Heike Becker
Biographic Data
| ID | 3584605 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Heike Becker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Heike |
| FAMILY NAME | Becker |
| SIGNATURE | BECKER H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Western Cape |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8079-9152 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 131 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The Bushman Myth Revisited
Cape Town to Berlin. Israels Krieg in Gaza, Südafrika und die strauchelnde Dekolonisierung der deutschen „Erinnerungskultur“
Leseprobe ----- Bibliographie: Becker, Heike: Cape Town to Berlin. Israels Krieg in Gaza, Südafrika und die strauchelnde Dekolonisierung der deutschen „Erinnerungskultur“, PERIPHERIE – Politik • Ökonomie • Kultur, Nr. 174-175 (2-2024), S. 344-353. https://doi.org/10.3224/peripherie.v44i2.15 ----- Open-Access-Lizenz: Dieser Beitrag ist ab dem 11.12.2026 im Open Access unter der Creative-Commons-Lizenz CC BY 4.0 (Namensnennung 4.0 International) ve…
“Youth speaking truth to power”
Decolonise
This article presents a set of arguments about decolonization debates and practices in the South African academy, and particularly efforts by anthropologists based at South African universities to reinvent their discipline from a 21st century southern African perspective. I argue that the student movements of 2015 – 2016 were the primary cause of robust conversations about epistemological and pedagogical issues that had previously not been raised…
Homes and Exiles
People have occupied Namibia, a dry and sparsely populated land, for many thousands of years – its wealth of rock art is testimony to very ancient patterns of settlement and documentation. As the oral history of the various Owambo polities attests, the ancestors of its present-day inhabitants have occupied the area for many generations. When South Africa took over in 1915, resident colonial officials were based in Owambo for the first time. Howev…
Writing Genocide
In this article I read several recently published novels that attempt to write the early 20th century Namibian experience of colonial war and genocide. Mari Serebrov’s Mama Namibia, Lauri Kubuitsile’s The Scattering and Jaspar Utley’s The Lie of the Land set out to write the genocide and its aftermath. Serebrov and Kubuitsile do so expressly from the perspective of survivors; their main characters are young Herero women who live through war and g…
Living Politics in South Africa's Urban Shacklands by Kerry Ryan Chance
Reviewed by: Living Politics in South Africa’s Urban Shacklands by Kerry Ryan Chance Heike Becker Kerry Ryan Chance, Living Politics in South Africa’s Urban Shacklands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 224 pp. Much has been written about popular protests, labor struggles, and social movements in post-apartheid South Africa. However, little attention has been paid to the material reality and the agency of activists. Instead, social move…
South A frica, Anthropology in
Anthropology in South Africa has always been politically implicated, albeit in diverse ways. The entry describes anthropology's formal establishment in response to early twentieth‐century concerns about “the native question” and how that fashioned a discipline focused on black South Africans, which was split between two perspectives on segregationism and apartheid policy: volkekunde , a racist‐inspired anthropology that underpinned apartheid's co…
Popular Culture, Anthropological Perspectives on
Until recently anthropologists have been ambivalent about popular culture. Reasons for this were twofold, theoretically as much as politically. Since the mid‐1980s, however, popular culture studies have become an increasingly salient arena of contemporary anthropology. Johannes Fabian introduced the term “popular culture” to anthropological inquiry, understood as contemporary cultural expressions by the masses in contrast to both modern elitist a…
Vincent Moloi, dir. Skulls of My People
Negotiating the German colonial past remains intensely contested. This is the central message of Skulls of My People, a feature-length documentary by South African filmmaker Vincent Moloi that aired on the Al Jazeera English Witness program. The film follows the story of the Herero in Namibia, who seek proper apologies and reparations for the 1904–1908 genocide of the Herero and Nama people committed by the German colonial army. They do so from t…
Remembering Marikana
This article investigates the role played by cultural initiatives in urban struggles in South Africa, and the emergence of public art to assert the right to the city. I explore how artistic- activist interventions engage an understanding of social justice and the right to the city in provocative visual and performance art. I demonstrate how such interventions reflect Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the city as a space to be inhabited in an active…
Un/making difference through performance and mediation in contemporary Africa
This special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies grew out of a panel we organized at the European Conference on African Studies in Lisbon in June 2013. Our starting point was the observation of a massive revival of cultural and religious identities across the African continent, stretching from post-apartheid South Africa to Islamist groups in parts of West Africa. In the early twenty-first century, Africa appears to be witnessing a h…
A hip-hopera in Cape Town
This paper looks into the aesthetics and politics of the ‘hip-hopera’ Afrikaaps. Afrikaaps was produced in 2010 by a group of musicians and spoken-word artists from Cape Town and the rural Western Cape Province of South Africa. The show premiered at an annual Afrikaans cultural festival; it then had a three week-run at a theatre, located in a predominantly white, English-speaking part of Cape Town, followed by different sets of performance in Sou…
Africa after apartheid
South African economic and political expansion into the African continent has been a controversial\nfeature of the post-apartheid era. Now human geographer Richard Schroeder has taken up the matter\nin an ethnographic study based in Tanzania, a preferred destination for South African business. The\ncountry presents a particularly interesting example of the post-apartheid social, cultural and political\ndynamics of "South Africa in Africa" since T…
South Africa
volkekunde paralleled the division between the country's English-medium and Afrikaansmedium universities.When, from the 1960s onward, the apartheid government established new universities for exclusively black (but ethnically divided) students-in order to exclude the small number of black students from the older, now almost exclusively white English-medium universities-most of the anthropology taught at those new institutions tended to be volkeku…
How We See Our Culture
This article presents visual imaginations of culture on the periphery of Cape Town. Auto-photography was engaged to investigate popular understandings of culture and the processes, discourses and practices of negotiating culture in contemporary South Africa. Some township residents were provided with inexpensive cameras to represent visually what they see as their culture. This auto-photography was complemented with studies of visual culture in p…
Counting teeth
Welcome toAnthropology Southern Africa2014
The making of the pentecostal melodrama
The politics and aesthetics of commemoration
The contributions to the special section in this issue study recent independence celebrations and other national days in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They explore the role of national days in state-making and nation-building, and examine the performativity of nationalism and the role of performances in national festivities. Placing the case studies in a broader, comparative perspective, the int…
Lenaika
Beyond Trauma
Commemorating Heroes in Windhoek and Eenhana
In post-colonial Namibia public memory of the liberation war prioritizes the armed struggle from exile. This master narrative of national liberation, having become the new nation's foundation myth, legitimizes the power of the post-colonial SWAPO elite as the sole, heroic liberators from apartheid and colonialism. It has not remained uncontested, however. The article develops the complex transfigurations of liberation war memory, culture and nati…
Introduction toAnthropology Southern Africaspecial issue on 'Engaging Difference
This special issue of Anthropology Southern Africa is the result of troubling questions of how to engage difference and belonging. Anthropologists in South Africa, like their colleagues elsewhere, today face the return of difference thinking. The articles in this special issue speak to a range of interconnected challenges presented by the politics of difference in contemporary southern and East Africa. Despite the variation of conceptual, epistem…
Debates Section
Commemorating Heroes in Windhoek and Eenhana
In post-colonial Namibia public memory of the liberation war prioritizes the armed struggle from exile. This master narrative of national liberation, having become the new nation's foundation myth, legitimizes the power of the post-colonial SWAPO elite as the sole, heroic liberators from apartheid and colonialism. It has not remained uncontested, however. The article develops the complex transfigurations of liberation war memory, culture and nati…
Herero Heroes
Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes: a socio-political history of the Herero of Namibia, 1890-1923. Oxford: James Currey, 1999, 320 pp., £40.00, ISBN 0 85255 754 X (hard covers), £14.95, ISBN 0 85255 749 3 (paperback). - Volume 71 Issue 4
The politics and aesthetics of commemoration
The contributions to the special section in this issue study recent independence celebrations and other national days in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They explore the role of national days in state-making and nation-building, and examine the performativity of nationalism and the role of performances in national festivities. Placing the case studies in a broader, comparative perspective, the int…
De-provincialising South African anthropology
This paper examines a range of challenges to anthropology in post-apartheid South Africa in the hope of stimulating a much needed debate on ‘doing anthropology’ from the perspective of South African anthropologists who research and teach within their own complex society. It addresses questions about the continuities and discontinuities of ‘doing anthropology’ in South Africa, which pay special attention to the discipline's historically situated p…
Fieldwork in shared spaces
The paper reflects on the ethical complexities of fieldwork 'at home' in Cape Town, South Africa and Namibia. It draws on Cheater's (1987) idea of the 'citizen anthropologist' to consider the obligations of resident anthropologists to the subjects of their research. It shows the shifts in understandings of research and the research relationship and explores the power dynamics of such relationships. It argues that anthropologists should be viewed …
South Africa
volkekunde paralleled the division between the country's English-medium and Afrikaansmedium universities.When, from the 1960s onward, the apartheid government established new universities for exclusively black (but ethnically divided) students-in order to exclude the small number of black students from the older, now almost exclusively white English-medium universities-most of the anthropology taught at those new institutions tended to be volkeku…
Introduction toAnthropology Southern Africaspecial issue on 'Engaging Difference
This special issue of Anthropology Southern Africa is the result of troubling questions of how to engage difference and belonging. Anthropologists in South Africa, like their colleagues elsewhere, today face the return of difference thinking. The articles in this special issue speak to a range of interconnected challenges presented by the politics of difference in contemporary southern and East Africa. Despite the variation of conceptual, epistem…
Global and African
This article investigates hip-hop, identity and global cultural flows among young people in contemporary Cape Town. We argue that hip-hop functions as a vehicle for identity negotiations in contemporary South Africa. The discussion of hip-hop in an 'African' township shows that the search for local forms of African identity in the time of globalisation does not necessarily mean the confirmation of old boundaries or the construction of bounded 'ne…
New Things after Independence
This article is concerned with gender and traditional authorities in postcolonial Namibia. Drawing on fieldwork in four rural localities, I argue that the widely-noted resurgence of chieftaincy in post-apartheid southern Africa is linked to shifts in local gender discourses and practices, which have re-imagined global and national gender discourses and have resulted in partial transformations of the institution. While these recent developments ar…
The Least Sexist Society? Perspectives on Gender, Change and Violence among southern African San
This article refutes essentialist popular and academic discourses revolving around the presumption of primordial gender equality and harmony among the San of southern Africa. These discourses continue to ignore the devastating gendered consequences of land and cultural dispossession, poverty and the large-scale militarisation of the San. The discussion focuses on contemporary gender-based violence among San communities against the background of t…
A hip-hopera in Cape Town
This paper looks into the aesthetics and politics of the ‘hip-hopera’ Afrikaaps. Afrikaaps was produced in 2010 by a group of musicians and spoken-word artists from Cape Town and the rural Western Cape Province of South Africa. The show premiered at an annual Afrikaans cultural festival; it then had a three week-run at a theatre, located in a predominantly white, English-speaking part of Cape Town, followed by different sets of performance in Sou…
Beyond Trauma
Let Me Come to Tell You
In this paper, I explore cultural discourse, gender and the subjectivities of local people on the frontier of empire in mid‐20th century southern Africa. Using the example of Nekwaya Loide Shikongo, a prominent woman from Ondonga in northern Namibia (the colonial “Ovamboland”), and an epic poem on the deposed King Iipumbu yaShilongo that she performed in 1953, I discuss how gender was constituted and mediated. The narrative of a remarkable woman’…
How We See Our Culture
This article presents visual imaginations of culture on the periphery of Cape Town. Auto-photography was engaged to investigate popular understandings of culture and the processes, discourses and practices of negotiating culture in contemporary South Africa. Some township residents were provided with inexpensive cameras to represent visually what they see as their culture. This auto-photography was complemented with studies of visual culture in p…
Debates Section
Writing Genocide
In this article I read several recently published novels that attempt to write the early 20th century Namibian experience of colonial war and genocide. Mari Serebrov’s Mama Namibia, Lauri Kubuitsile’s The Scattering and Jaspar Utley’s The Lie of the Land set out to write the genocide and its aftermath. Serebrov and Kubuitsile do so expressly from the perspective of survivors; their main characters are young Herero women who live through war and g…
Remembering Marikana
This article investigates the role played by cultural initiatives in urban struggles in South Africa, and the emergence of public art to assert the right to the city. I explore how artistic- activist interventions engage an understanding of social justice and the right to the city in provocative visual and performance art. I demonstrate how such interventions reflect Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the city as a space to be inhabited in an active…
Un/making difference through performance and mediation in contemporary Africa
This special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies grew out of a panel we organized at the European Conference on African Studies in Lisbon in June 2013. Our starting point was the observation of a massive revival of cultural and religious identities across the African continent, stretching from post-apartheid South Africa to Islamist groups in parts of West Africa. In the early twenty-first century, Africa appears to be witnessing a h…
Meekulu's Children
Herero Heroes
Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes: a socio-political history of the Herero of Namibia, 1890-1923. Oxford: James Currey, 1999, 320 pp., £40.00, ISBN 0 85255 754 X (hard covers), £14.95, ISBN 0 85255 749 3 (paperback). - Volume 71 Issue 4
The Least Sexist Society? Perspectives on Gender, Change and Violence among southern African San
This article refutes essentialist popular and academic discourses revolving around the presumption of primordial gender equality and harmony among the San of southern Africa. These discourses continue to ignore the devastating gendered consequences of land and cultural dispossession, poverty and the large-scale militarisation of the San. The discussion focuses on contemporary gender-based violence among San communities against the background of t…
Fieldwork in shared spaces
The paper reflects on the ethical complexities of fieldwork 'at home' in Cape Town, South Africa and Namibia. It draws on Cheater's (1987) idea of the 'citizen anthropologist' to consider the obligations of resident anthropologists to the subjects of their research. It shows the shifts in understandings of research and the research relationship and explores the power dynamics of such relationships. It argues that anthropologists should be viewed …
Let Me Come to Tell You
In this paper, I explore cultural discourse, gender and the subjectivities of local people on the frontier of empire in mid‐20th century southern Africa. Using the example of Nekwaya Loide Shikongo, a prominent woman from Ondonga in northern Namibia (the colonial “Ovamboland”), and an epic poem on the deposed King Iipumbu yaShilongo that she performed in 1953, I discuss how gender was constituted and mediated. The narrative of a remarkable woman’…
New Things after Independence
This article is concerned with gender and traditional authorities in postcolonial Namibia. Drawing on fieldwork in four rural localities, I argue that the widely-noted resurgence of chieftaincy in post-apartheid southern Africa is linked to shifts in local gender discourses and practices, which have re-imagined global and national gender discourses and have resulted in partial transformations of the institution. While these recent developments ar…
Ursula Trüper. The Invisible Woman
(2007). Ursula Truper. The Invisible Woman: Zara Schmelen, African Mission Assistant at the Cape and in Namaland. Social Dynamics: Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 253-255
De-provincialising South African anthropology
This paper examines a range of challenges to anthropology in post-apartheid South Africa in the hope of stimulating a much needed debate on ‘doing anthropology’ from the perspective of South African anthropologists who research and teach within their own complex society. It addresses questions about the continuities and discontinuities of ‘doing anthropology’ in South Africa, which pay special attention to the discipline's historically situated p…
Global and African
This article investigates hip-hop, identity and global cultural flows among young people in contemporary Cape Town. We argue that hip-hop functions as a vehicle for identity negotiations in contemporary South Africa. The discussion of hip-hop in an 'African' township shows that the search for local forms of African identity in the time of globalisation does not necessarily mean the confirmation of old boundaries or the construction of bounded 'ne…
Debates Section
Introduction toAnthropology Southern Africaspecial issue on 'Engaging Difference
This special issue of Anthropology Southern Africa is the result of troubling questions of how to engage difference and belonging. Anthropologists in South Africa, like their colleagues elsewhere, today face the return of difference thinking. The articles in this special issue speak to a range of interconnected challenges presented by the politics of difference in contemporary southern and East Africa. Despite the variation of conceptual, epistem…
Lenaika
Beyond Trauma
Commemorating Heroes in Windhoek and Eenhana
In post-colonial Namibia public memory of the liberation war prioritizes the armed struggle from exile. This master narrative of national liberation, having become the new nation's foundation myth, legitimizes the power of the post-colonial SWAPO elite as the sole, heroic liberators from apartheid and colonialism. It has not remained uncontested, however. The article develops the complex transfigurations of liberation war memory, culture and nati…
The making of the pentecostal melodrama
The politics and aesthetics of commemoration
The contributions to the special section in this issue study recent independence celebrations and other national days in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They explore the role of national days in state-making and nation-building, and examine the performativity of nationalism and the role of performances in national festivities. Placing the case studies in a broader, comparative perspective, the int…
Welcome toAnthropology Southern Africa2014
South Africa
volkekunde paralleled the division between the country's English-medium and Afrikaansmedium universities.When, from the 1960s onward, the apartheid government established new universities for exclusively black (but ethnically divided) students-in order to exclude the small number of black students from the older, now almost exclusively white English-medium universities-most of the anthropology taught at those new institutions tended to be volkeku…
How We See Our Culture
This article presents visual imaginations of culture on the periphery of Cape Town. Auto-photography was engaged to investigate popular understandings of culture and the processes, discourses and practices of negotiating culture in contemporary South Africa. Some township residents were provided with inexpensive cameras to represent visually what they see as their culture. This auto-photography was complemented with studies of visual culture in p…
Counting teeth
Africa after apartheid
South African economic and political expansion into the African continent has been a controversial\nfeature of the post-apartheid era. Now human geographer Richard Schroeder has taken up the matter\nin an ethnographic study based in Tanzania, a preferred destination for South African business. The\ncountry presents a particularly interesting example of the post-apartheid social, cultural and political\ndynamics of "South Africa in Africa" since T…
Un/making difference through performance and mediation in contemporary Africa
This special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies grew out of a panel we organized at the European Conference on African Studies in Lisbon in June 2013. Our starting point was the observation of a massive revival of cultural and religious identities across the African continent, stretching from post-apartheid South Africa to Islamist groups in parts of West Africa. In the early twenty-first century, Africa appears to be witnessing a h…
A hip-hopera in Cape Town
This paper looks into the aesthetics and politics of the ‘hip-hopera’ Afrikaaps. Afrikaaps was produced in 2010 by a group of musicians and spoken-word artists from Cape Town and the rural Western Cape Province of South Africa. The show premiered at an annual Afrikaans cultural festival; it then had a three week-run at a theatre, located in a predominantly white, English-speaking part of Cape Town, followed by different sets of performance in Sou…
South A frica, Anthropology in
Anthropology in South Africa has always been politically implicated, albeit in diverse ways. The entry describes anthropology's formal establishment in response to early twentieth‐century concerns about “the native question” and how that fashioned a discipline focused on black South Africans, which was split between two perspectives on segregationism and apartheid policy: volkekunde , a racist‐inspired anthropology that underpinned apartheid's co…
Popular Culture, Anthropological Perspectives on
Until recently anthropologists have been ambivalent about popular culture. Reasons for this were twofold, theoretically as much as politically. Since the mid‐1980s, however, popular culture studies have become an increasingly salient arena of contemporary anthropology. Johannes Fabian introduced the term “popular culture” to anthropological inquiry, understood as contemporary cultural expressions by the masses in contrast to both modern elitist a…
Political science (26 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Law (18 works) · History (16 works) · Politics (15 works) · Anthropology (14 works) · South African History and Culture (14 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Art (12 works)