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 to examine ‘HIV/AIDS patient behaviour’ with respect to choice of therapy on the continent [Bene, M. & Darkoh, M. B. K. (2014). The Constraints of Antiretroviral Uptake in Rural Areas: The Case of Thamaga and Surrounding Villages, Botswana. SAHARA-J: Journal of Social Aspects of HIV/AIDS, 11(1), 167–177. doi:10.1080/17290376.2014.972057; Chavunduka, G. (1998). Professionalisation of Traditional Medicine in Zimbabwe, Harare, Jongwe Printers; O’Brien, S. & Broom, A. (2014). HIV in (and out of) the Clinic: Biomedicine, Traditional Medicine and Spiritual Healing in Harare. SAHARA-J: Journal of Social Aspects of HIV/AIDS, 11(1), 94–104. doi:10.1080/17290376.2014.938102]. As such, a social approach to health-seeking behaviour questions how decisions about alternative therapies including herbal remedies, traditional healing and faith healing are made. The paper unpacks the realities around how people living with HIV and AIDS – who span different age groups and profess various religious backgrounds, faced with an insurmountable health challenge against a background of limited resources and no cure for the virus – often experience shifts in health-seeking behaviour. Grappling with seemingly simple questions about ‘when, where and how to seek medical attention’, the paper provides pointers to therapy choices and health-seeking behaviour; and it serves as a route into deeper and intense healthcare practice explorations. In conclusion, the paper proposes that medicine and the humanities should engage seriously with those social aspects of HIV and AIDS which call for an integrated approach to healthcare practice in Africa. If combined, medicine and the humanities might achieve what neither would alone.

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 exclusions from the future. Young people, in the absence of conducive conditions for fostering a sense of belonging, face a crisis of making sense of who they are in the 25+ year-old democracy. This article explores the intersections of identity, belonging and drug use disorder through the narratives of eleven male youth (20–30 years) at Soshanguve SANCA Rehabilitation Centre. Overall, drug use disorder is a manifestation of deep structural issues that influence belonging and identity formation; and it doubles as a way of renegotiating identity as young people strive to escape or belong to socio-relational groups around them.

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 genuineness of such women’s land ownership in the resettled spaces. It is established through narrative analysis that the meaning of land ownership by women, seen from the vantage point of Western feminism, gives a limited representation of what is occurring on the ground in Zimbabwean communities. The main argument that came out of the field-based evidence from Masvingo District is that women’s land ownership may not merely be viewed from the perspective of ownership and possession of a document called a title deed, ‘offer letter’ or ‘permit’. Ownership of land goes beyond these, because it is tied to totemic, clan and lineage relations. These gendered relational nuances are better understood from an African feminist perspective which, we argue, is more attuned and positioned to explain the gendered inequalities and structures that women navigate as they negotiate access to and ownership of land. For instance, African feminism relative to Western feminisms allows the deployment of the cultural idiom of ‘honorary husband’, deconstruction of the highly patriarchal concept of ‘samusha’, and engagement with the gendered inequalities and politics around land inheritance and transfer to the next generation. Analysis of women’s land ownership that is located within Western feminisms portrays a generalisation of African women and fails to analyse specific cultural contexts; this is due to the homogenisation and universalisation tendencies of that framework, a consequence of over-reliance on the European-American white middle-class woman as a model.

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 respect to notions of intimacy, relationships and identities in the diaspora. Drawing on interviews with 28 Zimbabwean women (14 living in the diaspora and 14 resident in Zimbabwe) aged between 25 and 90 years, this paper analyses ways in which transnational processes influence how women experience and assign meaning to their gendered and sexual lives. The 14 diaspora-based interviewees illuminated how Zimbabwean women located in South Africa and the UK often redefine their gendered and sexual identities as they exercise agency by challenging economic barriers and simultaneously crossing socio-cultural boundaries from their homeland. Conversely, the 14 Zimbabwe-based interviewees discussed how women from a different generation and geographical location read emerging questions of gender and sexuality in the diaspora. Overall, the paper offers profound gendered lenses through which one could analyse the dynamics of transnational processes, especially how labour, intimacy and relationships in the diaspora are experienced by immigrants and subsequently engaged by diaspora studies scholars.

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 and sexualities categorised as counter to citizenship. Exclusion in post-apartheid South Africa (SA), for instance, is evident in how black lesbians and queers are attacked and excluded for being sexually different. Consequently, one’s gender, sexual and racial identities serve as a source of violence and constant negotiation for belonging to this democracy, irrespective of the progressive Constitution. The feeling of not being a ‘proper’ citizen is equally evident in how nationals from the northern part of SA are in some spaces constructed by fellow citizens as bodies that do not belong. These polarised constructions generate outsider identities that are informed by notions of ‘inferior pigmentation and language’ vis-à-vis ‘dominant ones’. Such dichotomised images of citizenship are reinforced by ever-evolving grammars and vocabularies about people foreign to SA, whose bodies and privacy warrant intrusion in very violent nationalised, racialised, gendered and sexualised ways, as evidenced by the 2008 and 2015 xenophobic attacks. Informed by my intersecting positionalities as a black foreign national who has lived in SA since 2008, the article analyses Zimbabwean migrants’ experiences of constantly negotiating the politics of national belonging and difference in SA that emerged during fieldwork engagements in Johannesburg between 2008 and 2015. The article interrogates subtle and overt institutionalised and everyday technologies of difference that not only force foreign nationals to live through heavily patrolled black bodies marked as different within specific temporal landscapes, places and spaces, but are also core to the xenophobic grammar that frames Zimbabweans as bodies that destabilise the very foundation and survival of the nation.

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 sexual objects who merely went to war to perform ‘reed dance’ for the male freedom fighters. Subsequently, the negative labelling limited women’s chances post-independence and even deterred them from enjoying the fruits of the land they fought hard for. This negativity, in many African contexts where women struggled for democracy, not only trivialises their contribution but renders invisible their bodies from the land they fought for. Although women’s contribution to democracy in South Africa is acknowledged through the annual celebration of the August 9 1956 women’s march to the Union Buildings, the commemoration does not do justice to individual women’s contribution to the land as well as their struggles on and for the land. Their contribution is often ‘celebrated’ and negotiated through men and as a result, women suffer the effects of a gendered and hierarchised patriarchal structure which reads their relationship to and struggle for the land through their sexual and reproductive bodies. Building on the gendered realities of unsung heroines who fought for land, this article pursues the theme ‘women for land’ through elderly women farmers’ narratives of violence on the land in South Africa and Zimbabwe. The article theorises that as the elderly women’s violent experiences on the land are heard, they cease to be mere (sexual and reproductive) bodies that deserve to be violated and emerge as voices that re-value previously uncelebrated women who fought on and for the land. These empirical voices simultaneously insert the unsung heroines’ long forgotten experiences into the historical land struggle narrative and contemporary land rights framework that seeks to make visible and audible the violent gendered patriarchal effects women suffer on, for and through the land in South Africa, Zimbabwe and beyond.