At the beginning of April, Thandeka Cochrane attended the Association of Social Anthropologists UK (ASA UK) annual conference in Birmingham (9-11 April). There she presented a paper on ‘Economies of Uncertainty: precarity and hope in African health worlds’ for the panel ‘New directions in the anthropology of work’. The paper outlined the precarious lives of cancer registrars in east Africa, many of whom work without work contracts and do unpaid labour for many months in the hope of securing payment, better jobs, and permanent positions. Her paper argued that a key mechanism keeping people captive in these unpredictable, poorly paid or unpaid labour cycles, is the constant uncertainty of whether there might be money coming in soon, when the money is coming and when the next piece of work will be made available.
Thandeka also presented on a round table discussion on the productive interface between anthropology and history. Here she presented on the work of the Cartographies of Cancer project with a talk on ‘Recursive histories of Africa: uncovering colonial entanglements through the lens of the long durée’. Her talk outlined the mixed-methods approach of the project, using anthropology, history and sociology, to tells it story that spans across the 20th century. Thinkers such as Ann Stoler and Achille Mbembe, who argue that the colonial is not a thing of the past, separated and truncated from our present, but rather that that colonial is still inextricably enmeshed in and constitutive of the post-colonial present. Building off this thinking, Thandeka put forward the question of whether it is possible to have a truly decolonial anthropology if one does not work delve into history in order to uncover the tendrils of the colonial that remain woven into the postcolonial present. The round table was widely attended, with a large audience that was deeply sympathetic to and supportive of the importance of historical work and reflection in anthropological writing and practice.
