Kezia Batisai

• Professor at University of Johannesburg

Background: Vaccination is a proven and safe method for combating COVID-19; however, coverage remains low in many low- and middle-income countries, including Nigeria. There is also a lack of contextual evidence regarding the public perception of and willingness to receive vaccines. This study aims to contribute to efforts to optimize the vaccinatio...

This article explores the coping strategies employed by urban ratepayers to withstand their prolonged infrastructure problems. The main argument herein is that urban ratepayers make use of different individual and collective coping and resilience strategies to endure infrastructure problems. The article provides a critique of urban community life a...

Background: This study investigated the impact of socio-economic variables influencing the provision of basic skills for navigating the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). Objectives: The study aims to describe the variables underpinning this study, using statistical analysis and quantitative measurement as displayed in Table 1 ....

Background The relationship between insufficient financial resources and psychological health has been extensively studied and established in various contexts. However, there remains uncertainty regarding the potential impact of the Nigerian naira currency redesign policy on the psychological well-being of Nigerians. This policy, which aimed to dem...

In South Africa, the politicisation of COVID -19 widened structural fissures, unearthed underlying inequalities, and exposed the ‘rainbow nation’ fallacy. The pandemic highlighted the struggles faced by marginalised households whose income streams were wiped out during lockdown. Public unrest emerged in townships and manifested as food protests, wh...

Objective: The study explored the perceptions and coping strategies employed by older adults in a Sub-Saharan African community in relation to their disabilities. Methods: The research utilized an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis methodology and conducted semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of households. The study recruited a...

This article explores the “violence–politics of patronage” nexus of land redistribution and ownership after land reform in Zimbabwe. Foregrounding an analysis of the violence on farms, which has been explored by many scholars in other dimensions, the article presents hard evidence of what happened on these farms post the Fast Track Land Reform Prog...

Background. Awareness and knowledge about Mother-to-Child Transmission (MTCT) and prevention measure are important to combat MTCT in the Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission (PMTCT) postpartum phase. Nevertheless, knowledge about MTCT remains inadequate among mothers with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) despite strong evidence of the impor...

Calls to hire more diverse faculty members in South African and Canadian universities have long standing histories. The pace of implementation of proposals to appoint more Black and women faculty members was slow. It was partly pressures from the #RhodesMustFall student movement in South Africa (2015) and renewed calls to address anti-Black racism...

The physical and social environmental repercussions of large dam construction have pre-occupied development discourse for some time globally. Literature on dam projects focuses on the displacement of humans and wildlife from their natural habitats and the dam’s contribution to urban and industrial transformation. There is a dearth of literature on...

Academic exclusion within higher education institutions has been an alarming global issue that has resulted in a vast number of policies aimed at combating the exclusion. In South Africa, exclusion is deeply rooted in the historical inequalities that continue to render access to higher education a complex process as visibly evidenced by structural...

The article explores how Zimbabwean women cross-border traders travelling to Tanzania used Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) particularly the mobile phone for communicating with family, customers and shop owners. The African feminist theory explained the women’s traders’ innovation in using ICTs. The study was grounded in the qualitativ...

Broadening the conceptual scope beyond the Global North and ‘Asian biases’, this chapter takes cognisance of the challenges of universalistic approaches to migration realities, which undermine the fact that both experience and knowledge are contextual. Emphasis is on re-theorising migration to account for contextual specificities that shape the rea...

The chapter examines women’s land ownership experiences within the context of land reform in the Zimbabwean resettled spaces, focusing on how land previously owned by women in Masvingo district is passed from the principal owners to the next generations. Using African Feminist ‘lenses’, the chapter unravels the sociocultural and political factors a...

The land question in postcolonial Africa, particularly in former settler colonies, has an enduring legacy. To illuminate the enduring dimensions of the land question, this article explores various land recovery options adopted by (former) white commercial farmers in Zimbabwe as they renegotiate access, ownership and control of land expropriated via...

The exclusionary principles of the apartheid nation undermined black South Africans’ value and weakened their sense of belonging. The transition to post-apartheid was marked by the absence of supportive structures to nurture a sense of belonging let alone form an identity. Today, young people suffer ‘wounded attachments’ to the past and multiple ex...

In the light of a scholarly gap, we identify and profile discourses of migration and xenophobia in the media that deconstruct mainstream representations of African migrants who are often perceived and constructed as socio-cultural and economic burdens. In particular, we profile progressive (self)-representations of African migrants on different pla...

A wide range of literature reveals that women in many African societies have historically been faced with the challenge of patriarchy and lack of freedom in their households—a challenge also mirrored in institutions of education, the economy, law and politics. This gendered position produces gendered inequalities which lead women to experience pove...

South Africa has made strides in its fight against HIV and AIDS but research shows that the country still carries the heaviest burden of disease within Sub-Saharan Africa and the entire world (UNAIDS 2006). While the epidemic in South Africa has impacted across all age groups, youth, especially young women are the most impacted by new HIV infection...

Women’s land ownership through land reform all over the world has taken place on a gendered, incremental basis. The percentage of women land owners in Zimbabwe was less than 5% before and soon after independence, thereafter rising to a range of 12% to 27% for both small- and large-scale farms. This open forum unpacks the authenticity and genuinenes...

Since reports of the first incidence of the HIV virus in Zimbabwe in 1985, the epidemic has negatively impacted on every facet of human security. Rural areas, by virtue of being the periphery and constrained in terms of resources and health care provision, bear the brunt of the epidemic. In light of the above background, this paper examined how the...

Scholarly evidence from African flag-democracies reveals that although women were central to the liberation struggle, narratives of their participation and contribution let alone the violence they suffered on their bodies during the fight for land are invisible from post-independence discourses. In Zimbabwe, female freedom fighters were reduced to...

Drawing on narratives of rurally-based Zimbabwean older women, this article analyses experiences of motherhood in relation to the country’s shifting economic and socio-political landscapes. The narratives of these older women, who have nurtured their children and continue to do so way into (their children’s) adulthood, push scholars to grapple with...

Questions about gender and sexuality that were central to the colonial project where women negotiated their connection to the nation through liaisons with men continue to be central to the process of building postcolonial African states. The establishment of many of these states has been embedded in dense body politics that often exclude genders an...

Unlabelled: This article frames the intersections of medicine and humanities as intrinsic to understanding the practice of health care in Africa. Central to this manuscript, which draws on empirical findings on the interplay between HIV and AIDS and alternative medicine in Zimbabwe is the realisation that very limited research has been undertaken...

Globalization, defined here as the increasing interconnectedness of the world, along with shifting socio-political and economic landscapes predominantly in the Global South culminate into increased transnational labour migration processes. These transnational processes call for new interpretations and conceptualizations of gender and sexuality with...

Critical engagement with existing scholarship reveals that many postcolonial African states have set up legal frameworks which institutionalise heterosexuality and condemn counter-sexualities. Clearly discernible from this body of literature is the fact that non-complying citizens constantly negotiate ‘the right to be’ in very political and gendere...