3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Assessment of regional integration progress in the East African community(2014-01-28) Kaisi, Hosi JohnThere have been integration efforts in Africa for the last four decades, similar to other continental efforts across the globe. Learning from the past failures of regional integration efforts in Africa, in the late 1960s and 1970s, the East African Community partner states came up with a new approach towards integrating the region, that is, people centered and private sector driven integration. The regional integration projects and programmes remain the top priority among the EAC partner states as the means to achieve sustainable development in the region. Nevertheless there are indications that EAC partner states are over ambitious in advancing regional integration. The major challenges of the EAC integration span issues such as policy coordination and harmonization, infrastructure development and intra-regional trade expansion, protocols and policy implementation, labour mobility. The purpose of the study was to appraise the progress of regional integration protocols and policies implementation at the national level of the EAC partner states. The study assessed the extent of regional cooperation and integration success since the EAC was revived in 1999, up to 2010, in three broad areas: (i) customs union, (ii) community external relations, and (iii) common market. The research used exploratory case study approach. The main findings of the research were that: (i) the customs union is a difficult stage for partner states to implement; (ii) Tanzania has argued that land matters are not part in the common market discussion; and (iii) the EAC partner states are skeptical of the EU’s motives in economic partnership agreement negotiations. The study also found that the EU’s motives are to obtain preferential trade arrangements both in the EAC and other emerging economies. The study recommends initiatives to create an enabling environment for the greater mutual understanding and substantial degree of trust on the scope of cooperation agreed upon, among the partner states as building for further integration in the region.Item A comparative study of contemporary East and West African poetry in English(2012-09-03) Mosoti, EdwinModern African poetry in English is a product of a number of literary traditions broadly categorised as either „indigenous‟ or „alien‟ to Africa. Working on the premise that these vary from one region to another, this study seeks to compare the myriad of poetic influences and traditions as manifested in contemporary East and West African poetry of English expression using a corpus of selected contemporary African poems. The contemporary era, here temporally defined as the post 1980s period, is typified by borrowing across literary genres and traditions to the point where the boundaries of what may be designated as „indigenous‟ or „alien‟ has become difficult to determine and distinguish. Core to my thesis is what Jan Ramazani (2001) designates as the hybrid muse, which ensures that contemporary poetry or poetic discourses explicitly or implicitly acknowledge that they are defined by their relationship to others, hence regarded as „epochal continuities‟ of foundational poetics. The study seeks to illustrate how creative writing, in particular poetic composition, emerging from the two regions exhibits affinities, parallels, as well as inter-connectedness despite the much emphasised disparities and peculiarities. Central to contemporary poetry examined in this study is „song‟ as a metaphor for its characteristic hybrid nature. The following chapters engage with different facets of song; from the praise song – hatched as a dirge in Chapter Two, mashairi as a Swahili sung poem tradition influencing poetry in written English in Chapter Three, what Osundare calls „songs of the season‟ in Chapter Four and how the experiment dialogues with journalistic discourses, song school and the different „Lawinos‟ singing in contemporary times in Chapter Five, through to Mugo‟s mother‟s poem and other songs in Chapter Six. Recent poetry from Africa is replete with and informed by diverse texts and intellectual discourses available to the poet in East or West Africa. Despite the much emphasized differences, I argue that there need not be explicit intertextual relations; that even when produced or consumed in tregion („solitary speaker‟), contemporary poetry still typically includes „language‟ or textual material derived not just from a „socially diverse discursive formation‟ but econo-political and intellectual environment underpinning the „other‟. The contemporary socio-political and economic conditions as well as various institutional parameters ensure that sharp differences in thematic preoccupations and aesthetic – are not as much as they may have been portrayed in “foundational poetry”. Considering the commonality in contemporary poetry issues from more or less the same pool of texts, intertextuality marking the era therefore evidences dialogues within and across the regions examinedItem Landscapes sublime: imperialism, the wilderness ideal and the history of conservation in Tanzania(2009-09-18T10:52:15Z) Butler, Marie-JeanAbstract “LANDSCAPES SUBLIME: IMPERIALISM, THE WILDERNESS IDEAL AND THE HISTORY OF CONSERVATION IN TANZANIA" The aim of this dissertation is to trace the implications that Western views of nature have had for the restructuring of African landscapes through the creation of game reserves and national parks, with a particular focus on Tanzania. I contend that wilderness spaces are the main repositories of a western imaginary that longs for those places where nature is prodigious and untamed, uncontaminated by development and devoid of people. The idealization of landscapes is derived from the aesthetic of the Romantic sublime with its dual impulse: the quest for escape from a fragmenting and morally corrupting capitalist society, and the search for the immutable and the transcendent in landscape 'untouched' by development. In Africa the physical manifestation of the wilderness landscape ideal came to be reflected in real space – the space of the East African national park. To produce a wild landscape in which animals roam free required the reproduction of a certain ideology of nature which may have been inaugurated during the colonial period, but which has been assimilated and even expanded by post-colonial regimes like Tanzania. Why is it, I ask, that the wilderness landscape ideal is so remarkably persistent in the post-colonial, post-socialist Tanzania of today? Taking the approach of scholars like Mitchell, I ask not just what landscape ‘is or ‘means’ but what it does in this context.