News & Events

The African Studies Centre Leiden Annual Report for 2018 is out now! In addition to an excellent list of publications by our researchers, you will find other highlights such as the Destination Africa Conference in March, Nelson Mandela's Centenary in June, and the Stephen Ellis Annual Lecture by Henrietta Moore in December. 

Dr Adegbite's research focus is on Nigerian laws and their interactions with international agreements on children’s rights and inclusive development. Unlike children’s rights laws, international developmental agenda accepts children as individuals with capacities to benefit and contribute to economic growth. While both structures agree on the role of education in human development, the former de-emphasizes the children’s economic capabilities, while the latter seeks to maximize all potential within efficient human right standards. Most works have argued on children’s rights to human capital development through education, but due to ideological discrepancies in the conception of childhood, child labor and also the caretaker’s insistence on recognition on the basis of affection, not many studies have attended to structures of law that protect children’s rights to education with little regard for their economic freedom. Within existing jurisprudence, this work examines the Nigerian statutes and Yoruba Customary Law on child education and economic empowerment.

In Africa, infertility is often not only painful on a personal level, but also seen as a big problem by society as a whole. This sensitive and often taboo issue is not only examined in academic publications, it is also explored in literature and film. The novel Stay with me from Nigeria and documentary film L'Arbre sans fruit from Niger, both created by women, explore the consequences of infertility. They form the subject of our latest Library Highlight!

Africa’s richest state per capita, Equatorial Guinea, is governed by the continent’s longest serving non-monarchical head of state, assisted by one of the continent’s most corrupt and violent ruling clans. Recent developments suggest that, if gone unchecked, respect for human rights could sink to a new, frightening low. Read the latest contribution to the ASCL Africanist Blog.

Anthropologist Sjoerd Zanen was interviewed by NRC Handelsblad on the occasion of his book Tong Mabior. In het gebied van de Boven-Nijl - tussen verleden en toekomst, published by the ASCL in October 2018. The book deals with the history of South Sudan and the confrontation of the local population with the various strangers that have intruded the area through the ages: explorers, Arabic rulers, colonists, development workers, peace missions and humanitarian workers.

Meike de Goede, currently working at the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and earlier at the History Institute of Leiden University, has won the French History Article Prize 2018 of Oxford University Press. She won the prize for an article on the Matsouanists of Congo-Brazzaville. De Goede - a member of the Collaborative Research Group 'Rethinking African History' - and ASCL researcher Klaas van Walraven collaborate on issues concerning the history of French Equatorial Africa. Congratulations Meike!

Women’s nude curse was a predominant socio-cultural practice and ritual performance in Yoruba land before the advent of colonial contact, imported religions and their conception of nudity as obscenity. Owing to this conception from the late 18th century onward, ex-colonial and imported religions prohibited their faithful from engaging in nude nurse which they considered heathen. With the degenerating spate of political misrule in the 20th century colonial and postcolonial Yoruba land, however, Yoruba women broke away from the religious strictures on nudity and reclaimed their nude protest performance as a counter-check to socio-political malaise perpetrated by corrupt and oppressive rulers. This study seeks, among other things, to analytically document the contexts of women’s political struggle using the 2009 Ekiti  women’s nude protest and theorize the dynamics of power relations in Yoruba women’s nude curse vis-à-vis socio-cultural and political developments in Yoruba land.