New publications

Common Threads explores the ties that bind India and Africa through the material medium of cloth, from antiquity to the present. Cloth made in India has been sold across African markets for millennia, by Indian, African, and European traders. The history of this trade offers perspectives into the rich stories of bi-directorial migrations of peoples, across the Indian Ocean, the exchange of visual aesthetics, and the co-production of cultures in the two geographies.

On the occasion of the Africa 2020 year, the ASCL has created Infosheets about the countries that became independent in 1960. Of the seventeen colonies gaining independence in that year, Congo (earlier known as Zaire, nowadays called the Democratic Republic of the Congo) was the fifth one: on 30 June. Congo had been a Belgian colony from 1908 until 1960, after having been a ‘Free State’ under a company owned by the Belgian King Leopold II from 1884.

Rahmane Idrissa published a new article in the London Review of Books Diary, travelling to Djenné to discover more about the history of the Songhay Empire. Songhay was one of the largest states ever established in Sub-Saharan Africa; for much of the 15th and most of the 16th century, it ruled over what is now Mali, as well as parts of Senegal, Mauritania and Niger, northern Benin and north-western Nigeria. 

The legacy of the independence wave in 1960 has had an impact on Africa for a long time, but the current political instability and mismanagement are no longer due to the break with the colonial past. In his contribution for the Clingendael Spectator series 'Afrika: 60 jaar onafhankelijkheid' ('Africa: 60 years of independence'), Jon Abbink distinguishes seven factors that determine the political prospects in Africa and the opportunities for good governance.

Nationalism is often seen as emerging from European historical developments, also in postcolonial countries outside Europe. Yet the precolonial Kingdom of Barue in what is now Mozambique already showed characteristics generally associated with nationalism, giving the country great resilience against colonial encroachment. Postcolonial Mozambique, on the other hand, has so far not succeeded in creating national coherence. This book by André van Dokkum has been published in the Afrika-Studiecentrum Series by Brill.