The African Studies Centre Leiden is the only multidisciplinary academic knowledge institute in the Netherlands devoted entirely to the study of Africa. It has an excellent library that is open to the general public. The ASCL is an interfaculty institute of Leiden University.
The winner of the Africa Thesis Award 2019 is Nsima Udo for his thesis Visualising the body: photographic clues and the cultural fluidity of Mbopo institution, 1914 – 2014. Nsima Udo graduated cum laude for the MA in History at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His thesis unpacks the history of mbopo, a form of female initiation in Southern Nigeria: how it emerges historically, is discredited in the 1990s as a form of female mutilation and is re-appreciated in recent reality TV shows.
The ASCL is delighted that Emmanuel Akyeampong, Director of the Center for African Studies at Harvard University, will give the Stephen Ellis Annual Lecture 2019. Prof. Akyeampong will explore the nexus of spirituality, culture and political power in the connected lives of three first-generation African nationalist leaders: Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sekou Touré of Guinea, and Leopold Senghor of Senegal. All welcome, please register!
This conference will bring together some of today’s most influential thinkers on African affairs. Independence from colonial rule, to many, was a turning point in African history, but what has changed, and what has persisted? Confirmed speakers: Lungisile Ntsebeza (African Studies, University of Cape Town), Birgit Meyer (Religious Studies, Utrecht University), Carolyn Hamilton (Archive and Public Culture, UCT) and Jan Abbink (ASCL, Leiden University). The conference is organized in the framework of Africa 2020.
Tikam Sall and Bernardo Tiberi are two of our new Research Master students in African Studies, Alma Ionescu and Melat Pusch are two of our new Master students. Curious about their background, their motivation to do African Studies and their career expectations for the future? Read the interviews we did with them to get to know them better!
Just more than 60 years ago Barthélémy Boganda, ‘father’ of the Central African Republic, met a premature death in an air crash (29 March 1959). In a new ASC Working Paper, Klaas van Walraven investigates the possibility of long-term causation in the political history of the Central African Republic by looking at the biography of Barthélémy Boganda. He argues that the upheavals of European colonisation at the beginning of the twentieth century, as experienced by Boganda as a child, exercised an enduring influence on his persona and remained relevant for his life and work throughout the later part of the colonial era.
