Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
Biographic Data
| ID | 3769059 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga |
| GIVEN NAMES | Clapperton Chakanetsa |
| FAMILY NAME | Mavhunga |
| SIGNATURE | MAVHUNGA C C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 45 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Zvipukanana
Summoning insights from dzimbahwe cultures of knowing—specifically indigenous ways of seeing, thinking, knowing, and doing as archived in local languages—this essay will first argue that the word “insect” did not exist among the author’s ancestors before the colonial moment and is too light and narrow to account for their sciences and what they did with and through them. Second, it proposes indigenous concepts that more adequately capture meaning…
The Mobile Workshop
How the presence of the tsetse fly turned the African forest into an open laboratory where African knowledge formed the basis of colonial tsetse control policies.\n\nThe tsetse fly is a pan-African insect that bites an infective forest animal and ingests blood filled with invisible parasites, which it carries and transmits into cattle and people as it bites them, leading to n'gana (animal trypanosomiasis) and sleeping sickness. In The Mobile Work…
What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?
Beyond Austerity - Reforming the Greek Economy
More than eight years after the global financial crisis began, the economy of Greece shows little sign of recovery, and its position in the eurozone seems tenuous. Between 2008 and 2014, incomes in Greece shrank by more than 25 percent, homes lost more than a third of their value, and the unemployment rate reached 27 percent. Most articles on Greece in the media focus on the effects of austerity, repayment of its debt, and its future in the euroz…
Containers, Carriers, Vehicles”
This introduction launches the new portfolio of articles on African mobilities and situates the three articles of this special section within the portfolio’s approach. This could be summarized in three key objectives. First, it seeks to highlight the inadequacy of enthusing in Africa simply as a venue where the itineraries of things and people from outside take place. Second, African mobilities is a way to signal the mobilities of Africans and th…
Guerrilla healthcare innovation
Drawing from the last five years of chimurenga, Zimbabwe’s war of self-liberation from the early 1960s to 1980s, this paper shows that the most important aspect of technology and innovation in Africa is not the technology and innovation itself, but the African spirit of creative resilience born of the specificities of struggles its people have endured. By creative resilience is meant a phenomenon whereby, even where death is the outcome, and wher…
The Coming of the Gun
This chapter focuses on Africa's professoriate of the hunt, a spiritually guided institution and practice whose central feature was innovation and technology and through which maTshangana and vaShona—the two ethnolinguistic groups that live in the southern end of the Mozambique-Zimbabwe border region—interpreted incoming things such as the gun. The gun arrived in southern Africa around 1500 with the Portuguese interest in Angola, Mozambique, and …
The Professoriate of the Hunt and International Ivory Poaching
This chapter contains sections titled: Mozambican Poachers and the People-Parks Conflict in Postwar Gonarezhou, The Law as a Refuge for Poachers: Four Instances, Afterword: Shadrek, CAMPFIRE, and After
Poaching as Criminalized Innovation
This chapter examines the criminalization of African poaching in the wake of emerging wildlife conservation regimes during the colonial period. More specifically, it considers how indigenous hunting was systematically suppressed as criminal acts that were informed by “absolute fatalism,” “pure cruelty,” and “without feeling whatever for animals.” In conservation, tourism, and state circles the poacher (mupocha) was seen as a criminal, but in the …
The Professoriate of the Hunt and the Tsetse Fly
This chapter examines how European colonizers under siege from the deadly tsetse fly in Africa turned to the professoriate of the hunt in the absence of any remedies of their own. Until the appearance of trypanosomiasis drugs and residual insecticides in the late 1950s, there was no other method besides “game destruction” to starve the tsetse fly and deny it its primary vehicle for mobility: big forest animals. Similarly, in the absence of ready-…
Transient Workspaces
Transient Workspaces
In this book, Clapperton Mavhunga views technology in Africa from an African perspective. Technology in his account is not something always brought in from outside, but is also something that ordinary people understand, make, and practice through their everyday innovations or creativities -- including things that few would even consider technological. Technology does not always originate in the laboratory in a Western-style building but also in t…
Vermin Beings
This article examines the descent of human beings into human game (animal hunted for food and sport) and even further into a vermin being (pestiferous being in need of elimination). It goes beyond the realm of similitude, that is, the treatment of certain people like animals , towards the treatment of people as animals . When humans turn other humans into vermin beings, as preparation for annihilating them using weapons befitting “problem animals…
Transfrontier Talk, Cordon Politics
This article explores the early history of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP). In 1927, a year after the Kruger National Park was created, authorities from the Union of South Africa approached their Portuguese counterparts to request that a similar reservation be created on the Mozambican side of the border contiguous to Kruger. Similar requests were made to and by Southern Rhodesian authorities. This article describes the tensions and c…
A Finger on the Pulse of the Fly
This article emanates from a joint research project aimed at documenting the history of transboundary wildlife policies in southern Africa. One of the issues that emerged from this project was the interplay between such policies and veterinary disease agents
Firearms Diffusion, Exotic and Indigenous Knowledge Systems in the Lowveld Frontier, South Eastern Zimbabwe 1870-1920
This article considers late-nineteenth-century firearms as technology received and used by Africans with a variety of social outcomes. It focuses on the Gonarezhou area of South Eastern Zimbabwe, a rich wildlife habitat now incorporated in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, the largest single wildlife conservation area in the world. When completely established it will cover 100,000 square kilometers in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Mozambique. I…
Vermin Beings
This article examines the descent of human beings into human game (animal hunted for food and sport) and even further into a vermin being (pestiferous being in need of elimination). It goes beyond the realm of similitude, that is, the treatment of certain people like animals , towards the treatment of people as animals . When humans turn other humans into vermin beings, as preparation for annihilating them using weapons befitting “problem animals…
Firearms Diffusion, Exotic and Indigenous Knowledge Systems in the Lowveld Frontier, South Eastern Zimbabwe 1870-1920
This article considers late-nineteenth-century firearms as technology received and used by Africans with a variety of social outcomes. It focuses on the Gonarezhou area of South Eastern Zimbabwe, a rich wildlife habitat now incorporated in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, the largest single wildlife conservation area in the world. When completely established it will cover 100,000 square kilometers in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Mozambique. I…
A Finger on the Pulse of the Fly
This article emanates from a joint research project aimed at documenting the history of transboundary wildlife policies in southern Africa. One of the issues that emerged from this project was the interplay between such policies and veterinary disease agents
Containers, Carriers, Vehicles”
This introduction launches the new portfolio of articles on African mobilities and situates the three articles of this special section within the portfolio’s approach. This could be summarized in three key objectives. First, it seeks to highlight the inadequacy of enthusing in Africa simply as a venue where the itineraries of things and people from outside take place. Second, African mobilities is a way to signal the mobilities of Africans and th…
Transfrontier Talk, Cordon Politics
This article explores the early history of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP). In 1927, a year after the Kruger National Park was created, authorities from the Union of South Africa approached their Portuguese counterparts to request that a similar reservation be created on the Mozambican side of the border contiguous to Kruger. Similar requests were made to and by Southern Rhodesian authorities. This article describes the tensions and c…
Firearms Diffusion, Exotic and Indigenous Knowledge Systems in the Lowveld Frontier, South Eastern Zimbabwe 1870-1920
This article considers late-nineteenth-century firearms as technology received and used by Africans with a variety of social outcomes. It focuses on the Gonarezhou area of South Eastern Zimbabwe, a rich wildlife habitat now incorporated in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, the largest single wildlife conservation area in the world. When completely established it will cover 100,000 square kilometers in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Mozambique. I…
A Finger on the Pulse of the Fly
This article emanates from a joint research project aimed at documenting the history of transboundary wildlife policies in southern Africa. One of the issues that emerged from this project was the interplay between such policies and veterinary disease agents
Transfrontier Talk, Cordon Politics
This article explores the early history of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP). In 1927, a year after the Kruger National Park was created, authorities from the Union of South Africa approached their Portuguese counterparts to request that a similar reservation be created on the Mozambican side of the border contiguous to Kruger. Similar requests were made to and by Southern Rhodesian authorities. This article describes the tensions and c…
Vermin Beings
This article examines the descent of human beings into human game (animal hunted for food and sport) and even further into a vermin being (pestiferous being in need of elimination). It goes beyond the realm of similitude, that is, the treatment of certain people like animals , towards the treatment of people as animals . When humans turn other humans into vermin beings, as preparation for annihilating them using weapons befitting “problem animals…
The Coming of the Gun
This chapter focuses on Africa's professoriate of the hunt, a spiritually guided institution and practice whose central feature was innovation and technology and through which maTshangana and vaShona—the two ethnolinguistic groups that live in the southern end of the Mozambique-Zimbabwe border region—interpreted incoming things such as the gun. The gun arrived in southern Africa around 1500 with the Portuguese interest in Angola, Mozambique, and …
The Professoriate of the Hunt and International Ivory Poaching
This chapter contains sections titled: Mozambican Poachers and the People-Parks Conflict in Postwar Gonarezhou, The Law as a Refuge for Poachers: Four Instances, Afterword: Shadrek, CAMPFIRE, and After
Poaching as Criminalized Innovation
This chapter examines the criminalization of African poaching in the wake of emerging wildlife conservation regimes during the colonial period. More specifically, it considers how indigenous hunting was systematically suppressed as criminal acts that were informed by “absolute fatalism,” “pure cruelty,” and “without feeling whatever for animals.” In conservation, tourism, and state circles the poacher (mupocha) was seen as a criminal, but in the …
The Professoriate of the Hunt and the Tsetse Fly
This chapter examines how European colonizers under siege from the deadly tsetse fly in Africa turned to the professoriate of the hunt in the absence of any remedies of their own. Until the appearance of trypanosomiasis drugs and residual insecticides in the late 1950s, there was no other method besides “game destruction” to starve the tsetse fly and deny it its primary vehicle for mobility: big forest animals. Similarly, in the absence of ready-…
Transient Workspaces
Transient Workspaces
In this book, Clapperton Mavhunga views technology in Africa from an African perspective. Technology in his account is not something always brought in from outside, but is also something that ordinary people understand, make, and practice through their everyday innovations or creativities -- including things that few would even consider technological. Technology does not always originate in the laboratory in a Western-style building but also in t…
Guerrilla healthcare innovation
Drawing from the last five years of chimurenga, Zimbabwe’s war of self-liberation from the early 1960s to 1980s, this paper shows that the most important aspect of technology and innovation in Africa is not the technology and innovation itself, but the African spirit of creative resilience born of the specificities of struggles its people have endured. By creative resilience is meant a phenomenon whereby, even where death is the outcome, and wher…
Containers, Carriers, Vehicles”
This introduction launches the new portfolio of articles on African mobilities and situates the three articles of this special section within the portfolio’s approach. This could be summarized in three key objectives. First, it seeks to highlight the inadequacy of enthusing in Africa simply as a venue where the itineraries of things and people from outside take place. Second, African mobilities is a way to signal the mobilities of Africans and th…
What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?
Beyond Austerity - Reforming the Greek Economy
More than eight years after the global financial crisis began, the economy of Greece shows little sign of recovery, and its position in the eurozone seems tenuous. Between 2008 and 2014, incomes in Greece shrank by more than 25 percent, homes lost more than a third of their value, and the unemployment rate reached 27 percent. Most articles on Greece in the media focus on the effects of austerity, repayment of its debt, and its future in the euroz…
The Mobile Workshop
How the presence of the tsetse fly turned the African forest into an open laboratory where African knowledge formed the basis of colonial tsetse control policies.\n\nThe tsetse fly is a pan-African insect that bites an infective forest animal and ingests blood filled with invisible parasites, which it carries and transmits into cattle and people as it bites them, leading to n'gana (animal trypanosomiasis) and sleeping sickness. In The Mobile Work…
Zvipukanana
Summoning insights from dzimbahwe cultures of knowing—specifically indigenous ways of seeing, thinking, knowing, and doing as archived in local languages—this essay will first argue that the word “insect” did not exist among the author’s ancestors before the colonial moment and is too light and narrow to account for their sciences and what they did with and through them. Second, it proposes indigenous concepts that more adequately capture meaning…
Political science (9 works) · African history and culture studies (8 works) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (8 works) · Geography (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Africa (5 works) · Archaeology (5 works) · Ecology (5 works) · Ethnology (5 works)