| Abstrakt: |
The article focus on instances of uncertainty, by describing certain defined situations in the lives of the people of Africa. The study contains papers from the Conference on Uncertainty in Contemporary African Lives that Liv Haram, affiliated to the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden, convened in Arusha, Tanzania, 9-11 April 2003. Uncertainty is not problematised as an epistemological concept, although such issues were addressed and discussed in some of the papers at the conference. The main focus of the papers is on concrete social situations where some contingent set of factors coincided to cause uncertainty and suffering in everyday life. The next step is then to explore how the people concerned manage their uncertainty. One cannot hold that uncertainty is something specific to Africa, the impact of various kinds of upheavals and catastrophes on the continent has been disproportionably large during a great part of the past century, and so it is even today. In recent years, Africa has undergone profound political, economic and social changes, resulting from a contingent set of internal as well as external forces. |
