Lidwien kapteijns biography of donald

Home / Celebrity Biographies / Lidwien kapteijns biography of donald

Marshaling a vast amount of source material, including Somali poetry and survivor accounts, Clan Cleansing in Somalia analyzes this campaign of clan cleansing against the historical background of a violent and divisive military dictatorship, in the contemporary context of regime collapse, and in relationship to the rampant militia warfare that followed in its wake.

Clan Cleansing in Somalia also reflects on the relationship between history, truth, and postconflict reconstruction in Somalia.

Professor of History at Wellesley College.

Fellow (1 February 2008 – 30 June 2008)

SOMALI POPULAR CULTURE AND THE CHANGING NATIONAL IMAGINARY, 1960-2005

My project focuses on Somali poetry and popular songs to examine how these forms of cultural production in the public sphere mediate – understand, represent and attempt to intervene in – the ongoing violence of the Somali civil war.

lidwien kapteijns biography of donald

Manipulating clan sentiment, they succeeded in turning ordinary civilians against neighbors, friends, and coworkers. Although this episode of organized communal violence is common knowledge among Somalis, its real nature has not been publicly acknowledged and has been ignored, concealed, or misrepresented in scholarly works and political memoirs—until now.

Using the symbol of the barber pole (the tube or pole that has three strands and turns around and upwards), I argue that the Somali mediations of violence I study are deeply interdiscursive and that the discursive strand of Islam/Islamism has not only been growing stronger but has also lit up (again) the discursive strand of nation/nationalism.

.

Documenting the organization and intent behind the campaign of clan cleansing, Lidwien Kapteijns traces the emergence of the hate narratives and code words that came to serve as rationales and triggers for the violence.

By first focusing on Somali poetry and songs about the city of Mogadishu as a site for memory-making, I show that Somali popular culture in the public sphere mediates violence through three discourses, those of clan/clanism, nation/nationalism, and Islam/Islamism. 1850-1950.”

After more than thirty years at the College, teaching Wellesley students remains a challenge and a pleasure.

COURSES

HIST263 South Africa in Historical Perspective: Rereading the Past, Re-imagining the Future

HIST264 The History of Pre-Colonial-Africa

HIST265 History of Modern Africa

HIST266 The Indian Ocean as African, Arab, and South Asian History

HIST268 Islamic Africa: A Historical Introduction

HIST293 Changing Gender Constructions in the Modern Middle East

HIST265 Seminar: African History through Public and Popular Culture

HIST364 Seminar: Film and Narratives of Social Change in the Modern Middle East and North Africa

HIST365 Seminar: African History through Public and Popular Culture

HIST366 Seminar: 'Greater Syria' under Ottoman and European Colonial Rule, c.

However, it was not clans that killed, she insists, but people who killed in the name of clan. from the University of Amsterdam.

While my research initially focused on state and society in the late-precolonial Sudan, in recent decades it has focused on Somali history and culture.

  • Women’s Voices in a Man’s World (with Maryan Omar Ali, Heinemann, 1999) analyzes constructions of gender in a wide variety of Somali oral texts, including folkloric texts and Somali popular songs of the 1970s and 1980s.
  • “Making memories of Mogadishu in Somali poetry about the civil war ” is a chapter in Mediations of Violence in Africa: Fashioning New Futures from Contested Pasts (co-edited with Annemiek Richters, Brill, 2010), and deals with Somali popular culture dealing with the civil war.
  • Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) is a history of how the Somali war civil war turned into large-scale clan cleansing.

    African historian focusing on Somalia and Sudan with a long-term research and teaching focus on the history of Africa, the Middle East, and Islam in Africa; translator of historical and popular culture texts in Arabic and Somali. Ph.D. This book was nominated for the African Studies Association's Ogot Prize for East African History in 2014 and is now out in paperback.

  • Currently in press is a source publication titled Stringing Coral Beads: The Religious Poetry of Brava (c.1890–1975), co-edited with Alessandra Vianello and Mohamed Kassim (Brill 2018).

I teach African and Middle Eastern history, including survey courses on the history of precolonial and modern Africa, South Africa, and the modern Middle East, as well as a course on Constructions of Gender in the Modern Middle East.

Clan Cleansing in Somalia establishes that public acknowledgment of the ruinous turn to communal violence is indispensable to social and moral repair, and can provide a gateway for the critical memory work required from Somalis on all sides of this multifaceted conflict.

Kapteijns, L

Lidwien Kapteijns, born in St.

Michielsgestel, the Netherlands, in 1951. 1850-1950

HIST367 The Indian Ocean as African, Arab, and South Asian History

HIST369 The HIstories of "Ethnic" and "Religious" Violence

Education

  • B.A., University of Amsterdam
  • M.A., University of London
  • Ph.D., University of Amsterdam

Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991

In 1991, certain political and military leaders in Somalia, wishing to gain exclusive control over the state, mobilized their followers to use terror—wounding, raping, and killing—to expel a vast number of Somalis from the capital city of Mogadishu and south-central and southern Somalia.

I have recently developed a new 200-level course about “Port Cities of the (Western) Indian Ocean” and am working on a new seminar called “Greater Syria, c. Kapteijns argues that the mutual forgiveness for which politicians often so lightly call is not a feasible proposition as long as the violent acts for which Somalis should forgive each other remain suppressed and undiscussed.