On 19 April, zoologist, writer, painter and broadcaster Desmond Morris passed away. Morris invited Professor Emeritus Wouter van Beek to his home in Ireland in April 2024, to discuss African bronzes, Dogon art, Dogon people, brass casting, and Africa more broadly. Van Beek recollects.
On 28 April Antonio Frank will defend his dissertation ‘Policing the Periphery: Party-anchored hybrid policing in Luanda, Angola’. His findings show that hybrid police networks in a number of suburbs in Luanda are anchored in the MPLA, the political party that has been in power since 1975.
Do you have a keen interest in Africa and are you looking for a suitable master’s programme? Then apply for the Master African Studies at Leiden University! The programme is unique in the Netherlands and highly recommended throughout Europe, including for its embedded research component.
Het ASCL biedt momenteel twee promotieplekken aan: één over multipolariteit en militaire samenwerking in Afrika, en één over klimaat en krijgsmacht in Afrika. De projecten zijn onderdeel van de Kennishub Afrika van de Nederlandse Defensie Academie (NLDA) en worden door het ASCL met de NLDA beheerd en begeleid.
The jury of the Africa Thesis Award is delighted to announce that the 2025 prize has been awarded to Yonwaba Matshobotiyana of the University of the Free State, South Africa, with a thesis on Black women's poetry in South Africa. The jury was blown away by this strong scholarly contribution to Black feminist thought and the field of decolonial literature studies.
Describing almost 1400 Africa maps in three months: it’s no small task that student assistants Artemis Mantheakis and Beatriz Veiga have been working on within the joint ASCL-UBL Africa Maps Project. The aim is to describe a 20th-century map collection of the library of the African Studies Centre, that is housed in the Leiden University Libraries (UBL).
28 April 2026
19 June 2026