Genealogy

This conceptual article introduces mokopuna (grandchild, descendant) reworlding, a theorising of Indigenous cultural identity grounded in the position every person occupies within whakapapa (genealogy): he mokopuna, he tūpuna (ancestors). Each of us is a beloved descendant, held within a circulation of aroha (love, compassion) flowing from tūpuna, Ranginui (the sky father), Papatūānuku (the earth mother), and our earth sky kin. To love is to be loved: when adult attention turns toward mokopuna, we enact the posture the living world has always held toward us, and the tūpuna position occurs of itself as the current passes onward. From here, colonisation is reread not as a force that severed whakapapa, which was never within its power, but as one that worked, structurally and deliberately, to loosen our attention from a current that never ceased flowing. The remedy is therefore not a fight but a return: he mauri tuku, he mauri ora (a released life force is a living life force). Reworlding names this attunement, through which ordinary acts of loving children become sites of cosmological and political restoration. The article contributes an Indigenous framework in which self-determination is expressed through mauritau, the settled state of a people who know themselves loved, and offers the Indigicene, an ever-present epoch coined and declined here, as evidence that whakapapa accumulates rather than periodises.

This study examines how Abū al-Ghāzī Bahadur Khan represents and evaluates historical events and the social and political relations surrounding them in Shajara-i Tarākima, focusing on passages in which his perspective as narrator is explicit. Employing a historical research design, the study first identified narrative units in which Abū al-Ghāzī’s position as narrator becomes explicit. These units were subsequently coded and analyzed thematically using a qualitative content analysis approach. The analysis focused on narrator-centered passages identified through indicators of self-reference, personal experience and eyewitness testimony, explicit narrative intervention, evaluative statements, and contextual inference. The findings show that social order in Shajara-i Tarākima is represented through six interrelated dimensions: political authority and moral responsibility; epistemic authority and critical verification; language, audience, and access to knowledge; genealogy and collective belonging; migration, settlement, and social order; and narrative management and the author–reader relationship. The findings further demonstrate that Abū al-Ghāzī does more than transmit genealogical knowledge: he selects, organizes, and evaluates lineage, status, knowledge, and communal belonging according to particular value-based and epistemic criteria. Accordingly, Shajara-i Tarākima can be understood not simply as a historical text that records lines of descent, but as a genealogical narrative that reconfigures the past through genealogical categories, social relations, and narrator positioning. The study therefore demonstrates that genealogical narratives provide insight not only into the transmission of lineage and descent, but also into the narrative construction of social order, belonging, and authority.

Abahambe (“they must go”) is an isiZulu and isiXhosa expression prominent in South African political and protest discourse calling for undocumented immigrants to leave the country. Although proponents associate the slogan with concerns about unemployment, healthcare, crime, and competition for resources, its use raises broader questions about Afrophobia, belonging, violence, and the exploitation of African migrants. This article examines the rationale and implications of Abahambe within the broader context of transnational migration in South Africa. Drawing on a qualitative literature review and content analysis of relevant media and social media discourse, it examines how the slogan is constructed and used in contemporary migration debates. The analysis is informed by Pan-Africanism, Ubuntu, and biblical models of solidarity with strangers and foreign nationals. The article argues that, although the socio-economic concerns surrounding migration warrant attention, exclusionary uses of Abahambe risk reinforcing Afrophobic attitudes, legitimising hostility towards African migrants and obscuring broader structural causes of poverty, unemployment and inequality. In response, it advances a Pan-Africanist framework grounded in Ubuntu and solidarity that emphasises shared humanity and African interconnectedness while acknowledging host communities’ concerns. This framework offers an alternative for examining migration, belonging and socioeconomic tensions without endorsing exclusion or hostility towards fellow Africans.