Academic literature on the topic 'Somono (African people)'

This study explored the relationship between racial groups, racial identity, and attitudes toward dating a person with a physical disability. It was hypothesized that African Americans would have higher levels of racial identity than Caucasian Americans. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that because of shared minority group status, African Americans would have more positive attitudes than Caucasians toward dating someone described as having a physical disability. African American participants were found to have higher levels of racial identity than Caucasian participants, but had significantly more negative attitudes regarding dating a person with a physical disability than Caucasians. A discussion of racial identity, as well as implications for rehabilitation counselors, is included.

This article attempts a womanist reading of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Walker provides a gendered perspective of what it means to be “black,” “ugly,” “poor,” and a “woman” in America. This perspective is ignored in the majority of male-authored African American texts that privilege race and class issues. Being “black,” “poor,” “ugly,” and a “woman,” underscores the complexity of the African American woman’s experience as it condemns African American women into invisibility. However, Walker’s characters like Celie, Sofia, Shug, Mary Agnes, and Nettie fight for visibility and assist each other as African American women in their quest for freedom and independence in a capitalist, patriarchal, and racially polarized America. This article therefore maps out Celie’s evolution from being a submissive and uneducated “nobody” (invisible/voiceless) to a mature and independent “someone” (visibility/having a voice). Two important womanist concepts namely “family” and “sisterhood” inform this metamorphosis as Walker underscores her commitment to the survival and wholeness of African American people.

Amadou Hampâté Bâ was a major African traditionalist and humanist figure of the twentieth century. This article, essentially written from personal memories and direct conversations with him and certain people from his family environment, tells of the unusual journey and secret struggles of an unusual man in search of his roots. Writer, politician, and diplomat, spiritual and religious leader, philosopher, traditionalist; this text shows how Amadou Hampâté Bâ became all of these at once, how he lived through the violence and injustice of French colonialism and how he rediscovered his roots thanks to oral tradition. It was oral tradition that reconciled him with himself and allowed him to reenter Fulani society, from which the violence of colonial wars had expelled him. This article shows how his journey made him into a passionate defender of African cultures, traditions, and languages and someone who admirably knew how to make use of UNESCO as a platform for these causes.

Studies have suggested that in African countries, symptoms of cognitive decline are commonly seen as part of “normal ageing” or attributed to supernatural causes. The impact of folk beliefs about causality upon help-seeking is unclear. Likewise, there is a lack of evidence relating to how families cope with living with an older resident with dementia. Our study's aim was to explore the sociocultural beliefs, understandings, perceptions and behaviours relating to living with dementia in Kintampo, Ghana. We conducted in-depth interviews with a total of 28 people, using a series of case studies among 10 older people living with dementia and their families. Results revealed that symptoms of cognitive impairment were generally linked to inexorable bodily decline understood to be characteristic of “normal” ageing. Stigma was therefore perceived to be non-existent. Whilst managing the costs of care was often a challenge, care-giving was largely accepted as a filial duty, commonly shared among female residents of large compound households. Families experimented with biomedical and traditional medicine for chronic conditions they perceived to be treatable. Our findings suggest that whilst families offer a holistic approach to the needs of older people living with chronic conditions including dementia, health and social policies offer inadequate scaffolding to support this work. In the future, it will be important to develop policy frameworks that acknowledge the continued social and economic potential of older people and strengthen the existing approach of families, optimising the management of non-communicable diseases within primary care.

Ninety years ago the isolation of insulin transformed the lives of people with type 1 diabetes. Now, models based on empirical data estimate that a 25-year-old person with HIV, when appropriately treated with antiretroviral therapy, can expect to enjoy a median survival of 35 years, remarkably similar to that for someone of the same age with type 1 diabetes. It is high time we normalised the lives of people living positively with HIV. This includes the basic human right to conceive and raise children. HIV-positive individuals may be in serodiscordant relationships or in seroconcordant relationships. As health care providers, it is our responsibility to ensure we understand the opportunities and risks of natural conception in these scenarios, so that we can help our patients to make informed decisions about their own lives. Most of all, it is our duty to make family planning in the setting of positive prevention as safe as we can. This includes informed decisions on contraception, adoption, fostering, conception and prevention of mother-to-child transmission. Some months ago a dedicated group of individuals, invited and sponsored by the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society, came together in Cape Town to devise guidance in this area, recognising that there are ideal strategies that may be outside the realm of the resource constraints of the public sector or health programmes in southern Africa. This guideline therefore attempts to provide a range of strategies for various resource settings. It is up to us, the providers, to familiarise ourselves with the merits/benefits and risks of each, and to then engage patients in meaningful discussions. All the above, however, is based on the premise and prerequisite that the subject of family planning is actively raised and frequently discussed in our patient encounters.Please find a link to the update of this guideline: http://sajhivmed.org.za/index.php/hivmed/article/view/399

Expressing anger can signal that someone is certain and competent, thereby increasing their social influence—but does this strategy work for everyone? After assessing gender- and race-based emotion stereotypes (Study 1), we assessed the effect of expressing anger on social influence during group decision making as a function of gender (Studies 2–3) and race (Study 3). Participants took part in a computerized mock jury decision-making task, during which they read scripted comments ostensibly from other jurors. A “holdout” juror always disagreed with the participant and four other confederate group members. We predicted that the contextual factor of who expressed emotion would trump what was expressed in determining whether anger is a useful persuasion strategy. People perceived all holdouts expressing anger as more emotional than holdouts who expressed identical arguments without anger. Yet holdouts who expressed anger (versus no anger) were less effective and influential when they were female (but not male, Study 2) or Black (but not White, Study 3)—despite having expressed identical arguments and anger. Although anger expression made participants perceive the holdouts as more emotional regardless of race and gender, being perceived as more emotional was selectively used to discredit women and African Americans. These diverging consequences of anger expression have implications for societally important group decisions, including life-and-death decisions made by juries.

BackgroundIn Africa, health research on indigent people has focused on how to target them for services, but little research has been conducted to identify the social groups that compose indigence. Our aim was to identify what makes someone indigent beyond being recognised by the community as needing a card for free healthcare.MethodsWe used data from a survey conducted to evaluate a state-led intervention for performance-based financing of health services in two districts of Burkina Faso. In 2015, we analysed data of 1783 non-indigents and 829 people defined as indigents by their community in 21 villages following community-based targeting processes. Using a classification tree, we built a model to select socioeconomic and health characteristics that were likely to distinguish between non-indigents and indigents. We described the screening performance of the tree using data from specific nodes.ResultsWidow(er)s under 45 years of age, unmarried people aged 45 years and over, and married women aged 60 years and over were more likely to be identified as indigents by their community. Simple rules based on age, marital status and gender detected indigents with sensitivity of 75.6% and specificity of 55% among those 45 years and over; among those under 45, sensitivity was 85.5% and specificity 92.2%. For both tests combined, sensitivity was 78% and specificity 81%.ConclusionIn moving towards universal health coverage, Burkina Faso should extend free access to priority healthcare services to widow(er)s under 45, unmarried people aged 45 years and over, and married women aged 60 years and over, and services should be adapted to their health needs.Ethics considerationsThe collection, storage and release of data for research purposes were authorised by a government ethics committee in Burkina Faso (Decision No. 2013-7-066). Respondent consent was obtained verbally.

Purpose Cyberbullying occurs when a minor is tormented, threatened, harassed, humiliated, embarrassed or otherwise targeted by another child. Given that cyberbullying entails defamation or spreading false information or portfolios about someone, it is regarded as a violation of the ethical code of information use. The purpose of the study was to explore the perceptions, experiences and challenges of post-high school youth with regards to cyberbullying. This is a quantitative study that used a survey approach to gather data using a self-administered questionnaire, which was distributed to 60 youth from the KwaZulu-Natal computer literacy community engagement project. The findings attest that youth recognise that cyberbullying might have detrimental effects on victims, such as alcohol and drugs abuse, low self-esteem, high level of absenteeism, poor grades and depression and suicidal thoughts. There is a low percentage of victims and perpetrators of cyberbullying in rural contexts in South Africa. It is hoped that findings may will a positive impact in the rural communities and enable the youth to interact with the modern technologies and handle them in an ethical manner. The study recommends that parents need to take cognisance of the probable possible dangers of the various technologies so that they could be instrumental in educating their children about children cyberbullying. Further, the schools and the Department of Education can play a fundamental role in educating children about cyberbullying and cyber ethics. Design/methodology/approach This survey was conducted to explore youth perceptions and experiences, as well as violations, of ethics through cyberbullying as experienced by the rural community at Mbazwana in the North Coast of KwaZulu-Natal. Convenience sampling was used, because although the questionnaire was distributed to all 60 participants in the project, not all of them completed the instrument, as participation was voluntary. Only 43 were completed, which is equal to 72 per cent response rate. The validity of the data collection instrument used was enhanced by the fact that questions were derived from the main objective of the study. Some themes of the instrument were self-designed and others were adapted from a similar study by Dehue et al. (2008), who looked at cyberbullying experiences of youth. The instrument was tried out in a pilot study in grade 12 classes in two high schools at Mbazwana in a bid to find out whether the learners would understand the questionnaire. Post-high school learners were considered to be at a similar level as the grade 12 learners polled. The pilot study proved its own importance: students who filled in the questionnaire indicated that they were not familiar with some terms and the researchers had to simplify the language to make it more understandable. Findings A large portion of the youth studied (45 per cent) indicated that they used their smartphones to access the internet, 25 per cent identified libraries as their source of access to the internet and 13 per cent reported accessing the internet from community laboratories (usually found in Department of Education centres). In total, 13 per cent of respondents reported accessing the internet from friends’ computers. Last, the smallest proportion at 4 per cent reported having internet access via their home desktop computers. The South African Mobile Report (2014) reveals that a great majority of South Africans access the internet via their own smartphones. These findings might indicate that many people nowadays do indeed have internet access in their regions. Research limitations/implications The results of this study indicate that not all households own a desktop computer, as some people rely on community laboratories and others rely on friends who own desktop or laptop computers. Practical implications The study results reveal that most students who did the computer literacy course consider themselves at an “intermediate” level. It was noted that cellphones/smartphones play a significant role in gaining access to the internet and to social networking applications in rural communities. The social media applications most visited by youth in this study were shown to be Facebook and WhatsApp. Only a relatively low percentage of the respondents in this study in a rural context in South Africa reported being either victims or perpetrators of cyberbullying. Social implications Social media give people ample opportunities to interact and socialise with other people in global context. Only a relatively low percentage of the respondents in this study in a rural context in South Africa reported being either victims or perpetrators of cyberbullying. It is hoped that insights gained from these findings may have a positive effect in the rural communities if awareness programmes are put in place to enable the youth to interact with the modern technologies and handle them in an ethical manner. Originality/value The contribution to the world of knowledge is that this study gives a clear indication of experiences and perceptions of cyberbullying in rural areas in South Africa. This will inform other scholars who want to engage in similar studies in different contexts that can be compared with the results of this study. It is notable that one cannot predict one’s own knowledge of a certain aspect of a community until one has fully engaged in research. Prior to this study, the researchers did not know whether the rural community youth participated in cyberbullying.

Abstract Advance care planning (ACP) is linked with high-quality end-of-life outcomes. However, ACP engagement level among older adults varies significantly by demographic, social, and health characteristics. In this study, we sought to identify characteristics associated with informal and formal ACP, in order to inform development of targeted education and outreach efforts that are tailored to diverse groups of older adults. The data came from a nationally representative study of Medicare beneficiaries living in communities, the National Health and Aging Trends Study (Round 8, N= 5,547). Multivariable logistic regressions were conducted to identify individual characteristics (i.e., race/ethnicity, age, gender, income, functional disability, cognitive function, perceived health, and numbers of people in social networks) associated with ACP engagement. Rates of informal ACP (talking to someone), and formal ACP, completing a healthcare power of attorney (HPOA) and a living will (LW), were 56%, 60.5%, and 56% accordingly. Logistic regression showed that individuals who were married or had a larger social network, and had higher functional impairment and health needs were significantly more likely to engage in both informal and formal ACP. However, individuals with memory problems (only informal ACP) and African Americans and Hispanics were significantly less likely to engage in both informal and formal ACP. African Americans without dementia were more likely to have completed HPOA compared with Whites. Findings suggest an important role of social network, and functional and cognitive health in ACP with implications for developing targeted outreach efforts in faith-based or social group settings, and healthcare settings.

The Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the lynching of African Americans, the colonial slave trade: these are horrific episodes of mass violence spawned from racism and hatred. We like to think that we could never see such evils again—that we would stand up and fight. But something deep in the human psyche—deeper than prejudice itself—leads people to persecute the other: dehumanization, or the human propensity to think of others as less than human. This book looks at the mechanisms of the mind that encourage us to see someone as less than human. There is something peculiar and horrifying in human psychology that makes us vulnerable to thinking of whole groups of people as subhuman creatures. When governments or other groups stand to gain by exploiting this innate propensity, and know just how to manipulate words and images to trigger it, there is no limit to the violence and hatred that can result.

This chapter introduces a narrative of “hustling” that motivates young people to perform their future hopes and never give up, despite full awareness of the disproportionate challenges they face in society. It defines a hustler as someone who tries, and talks about what entrepreneurship is like in South Africa. It discusses the difficulties that aspiring African entrepreneurs encounter as they try to become successful in their business. It talks about the lack of pride the new generation of South Africans have and how this has affects their attitude towards work and how this impacts African society. It talks about survivalist improvisation, how Africans put up an image of dignity in the midst of struggle, and their feelings of being trapped in that situation.

This chapter explores the narrative that people associate strongly with a Zulu identity, but which also resonates beyond South Africa, a moral schema demanding that the good life requires respect for all people. It talks about hierarchies, how it affects people's perception of who they are, and how they learn to live with them. It defines inequality as the kind of situation when someone with lesser power has to figure out how to demand better treatment from someone in power. The chapter discusses how South African people manage with precarity — a situation when people have a source of income, a supportive social group, and a home to live in, yet they are always hovering just at the edge of losing those basic necessities. It also talks about respect as a moral code, respect being at the intersection of work and the good life, and it asks if respect is truly achievable.

This chapter examines the question of how to know or identify someone as free or enslaved, particularly in a legal culture where enslaved peoples represent an increasingly small percentage of the number of African Americans. It uses a variety of cases: one about arson, another about a free black ship captain, and a series of cases that elaborated on a legal presumption that all black people were presumptively enslaved until otherwise demonstrated. The cases occurred between 1820 and 1840

This chapter outlines the book’s mission to serve as a lens into the political activity of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century by focusing on the strategies that Robert R. Church Jr. used to organize and empower black people through the vote. The book argues that the activism of Church and his colleagues served as the catalyst for the modern civil rights movement. This chapter also seeks to answer the question how historians know so little about someone who accomplished so much.

This chapter opines on the prospect for another African American to helm the White House kitchen at some point in the future. No African Americans have presided over the White House kitchen since Zephyr Wright did in the late 1960s. Given the current way that chefs often get hired to work in the contemporary White House, future chefs will likely come from the existing kitchen staff, as the personal chef of a future president or as someone of stature in the culinary world. The chapter gives the back story of the 1994 State Dinner held in honor of Republic of South African President Nelson Mandela. The chapter ends by looking at how the contemporary White House kitchen inspires young people today with a special emphasis on former First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" Initiative and the Kids' State Dinners she hosted during her tenure. This chapter profiles Chef Patrick Clark, Chef Marcus Samuelsson, White House kitchen steward Adam Collick and Kiana Farkash. The chapter includes recipes for sesame and wasabi-crusted halibut, layered late-summer vegetables with lemongrass and red curry dressing, grilled salmon with farro, Swiss chard salad, and a tropical smoothie.

Four-leaf clovers are traditional emblems of good luck. Two-headed sheep, five-legged frogs, or persons with six-fingered hands, by contrast, are more likely to be considered repugnant monsters, or “freaks of nature.” Such alienation was not always the case. In sixteenth-century Europe, such “monsters,” like the four-leaf clover today, mostly elicited wonder and respect. People were fascinated with natural phenomena just beyond the edge of the familiar. Indeed, that emotional response—at that juncture in history—helped foster the emergence of modern science. Wonder fostered investigation and, with it, deeper understanding of nature. One might thus well question a widespread but generally unchallenged belief about biology—what one might call a sacred bovine: that emotions can only contaminate science with subjective values. Indeed, delving into how “monsters” once evoked wonder might open a deeper appreciation of how science works today. Consider the case of Petrus Gonsalus, born in 1556 (Figure 1.1). As one might guess from his portrait, Gonsalus (also known as Gonzales or Gonsalvus) became renowned for his exceptional hairiness. He was a “monster”: someone—like dwarves, giants, or conjoined twins—with a body form conspicuously outside the ordinary. But, as his courtly robe might equally indicate, Gonsalus was also special. Gonsalus was born on Tenerife, a small island off the west coast of Africa. But he found a home in the court of King Henry II. Once there, he became educated. “Like a second mother France nourished me from boyhood to manhood,” he recollected, “and taught me to give up my wild manners, and the liberal arts, and to speak Latin.” Gonsalus’s journey from the periphery of civilization to a center of power occurred because he could evoke a sense of wonder. Eventually, he moved to other courts across Europe. Wonder was widely esteemed. For us, Gonsalus may be emblematic of an era when wonder flourished. In earlier centuries monsters were typically viewed as divine portents, or prodigies. Not that they were miracles. The course of nature seemed wide enough to include them.

Things were very different 20 years ago. There was no Internet and no e-mail. The first text message had yet to be sent. Many European countries were still opening enormous transmission towers to put the finishing touches to their national television networks. Go back another 20 years, just as the first push-button phones were hitting the market, and a single computer would have taken up an entire living room should anyone have ever considered installing one. International phone calls were so expensive that people often timed them with stopwatches. The world has shrunk considerably since those days. E-mailing a research report or chatting online has become second nature. We can collaborate with someone on the other side of the world almost as easily as we can with a person two streets away. Companies use the Internet to outsource their accounts to India. Photographers sell their work all over the world. And if we want to, we can listen to Japanese radio in our European offices. Much of this book was written far away from the experts we interviewed. Yet in all the hundreds of phone calls, e-mails, and video sessions that went into its production, nobody paid the slightest thought to the physical distances separating us. As the world shrinks, the way we use our communication networks intensifies. The volume of data we send is doubling every year, and the capacity of computer networks and telephone cables inexorably increases, too. Communication technology continues to improve at a rapid rate. And with each doubling of capacity, the price of transporting information halves. Things will no doubt look very different again 20 years from now. By that time, for instance, regions that currently lack Internet access will have been connected. The first signs of these changes are already apparent. Africans are playing an important part in computer projects set up around the world by volunteers. They are involved, for instance, in developing Linux—the open-source alternative to the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Projects like this give programmers the chance to take part in global technological developments.

This qualitative study is an exploration of final year Social Science education students awareness of the intertwined nature of Social Science as a subject and the role of social justice in the classroom of a democratic South Africa. This study finds that South African Social Science teachers interpret or experience the teaching of Social Science in various ways. In the South African transitional justice environment, Social Science education had to take into account the legacies of the apartheid-era schooling system and the official history narrative that contributed to conflict in South Africa. Throughout the world, issues of social justice and equity are becoming a significant part of everyday discourse in education and some of these themes are part of the Social Science curriculum. Through a qualitative research methodology, data was gathered from Focus Group Discussion (FGD) sessions with three groups of five teacher education students in two of the groups and the third having ten participants from the same race, in their final year, specializing in Social Science teaching. The data obtained were categorised and analysed in terms of the student teacher’s awareness of the intertwined nature of Social Science and social justice education. The results of the study have revealed that participants had a penchant for the subject Social Science because it assisted them to have a better understanding of social justice and the unequal society they live in; an awareness of social ills, and the challenges of people. Participants identified social justice characteristics within Social Science and relate to some extent while they were teaching the subject, certain themes within the Social Science curriculum. Findings suggest that the subject Social Science provides a perspective as to why social injustice and inequality are so prevalent in South Africa and in some parts of the world. Social Science content in its current form and South African context, emanates from events and activities that took place in communities and in the broader society, thus the linkage to social justice education. This study recommends different approaches to infuse social justice considerations Social Science; one being an empathetic approach – introducing activities to assist learners in viewing an issue from someone else’s perspective, particularly when issues of prejudice or discrimination against a particular group arise, or if the issue is remote from learners’ lives.