News & Events

Fiction never foretells the future. But sometimes it comes quite close. In 2016, South African writer Deon Meyer published his novel Koors (Fever), a story about a pandemic fever raging over the world, and wiping away 95% of the population, leaving only a few people left, including father and son Willem and Nico in South Africa. Elements of the COVID-19 pandemic seem present in the book. Two staff members of the ASCL Library, ardent fans of Deon Meyer’s novels, interviewed Meyer by email.

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.

Spouses in Eastern Province, Zambia, are willing to compromise household-level earnings in order to maintain individual control over money. Wives, but not husbands, are more likely to compromise household-level earnings in order to maintain individual control over money, when they can keep that money and their actions hidden from their spouses. These are some of the preliminary findings of the project 'Financial decision-making, gender and social norms in Zambia' by Prof. Marleen Dekker and others.

Just before the corona crisis, the ASCL Library acquired a number of books from CERDOTOLA (International Centre for research and documentation on African traditions and languages), based in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Volume 2 of the Atlas linguistique du Cameroun is a bibliography on Cameroonian languages that includes references to works of different disciplines. And in the collective work The Grassfields of Cameroon researchers examine the construction of the identity or maybe identities of this region. Read the latest Library Highlight!