News & Events

On 9 January 2020, Tanzanian novelist, poet, and scholar Euphrase Kezilahabi died at the age of 75 in Dar es Salaam. He was one of the first African writers to publish a collection of free verse poetry in Swahili. 

The declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic saw the WHO recommend the same lockdown measures in all African countries regardless of population profile or socioeconomic frameworks. This lecture by Prof. Toby Green interrogates the processes by which enormous increase in economic inequality came about.

The ASCL will move to a new building in Leiden in May-June 2024. The name for the new building, formerly referred to as 'Cluster Zuid', was announced on 1 February: it will be called the 'Herta Mohr Building', named after the young Egyptologist that studied in Leiden in the late 1930s.

For the second time Madi Ditmars has been awarded a Virtual International Collaboration Project subsidy from the Netherlands Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. Aim is to develop a new online course (SPOC) for the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus minor Frugal Innovation for Sustainable Global Development that will focus on frugality.

How do history teachers in South Africa educate their students about Pan-Africanism? Visiting PhD candidate Esma Karadag investigates the dynamic nature of Pan-Africanism as a concept and its role in shaping a new national identity in post-apartheid South Africa. Read her blog post!

River Spirit is the most recent novel by the first-ever Caine Prize winner Leila Aboulela. It is a historical novel set in the Sudan of the 1880s, during the final years of the Turco-Egyptian regime (1820-1885). Aboulela takes the reader, through her characters, into Sudanese ways of thinking, Sudanese values and Sudanese (religious) considerations.

On 4 April Rose Boswell (Nelson Mandela University) will present the 'Blue Values Journey', a project that seeks to bring academia, the private sector and government together to advance the resilience of coastal communities in times of climate change and coastal development. Focus is on South Africa, Namibia, Kenya and Seychelles.

On 28 December 2018, Malian writer and politician, Seydou Badian Kouyaté died in  Bamako at the age of 90. He wrote the lyrics to the Malian national anthem, "Le Mali".