F Becker
Biographic Data
| ID | 41980 |
|---|---|
| NAME | F Becker |
| GIVEN NAMES | F |
| FAMILY NAME | Becker |
| SIGNATURE | BECKER F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ghent University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8210-7252 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 83 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1965 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
A stakeholder empowerment framework to advance eDNA biodiversity monitoring in Africa: Perspectives from Namibia
Muscat in Rural Tanzania: Omani Arabs, Identity, and Citizenship in Post-Slavery Tanzania, 1920s–1960s
Studies on post-slavery in East Africa often concentrate on the aftermath of slavery for the formerly enslaved. By contrast, former owners’ experiences after abolition and during emancipation are rarely explored. This article examines the trajectories of Omani Arabs in western Tanzania during and after the end of slavery, ca. 1910 to the late twentieth century. Having settled and built slavelabour plantations along the central caravan route in th…
Supportive, Destructive, or Indifferent? Expanding Global Markets and the End of Slavery in Continental East Africa in the Twentieth Century
Nineteenth-century East Africa experienced a first and last, rather than second, efflorescence of slavery. Legal abolition occurred late, between 1897 and 1922. Nevertheless, unlike in many other formerly slave-owning societies, most slave descendants here do not form distinctive, marginalized communities today. Still, they hesitate to acknowledge slave ancestry. This paper investigates the dynamics behind this ambivalent outcome. Comparing two r…
Women’s Livelihood and Status Struggles in Tabora after the End of Slavery, 1920s–60
This paper examines the life trajectories, social contexts and living conditions of women of uncertain status in post-slavery, colonial-era Tabora, with a focus on those involved in the production and consumption of beer. It thereby searches insights into the aftermath of slavery in this region, particularly for women. It reflects on the persistent social unease surrounding slavery and its aftermath, and on the way it shapes and limits sources, a…
Kijiji cha Watoro: Resistance, Identity, and Social Life of Nyamwezi Runaway Slaves along the Central Caravan Route in Tanzania
The 2023/24 Views Prediction challenge: Predicting the number of fatalities in armed conflict, with uncertainty
Governmental and nongovernmental organizations have increasingly relied on early-warning systems of conflict to support their decisionmaking. Predictions of war intensity as probability distributions prove closer to what policymakers need than point estimates, as they encompass useful representations of both the most likely outcome and the lower-probability risk that conflicts escalate catastrophically. Point-estimate predictions, by contrast, fa…
Claiming the People's Past: Populist Politics of History in the Twenty-First Century
This book offers a global and systematic overview of populist politics of history in the twenty-first century. An international group of scholars interrogates how and why populists engage with the past. Twelve case studies focus on uses of history and memory by populist movements across the globe – ranging from Brazil to Bangladesh, from Poland to Tanzania. Five thematic chapters zoom in on key features of populism: its relation to time, national…
In Pursuit of Freedom: Oaths, Slave Agency, and the Abolition of Slavery in Western Tanzania, 1905–1930
This article examines ways in which slaves and missionaries used public declarations before witnesses to carve out a distinctive space of legal proceedings in pursuit of emancipation in western Tanzania. This way of pursuing emancipation shows slaves deploying their intellectual creativity and cultural knowledge to shape the German and British colonial legal systems. Interviews provide evidence that these public declarations drew on long-standing…
Researching the Aftermath of Slavery in Mainland East Africa: Methodological, Ethical, and Practical Challenges
This article examines ethical, practical, and methodological challenges in researching the aftermath of slavery in continental East Africa away from the coastal plantation belt. Interest in post-slavery there is recent and inspired by the apparent contrast with West Africa, where the issue is much more salient. The article explains this silence by highlighting politically-motivated avoidance of the issue in colonial sources and the preference of …
S teven F abian . Making Identity on the Swahili Coast: Urban Life, Community, and Belonging in Bagamoyo
This book is a study of the history of urban identity in Bagamoyo, a Swahili town on the Tanzanian coast known particularly for its role as the end point of the central caravan route in the nineteenth century. While disagreeing with some of its claims, I found it a joy to read. The author’s appreciation for and close involvement with influential groups among present-day Bagamoyo’s urbanites are evident throughout and enable him to provide vivid c…
Tanzania’s Authoritarian Turn
For a time, Tanzania enjoyed a reputation for mostly free elections and public debate. But after President John Magufuli was elected in 2015, he introduced measures to stifle the media and tilt the electoral playing field in favor of the longtime ruling party. The turn toward authoritarianism is not due to any one personality or stereotypical “mad dictator,” however (notwithstanding Magufuli’s pandemic denialism, which may have cost him his life)…
“Looking for Life”: Traces of Slavery in the Structures and Social Lives of Southern Swahili Towns
This article traces the history of slavery and of post-slavery struggles for livelihood and status in the layout, the physical structures, and the social lives of three towns on the southern Swahili Coast: Kilwa, Mikindani, and Lindi. These towns were long surrounded by plantations that relied on the labor of enslaved people. In the first decades of the twentieth century, slave populations dissipated quickly. In towns, the colonial cash crop econ…
Locating the 'customary' in post-colonial Tanzania's politics: The Shiftingmodus Operandiof the Rural State
This paper examines how both rhetoric about custom and practices drawing on elements of deep-rooted political culture remain relevant in post-colonial Tanzania. This is the case despite the Tanzanian government's aggressively modernising stance and the erasure of colonial-era 'traditional' chiefs after independence. The paper identifies three patterns. Firstly, witchcraft cleansing remains a rare flashpoint over which rural people are willing to …
The Politics of Poverty: Policy-Making and Development in Rural Tanzania
How is it that rural poverty in southern Tanzania appears both easy to explain and yet also mystifying? Why is it that 'development' is such a touchstone, when actual attempts at fostering development have been largely ephemeral and/or unpopular for decades? In this book, Felicitas Becker traces dynamics of rural poverty based on the exportation of foodstuffs rather than the better-known problems connected to exportation of migrant labour, and ex…
Patriarchal Masculinity in Recent Swahili-language Muslim Sermons
This paper offers a close examination of statements on patriarchal masculinity from three widely traded sermon recordings produced in Zanzibar, Tanzania. It sets them in the context of Islamic reform, Muslim political discontent, and the consumption of sermon recordings in East Africa. Despite similar assertions on the need for men to protect and control women, in close reading the three preachers offer quite divergent characterisations of the pa…
Obscuring and Revealing: Muslim Engagement with Volunteering and the Aid Sector in Tanzania
This article examines Muslim involvement, or lack of it, in AIDS services provision in Tanzania. It argues that Muslims find it harder than Christians to work with Western donors whose conceptions of civil society and volunteering do not accurately reflect the institutional practices of Muslims. Many Muslims also mistrust the role played by the state in brokering cooperation. Nevertheless, Muslims seek to engage with the volunteering discourse an…
The bureaucratic performance of development in colonial and post-colonial Tanzania
This article examines change and continuity in development measures concerning cassava in a poor Tanzanian region over a period of 80 years. It shows ambivalent and dubious ways of reasoning about the causes of and solutions to poverty related to these measures, and argues that the persistence of such problematic arguments is understandable if one considers their political usefulness. Local officials have always had to safeguard their own viabili…
Introduction: Performing Citizenship and Enacting Exclusion on Africa's Indian Ocean Littoral
The Indian Ocean is frequently depicted as a sphere of seamless connectivity, characterized by fluid and wide-ranging exchanges between traders, sea-farers, clerics, intellectuals, and authors. We seek to nuance this depiction by highlighting the importance of specific, place-bound social concerns that tempered these cosmopolitan performances of citizenship with more exclusionary dynamics. Our goal is to emphasize the importance of context, conti…
Religious Anxieties in Two Marginal Regions
Becker’s article focuses on similarities between arguments about funerary ritual, in particular the rite of telkin (admonition), among Muslim congregations in Highland Aceh, Indonesia, and in parts of Tanzania. It discusses the Sufi and scholarly networks that most likely explain the presence of this rite in both regions. The intensity of recent arguments about telkin, though, is connected to changing social and political constellations in the co…
Remembering Nyerere: Political rhetoric and dissent in contemporary Tanzania
This article examines the changing uses of political rhetoric around the burial of Julius Nyerere in 1999. It argues that the ruling party uses rhetoric as a means of 'soft power', but also documents how this rhetoric, though geared towards legitimizing Nyerere's successors, employed tropes that were rejected by some people and were used by others to critique leaders who were perceived to lack the selfless integrity attributed to Nyerere. The art…
Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theater: Global Perspectives
Chapter 2 Freeborn Villagers: Islam and the Local Uses of Cosmopolitan Connections in the Tanzanian Countryside
Common Themes, Individual Voices: Memories of Slavery around a Former Slave Plantation in Mingoyo, Tanzania
African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade: Volume 1, the Sources
Though the history of slavery is a central topic for African, Atlantic world and world history, most of the sources presenting research in this area are European in origin. To cast light on African perspectives, and on the point of view of enslaved men and women, this group of top Africanist scholars has examined both conventional historical sources (such as European travel accounts, colonial documents, court cases, and missionary records) and le…
Season of Rains: Africa in the world
Traders, ‘Big Men’ and Prophets: Political Continuity and Crisis in the Maji Maji Rebellion in Southeast Tanzania
This article places the origins of the Maji Maji rebellion in Southeast Tanzania within the context of tensions between coast and interior, and between ‘big man’ leaders and their followers, which grew out of the expansion of trade and warfare in the second half of the nineteenth century. Without discounting its importance as a reaction against colonial rule, the paper argues that the rebellion was driven also by the ambitions of local leaders an…
Islamic Reform and Historical Change in the Care of the Dead: Conflicts Over Funerary Practice Among Tanzanian Muslims
Muslim radicalism in Tanzania has tended to be perceived as a political problem, and as part of a trans-regional wave of Islamist movements. The present article instead seeks to demonstrate the connections between current debates among Tanzanian Muslims and long-standing ritual and social concerns, by highlighting debates on funerary practice. While these debates focus on the correct ritual process of burial (with reformists decrying elements of …
Remembering Nyerere: Political rhetoric and dissent in contemporary Tanzania
This article examines the changing uses of political rhetoric around the burial of Julius Nyerere in 1999. It argues that the ruling party uses rhetoric as a means of 'soft power', but also documents how this rhetoric, though geared towards legitimizing Nyerere's successors, employed tropes that were rejected by some people and were used by others to critique leaders who were perceived to lack the selfless integrity attributed to Nyerere. The art…
Rural Islamism during the 'war on terror: A Tanzanian case study
In the Tanzanian country town of Rwangwa, a bitter confrontation has developed between Sufi Muslims and Islamist reformers. The Islamists draw on Middle Eastern inspiration, but the conflict arises equally from local, regional and national context, and is cultural as well as religious and political. Situated in an economically and educationally disadvantaged region, access to land and trade forms the focus of conflicts between the young (Islamist…
The Virus and the Scriptures: Muslims and Aids in Tanzania
This paper examines Tanzanian Muslims' practical and discursive stances on AIDS in relation to the context in which they are produced. The AIDS problematic is interacting with lively debates, as for the last two decades Muslim reformists have been demanding revisions to ritual practice and a more restrictive application of Muslim social norms. The state-sponsored central organisation for Tanzanian Muslims is viewed with distrust not only by refor…
Introduction: Performing Citizenship and Enacting Exclusion on Africa's Indian Ocean Littoral
The Indian Ocean is frequently depicted as a sphere of seamless connectivity, characterized by fluid and wide-ranging exchanges between traders, sea-farers, clerics, intellectuals, and authors. We seek to nuance this depiction by highlighting the importance of specific, place-bound social concerns that tempered these cosmopolitan performances of citizenship with more exclusionary dynamics. Our goal is to emphasize the importance of context, conti…
Searching for Pathways in a Landscape of Death: Religion and Aids in East Africa
The commonalities of eastern Africa's history from colonial occupation to the formation of nation states and their post-postcolonial decay, the region's shared experiences with the religions of the book-fist Islam and later Christianity-and its shared struggle with the physical, social, political and epistemological predicament of HIV/AIDS, make East Africa, with its cultural and historical diversity, a suitably coherent field to study the relati…
Commoners in the process of Islamization: Reassessing their role in the light of evidence from southeastern Tanzania
Many societies became Muslim gradually, without conquest by Muslim rulers. Explanations of this process typically focus on Muslim traders, proselytizing ‘holy men’, and the conversion of ruling elites, as the limited sources suggest. Yet it cannot be assumed that Islamization always made sense for elites as a power-enhancing stratagem, or that rulers or holy men were willing or able to shape the religious allegiances of commoners. In fact, studie…
Locating the 'customary' in post-colonial Tanzania's politics: The Shiftingmodus Operandiof the Rural State
This paper examines how both rhetoric about custom and practices drawing on elements of deep-rooted political culture remain relevant in post-colonial Tanzania. This is the case despite the Tanzanian government's aggressively modernising stance and the erasure of colonial-era 'traditional' chiefs after independence. The paper identifies three patterns. Firstly, witchcraft cleansing remains a rare flashpoint over which rural people are willing to …
The bureaucratic performance of development in colonial and post-colonial Tanzania
This article examines change and continuity in development measures concerning cassava in a poor Tanzanian region over a period of 80 years. It shows ambivalent and dubious ways of reasoning about the causes of and solutions to poverty related to these measures, and argues that the persistence of such problematic arguments is understandable if one considers their political usefulness. Local officials have always had to safeguard their own viabili…
Researching the Aftermath of Slavery in Mainland East Africa: Methodological, Ethical, and Practical Challenges
This article examines ethical, practical, and methodological challenges in researching the aftermath of slavery in continental East Africa away from the coastal plantation belt. Interest in post-slavery there is recent and inspired by the apparent contrast with West Africa, where the issue is much more salient. The article explains this silence by highlighting politically-motivated avoidance of the issue in colonial sources and the preference of …
Patriarchal Masculinity in Recent Swahili-language Muslim Sermons
This paper offers a close examination of statements on patriarchal masculinity from three widely traded sermon recordings produced in Zanzibar, Tanzania. It sets them in the context of Islamic reform, Muslim political discontent, and the consumption of sermon recordings in East Africa. Despite similar assertions on the need for men to protect and control women, in close reading the three preachers offer quite divergent characterisations of the pa…
Obscuring and Revealing: Muslim Engagement with Volunteering and the Aid Sector in Tanzania
This article examines Muslim involvement, or lack of it, in AIDS services provision in Tanzania. It argues that Muslims find it harder than Christians to work with Western donors whose conceptions of civil society and volunteering do not accurately reflect the institutional practices of Muslims. Many Muslims also mistrust the role played by the state in brokering cooperation. Nevertheless, Muslims seek to engage with the volunteering discourse an…
Häufiger benutzte Abkürzungen
Politics and Post-Colonial Theory: African Inflections
Introduction 1. Negritude and Nativism: In Search of Identity 2. Decolonisation and National Liberation 3. Modernity and the Problem of the Nation-State 4. Striving for Democratisation: The Complexities of Civil Society and Human Rights 5. Citizenship, Subjectivity and the Crisis of Modernity 6. Globalisation and Post-Colonialism: Towards the Reconstitution of Identity 7. Conclusion
Traders, ‘Big Men’ and Prophets: Political Continuity and Crisis in the Maji Maji Rebellion in Southeast Tanzania
This article places the origins of the Maji Maji rebellion in Southeast Tanzania within the context of tensions between coast and interior, and between ‘big man’ leaders and their followers, which grew out of the expansion of trade and warfare in the second half of the nineteenth century. Without discounting its importance as a reaction against colonial rule, the paper argues that the rebellion was driven also by the ambitions of local leaders an…
Rural Islamism during the 'war on terror: A Tanzanian case study
In the Tanzanian country town of Rwangwa, a bitter confrontation has developed between Sufi Muslims and Islamist reformers. The Islamists draw on Middle Eastern inspiration, but the conflict arises equally from local, regional and national context, and is cultural as well as religious and political. Situated in an economically and educationally disadvantaged region, access to land and trade forms the focus of conflicts between the young (Islamist…
Searching for Pathways in a Landscape of Death: Religion and Aids in East Africa
The commonalities of eastern Africa's history from colonial occupation to the formation of nation states and their post-postcolonial decay, the region's shared experiences with the religions of the book-fist Islam and later Christianity-and its shared struggle with the physical, social, political and epistemological predicament of HIV/AIDS, make East Africa, with its cultural and historical diversity, a suitably coherent field to study the relati…
The Virus and the Scriptures: Muslims and Aids in Tanzania
This paper examines Tanzanian Muslims' practical and discursive stances on AIDS in relation to the context in which they are produced. The AIDS problematic is interacting with lively debates, as for the last two decades Muslim reformists have been demanding revisions to ritual practice and a more restrictive application of Muslim social norms. The state-sponsored central organisation for Tanzanian Muslims is viewed with distrust not only by refor…
Becoming Muslim in Mainland Tanzania, 1890-2000
This book looks at the Muslims in Mainland Tanzania, as well as what people in Southeast Tanzania understood by Islam, or by being Muslim, and what they sought to attain by becoming Muslim. This question may seem contrived: the personal reasons why a set of people, most of whom are now dead, changed their religious allegiance are unrecoverable. The most fundamental problem lies with the timing of the expansion of Islam. It is clearly shown that c…
Commoners in the process of Islamization: Reassessing their role in the light of evidence from southeastern Tanzania
Many societies became Muslim gradually, without conquest by Muslim rulers. Explanations of this process typically focus on Muslim traders, proselytizing ‘holy men’, and the conversion of ruling elites, as the limited sources suggest. Yet it cannot be assumed that Islamization always made sense for elites as a power-enhancing stratagem, or that rulers or holy men were willing or able to shape the religious allegiances of commoners. In fact, studie…
Islamic Reform and Historical Change in the Care of the Dead: Conflicts Over Funerary Practice Among Tanzanian Muslims
Muslim radicalism in Tanzania has tended to be perceived as a political problem, and as part of a trans-regional wave of Islamist movements. The present article instead seeks to demonstrate the connections between current debates among Tanzanian Muslims and long-standing ritual and social concerns, by highlighting debates on funerary practice. While these debates focus on the correct ritual process of burial (with reformists decrying elements of …
Chapter Nine. Sudden Disaster And Slow Change: Maji Maji And The Long-Term History Of Southeast Tanzania
Maji Maji continues to occupy a special place throughout the war region. While the First World War was similarly devastating, Maji Maji stands alone as an attempt to get rid of colonial occupation by violent means. Focusing on the eastern half of the area affected by the war, this chapter shows how Maji Maji interacted with both change and continuity. It shows, on one hand, that the ways in which people sought to cope with the aftermath of the wa…
Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theater: Global Perspectives
Chapter 2 Freeborn Villagers: Islam and the Local Uses of Cosmopolitan Connections in the Tanzanian Countryside
Common Themes, Individual Voices: Memories of Slavery around a Former Slave Plantation in Mingoyo, Tanzania
African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade: Volume 1, the Sources
Though the history of slavery is a central topic for African, Atlantic world and world history, most of the sources presenting research in this area are European in origin. To cast light on African perspectives, and on the point of view of enslaved men and women, this group of top Africanist scholars has examined both conventional historical sources (such as European travel accounts, colonial documents, court cases, and missionary records) and le…
Season of Rains: Africa in the world
Religious Anxieties in Two Marginal Regions
Becker’s article focuses on similarities between arguments about funerary ritual, in particular the rite of telkin (admonition), among Muslim congregations in Highland Aceh, Indonesia, and in parts of Tanzania. It discusses the Sufi and scholarly networks that most likely explain the presence of this rite in both regions. The intensity of recent arguments about telkin, though, is connected to changing social and political constellations in the co…
Remembering Nyerere: Political rhetoric and dissent in contemporary Tanzania
This article examines the changing uses of political rhetoric around the burial of Julius Nyerere in 1999. It argues that the ruling party uses rhetoric as a means of 'soft power', but also documents how this rhetoric, though geared towards legitimizing Nyerere's successors, employed tropes that were rejected by some people and were used by others to critique leaders who were perceived to lack the selfless integrity attributed to Nyerere. The art…
The bureaucratic performance of development in colonial and post-colonial Tanzania
This article examines change and continuity in development measures concerning cassava in a poor Tanzanian region over a period of 80 years. It shows ambivalent and dubious ways of reasoning about the causes of and solutions to poverty related to these measures, and argues that the persistence of such problematic arguments is understandable if one considers their political usefulness. Local officials have always had to safeguard their own viabili…
Introduction: Performing Citizenship and Enacting Exclusion on Africa's Indian Ocean Littoral
The Indian Ocean is frequently depicted as a sphere of seamless connectivity, characterized by fluid and wide-ranging exchanges between traders, sea-farers, clerics, intellectuals, and authors. We seek to nuance this depiction by highlighting the importance of specific, place-bound social concerns that tempered these cosmopolitan performances of citizenship with more exclusionary dynamics. Our goal is to emphasize the importance of context, conti…
Obscuring and Revealing: Muslim Engagement with Volunteering and the Aid Sector in Tanzania
This article examines Muslim involvement, or lack of it, in AIDS services provision in Tanzania. It argues that Muslims find it harder than Christians to work with Western donors whose conceptions of civil society and volunteering do not accurately reflect the institutional practices of Muslims. Many Muslims also mistrust the role played by the state in brokering cooperation. Nevertheless, Muslims seek to engage with the volunteering discourse an…
Patriarchal Masculinity in Recent Swahili-language Muslim Sermons
This paper offers a close examination of statements on patriarchal masculinity from three widely traded sermon recordings produced in Zanzibar, Tanzania. It sets them in the context of Islamic reform, Muslim political discontent, and the consumption of sermon recordings in East Africa. Despite similar assertions on the need for men to protect and control women, in close reading the three preachers offer quite divergent characterisations of the pa…
The Politics of Poverty: Policy-Making and Development in Rural Tanzania
How is it that rural poverty in southern Tanzania appears both easy to explain and yet also mystifying? Why is it that 'development' is such a touchstone, when actual attempts at fostering development have been largely ephemeral and/or unpopular for decades? In this book, Felicitas Becker traces dynamics of rural poverty based on the exportation of foodstuffs rather than the better-known problems connected to exportation of migrant labour, and ex…
Locating the 'customary' in post-colonial Tanzania's politics: The Shiftingmodus Operandiof the Rural State
This paper examines how both rhetoric about custom and practices drawing on elements of deep-rooted political culture remain relevant in post-colonial Tanzania. This is the case despite the Tanzanian government's aggressively modernising stance and the erasure of colonial-era 'traditional' chiefs after independence. The paper identifies three patterns. Firstly, witchcraft cleansing remains a rare flashpoint over which rural people are willing to …
Tanzania’s Authoritarian Turn
For a time, Tanzania enjoyed a reputation for mostly free elections and public debate. But after President John Magufuli was elected in 2015, he introduced measures to stifle the media and tilt the electoral playing field in favor of the longtime ruling party. The turn toward authoritarianism is not due to any one personality or stereotypical “mad dictator,” however (notwithstanding Magufuli’s pandemic denialism, which may have cost him his life)…
“Looking for Life”: Traces of Slavery in the Structures and Social Lives of Southern Swahili Towns
This article traces the history of slavery and of post-slavery struggles for livelihood and status in the layout, the physical structures, and the social lives of three towns on the southern Swahili Coast: Kilwa, Mikindani, and Lindi. These towns were long surrounded by plantations that relied on the labor of enslaved people. In the first decades of the twentieth century, slave populations dissipated quickly. In towns, the colonial cash crop econ…
Political science (24 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (20 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (18 works) · History (17 works) · Law (14 works) · Colonialism (12 works) · Geography (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works)