Development of the Kagulu Auxiliary ng’hali
The Kagulu auxiliary verb ng’hali appears in a variety of auxiliary verb constructions and has several phonological realizations (ng’hali, kali, and ng’hati). Unlike other auxiliary verbs in the language, ng’hali occurs with limited morpholo…
Pitch Reset in Akan Subordinate Clauses
This study explores how lexical tone interacts with intonation in Akan, focusing on pitch reset as a prosodic cue in complex declaratives. Pitch reset – an upward shift in fundamental frequency (f0) following declination – has been documente…
Filling the Humanitarian Gap and a Plural Perspective on Humanitarianism
Communitarian socio-cultural practices ‘from below’ that involve the sharing of material and non-material items play a vital role in the lives of refugees. However, these support practices are rarely discussed, documented, or acknowledged fo…
From a Kingdom to a Commonwealth
This article examines the historical trajectory of Denkyira, a once-dominant Akan kingdom in Ghana. It challenges the prevailing narrative that the legacy of Denkyira ended with its defeat by Asante in 1701. Despite its significance as a pre…
Trapped in Coloniality
This article explores how the popular Icelandic Nordic Noir series, Trapped Season 2, provides a nuanced perspective on the deeply rooted concepts of Icelandic and Nordic exceptionalism and homonationalism in popular culture. It offers a com…
The Mother of Awashi
In September 2020, a video circulating on social media plunged he country of Mozambique into a deep moral crisis. The video showed five young men, dressed in the uniform of the Mozambican army, cruelly whipping a naked woman along a road and…
Silozi Phrasal Tonology
In Silozi, High tones are subject to a number of different processes including shift, doubling and deletion. After establishing these on the basis of isolation forms and two-word phrases, this paper examines a range of complex phrases which …
Warriors and Colonizers
This study critically examines (post)colonial ideologies within the Nollywood epic Jagun Jagun (2023), directed by Adebayo Tijjani and Tope Adebayo and produced by Femi Adebayo. Through a colonial reading, the film emerges as a narrative tha…
Form, Formats, and Forms of Informed Consent
This article reflects on the unforeseen dynamics revealed as we presented written consent forms to be signed by our interlocutors during fieldwork in Djibouti and Namibia. Throughout the article we analyse how the consent form (in its legali…