News & Events

Proverbs are held in high esteem in African societies, as are the people, often elderly, who know many and are able to apply them appropriately and convincingly. To mark the Year of Indigenous Languages, the ASCL Library has compiled a web dossier on proverbs in African languages. It also includes a Wikidata Map, indicating geolocated topics co-occurring with African proverbs as main subjects. Check out the web dossier!

'A few years ago, we could not have imagined writing this blog'. ASCL researchers Mirjam de Bruijn and Han van Dijk have done research in the Sahel for decades. 'We do not hesitate to use the word Talibanization to describe the process underway.' De Bruijn and Van Dijk observe that the internationalization of the conflict might ultimately lead to (...)  the birth of a new Islamic Caliphate in the Sahel. Read their blog.

In their influential contribution to theorising the urban from Johannesburg, Mbembe & Nuttall (2004: 348) observe the continued tendency to “describe Africa as an object apart from the world”, and decry the systematic inattention to its “embeddedness in multiple elsewheres”. This is a stark contrast to the literature on the East African littoral, where city life is typically explained in terms of its entrenched connectivity to the Indian Ocean realm (Kresse 2012, Loimeier & Seesemann 2006). Rather than assuming African urban space as inherently connected or disconnected to the world beyond, this paper argues that conceptualisations of conjunction in and from the continent must be grounded in the imaginaries of city residents themselves. Drawing on examples of everyday eating practices in the Kenyan port of Mombasa, Zoë Goodman will outline the problematic notions of origin and spread that underpin much of the literature on Indian Ocean Africa, and assert the political imperative to view edible instantiations of littoral urbanism as ‘already local’ (Pennycook 2010).

Namibian beer is immensely popular in Namibia and beyond. The beer that is brewed by Namibia Breweries has grown into the national beverage of the country and is thus deeply ingrained into the idea of an autonomous and inclusive Namibia. But for decades, the same brew from the same company was not available to the black population as a consequence of colonial politics. The book 'Breweries, Politics and Identity: the History Behind Namibian Beer' by Tycho van der Hoog aims to explain this transformation. This book launch will be held in Dutch.