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Township tourism in South Africa is an increasingly attractive phenomenon, especially for foreign tourists. For many international tourists, the motivation resides in their quest for an authentic local African cultural experience. However, due to its complex phenomenon, the notion of 'township tourism' has been relatively subjective in its promise of an authentic (African) experience. While some scholars suggest that township tourism exploits the "poor", others argue that township tourism is a poverty alleviation mechanism. This study works on the premise that a complex cluster of issues surrounds what we understand as 'township tourism'. It examines how South Africa's rich culture and heritage products, such as township tourism, are constructed and enacted to attract tourists in the Umlazi township in the eThekweni Municipality. The exploratory, descriptive design using semi-structured interviews was employed to obtain qualitative data. Analysis of findings revealed that constructing and enacting indigenous heritage spaces as products for tourism consumption in Umlazi is a move to change the trajectory that views township tours as an exploration of poverty. Based on empirical engagement with the community, it becomes evident that culture and heritage are viable resources that can be used as tools for township tourism development.

Mapping informal settlements’ diverse morphological patterns remains intricate due to the unavailability and huge costs of high-resolution data, as well as the spatial heterogeneity of urban environments. The accessibility to high-spatial-resolution PlanetScope imagery, coupled with the convenience of simple non-iterative clustering (SNIC) algorithm within the Google Earth Engine (GEE), presents the potential for Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) to map the spatial morphology of deprivation pockets in a complex built-up environment of Durban. Such advances in multi-sensor satellite image inventories on GEE also afford the possibility to integrate data from sensors with different spectral characteristics and spatial resolutions for effective abstraction of informal settlement diversity. The main objective is to exploit Sentinel-1 radar data, Sentinel-2 and PlanetScope optical data fusion for more accurate and precise localization of informal settlements using GEOBIA, within GEE. The findings reveal that the Random Forests classification model achieved informal settlement identification accuracy of 87% (F-score) and overall accuracy of 96%. An assessment of agreement between observed informal settlement extents and ground truth dimensions was conducted through regression analysis, yielding root mean square log error (RMSLE) = 0.69 and mean absolute percent error (MAPE) = 0.28. The results demonstrate reliability of the classification model in capturing variability of spatial characteristics of informal settlements. The research findings confirm efficacy of combined advantages of GEOBIA within GEE, and integrated datasets for more precise capturing of characteristic morphologic informal settlement features. The outcomes suggest a shift from standard static conventional approaches towards more dynamic, on-demand informal settlement mapping through cloud computing, a powerful analysis platform that simplifies access to and the processing of voluminous data. The study has important implications for identifying the most effective ways to map informal settlements in a complex urban landscape, thus providing a benchmark for other regions with significant landscape heterogeneity.

Accurate and reliable informal settlement maps are fundamental decision-making tools for planning, and for expediting informed management of cities. However, extraction of spatial information for informal settlements has remained a mammoth task due to the spatial heterogeneity of urban landscape components, requiring complex analytical processes. To date, the use of Google Earth Engine platform (GEE), with cloud computing prowess, provides unique opportunities to map informal settlements with precision and enhanced accuracy. This paper leverages cloud-based computing techniques within GEE to integrate spectral and textural features for accurate extraction of the location and spatial extent of informal settlements in Durban, South Africa. The paper aims to investigate the potential and advantages of GEE’s innovative image processing techniques to precisely depict morphologically varied informal settlements. Seven data input models derived from Sentinel 2A bands, band-derived texture metrics, and spectral indices were investigated through a random forest supervised protocol. The main objective was to explore the value of different data input combinations in accurately mapping informal settlements. The results revealed that the classification based on spectral bands + textural information yielded the highest informal settlement identification accuracy (94% F-score). The addition of spectral indices decreased mapping accuracy. Our results confirm that the highest spatial accuracy is achieved with the ‘textural features’ model, which yielded the lowest root-mean-square log error (0.51) and mean absolute percent error (0.36). Our approach highlights the capability of GEE’s complex integrative data processing capabilities in extracting morphological variations of informal settlements in rugged and heterogeneous urban landscapes, with reliable accuracy.

The economic meltdown and worsening levels of poverty in Zimbabwe led to a significant increase in the number of women migrating to South Africa from 2005 to 2010 (Crush et al., 2015: 367). A Southern African Migration Programme (SAMP) survey in 1997 found that 61% of Zimbabwean migrants were male and 39% were female (Crush et al., 2015: 367). This suggested that there was an increase in the number of women migrating to South Africa compared with other countries in Southern Africa. This gives us reason to ‘speculate’ that the numbers could have increased a decade later because of the economic crisis that resulted in large numbers of people migrating out of Zimbabwe. Most Zimbabwean women are now moving across borders independently of their spouses and partners in search of better and sustainable livelihoods (Dzingirai et al., 2015: 13; Mbiyozo, 2019). Whilst some have valid immigration documents, a large number of these women are undocumented, which heightens their vulnerability to various structures of violence (Bloch, 2010; Rutherford, 2020: 172).

Background: Politics is a major determinant of community’s access to health. The right to access to health for communities and individuals has been recognised as vital by international bodies and national constitutions. Several studies have considered the negative effects of political violence on community access to health. Aim: This study aimed to explore the complexities of political conflict in community health praxis. Setting: This study was conducted in three clinics in Chegutu Urban District, Zimbabwe. The site was particularly chosen because political conflicts therein have rarely been studied in terms of their indirect and subtle effects on community health. Methods: This study used a qualitative research approach to gain a deeper understanding of political conflict and community health by interviewing 20 health professionals selected through stratified random sampling. The data obtained from these interviews were thematically presented. Results: From the participants’ responses, it became clear that politics determines the nature of community health programmes, and individual access is partisan and contested. Political conflict to some extent increased intra-group conflicts amongst health professionals, leading to non-collaboration in healthcare. Conflict-induced economic decline has led to structural shortages and environmental pollution. Conclusion: The study findings demonstrate how politicisation of access to health can have detrimental effects on the excluded members of the community.

“Voluntary” out-migration is anything but voluntary or driven by “free” volition. Forced migration and displacement in turn draw the gaze to the complexities and fraught realities imbricated in certain compelled contexts of “displacements” and movements of people and their livelihoods. The paper works through the prismatic lens of sense-making theory in attempting to reveal how a group of internally displaced people in Zimbabwe endeavour to reconstruct their displaced lives. Seen through a sense-making lens, each displaced individual is understood as moving through space and time and interacting with other (displaced) individuals and certain scavenged material and emotional artefacts or relics which to rebuild and assemble a material (and emotional) shelter or dwelling place, while simultaneously attempting to assemble order in a world of political complexity, immense uncertainty and continuous change. Adopting a micro-analytical perspective and focusing on “space” (as opposed to “place” or home) allows one to see space as a socially and discursively constructed aspect of the displaced person’s experiences. Working through the narratives of a sample community of twelve participants living at Caledonia settlement in Zimbabwe, the paper problematizes and “troubles” the notion of subaltern agency within the context of displacement. The qualitative data elicited, in turn reveals the layers and multiple tiers of both visible deprivation as well as (in)visible agency embedded in the actions of the displaced people.

As the eminent (female) anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) pointed out, the "social body" constrains and contrives the way the physical body is perceived and obligated into performance. The physical experience ofthe body is in turn often modified by a clutch of regulatory and panoptic religio-social categories through which it is known and made to reflect a normative view of society. This paper wrestles with the assertion (DeNapoli 2013) that female gurus are transgressive bodies and irruptions into a predominantly malestream tradition of religious teachers. The paper works through the theoretical notion of intertextuality and attempts to deconstruct and read whether such irruptions (and interruptions) into the Hindu tradition are actually transgressive and gendered religious violations, or whether they work instead to discursively and differently perpetuate particular parochial and masculinised social constructions of "woman". The paper thus probes what could be conceived of as "intertextual gaps" in order to examine the assertion that particular gendered enactments of the female gurus are subversive. The paper suggests instead that the gendered enactments appear to present ambivalences and ambiguities in renunciate discourses on gender and female agency.

Whether formally categorized as refugees or not, displaced migrants experience varying degrees of vulnerability in relation to where they find themselves displaced. The internally displaced furthermore squat invisibly and outside the boundaries of the legal framework and incentive structures accorded to those classified as 'refugee'. They are thus arguably, by and large, left to source sustaining solutions for themselves. This article works through the theoretical prism of sense-making theory and works through the notion of crisis as a ' cosmology episode' (see Weick 1993). For Weick, a 'cosmological episode' occurs when people are suddenly and profoundly plunged into an awareness that the universe is no longer a rational and orderly system and experience themselves as being in a state of crisis. Crisis sense-making is in turn understood as a social process and a communicative phenomenon present in individuals' interaction with their (disrupted) and sometimes violent life-world, which in the instance of the internally displaced, is also one of disorder, crisis and discontinuity. The article probes how internally displaced persons (IDPs) in one Zimbabwe settlement cope with the materialities of their disrupted lives through their personal scaffold of religious beliefs and behaviours. Using narrative inquiry with a sample community of five women and five men in Caledonia settlement in Zimbabwe, the article sheds light on how these individuals use their religious beliefs to cohere some semblance of order out of crisis typified by the structural violence of deprivation, poverty and dislocation. Findings suggest that, in the absence of security and a known and ordered future, the internally displaced in Caledonia settlement make sense of their present reality and their precarious future within their settlement through the matrix of their beliefs, and exhibit resilience, trust and faith.

The Mpondo women of the Tafeni are known for their preference for giving birth on their own, without any assistance from birthing attendants, as is the custom and practice in many other communities across urban and rural contexts. This profound hesitancy to have with them the presence of a potentially supportive (female) birthing attendant can be attributed to the Mpondo's deeply embedded beliefs and patterns of understanding of illness and health regarding their unborn child. Through participant observations and in-depth interviews with the Mpondo mothers and mothers-to-be, the paper applies an ethnographic lens to how pregnancy and birthing is constructed and enacted within the community. The paper uses this empirically observed avoidance of using traditional birth attendants, and reveals the Mpondo belief in the spiritual or metaphysical causation of infant mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Levitt and Schiller (2004), in rethinking migration, approached transnational family life as a socio-economic unit for whom familial connections are reworked and in a sense rewritten over time and space. However, much more recent work by scholars (with a feminist approach) like Dreby (2011) prompt us to acknowledge the moral complexities that additionally exemplify transnational parenting, and offer a patent reminder that immigration is not just about economic and political issues but also about the vital domains of the everyday articulations of family and family life. This paper works through the methodological approach of narrative analysis and brings to the fore the experiences of a sample group of migrant mothers, and attempts to probe if they experience any tension around raising their children in a transnational or migrant space, away from their larger network of extended familial care givers in their original home spaces. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild's (2003) work on global (mobile) woman's paid labour raises the notion of a 'care deficit'. However, in the context of this paper, all the migrant mothers have their children with them, and are not' absent mothers', or 'mothering from a distance', the women known to be 'mothering across borders. All the terms prefacing 'mother' and mothering operationalise the point that the women here are apart from their children and showcase the more recent attention on women compelled by various processes of globalisation and uneven economic processes, to be 'transnational mothers'. However, relatively less attention has been paid to women who are forced to be mothers in a transnational and foreign cultural context because they have migrated as refugees or in an attempt to look for greener pastures for themselves and their children. The paper raises discussion of the possible tensions and guilt experienced by African migrant mothers in raising their children away from their traditional value systems and ancestral homes and families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]