News & Events

This project aims at digitally recording and safeguarding part of the immaterial cultural heritage of the Dogon in Mali, the baja ni, a major song cycle that forms an integral part of the funeral complex. ASCL researcher Wouter van Beek, who has been studying baja ni performances since 1980, has collected many hours of recordings, and has recently prepared a manuscript text which, together with the recordings, will serve as the starting point for this project. Due to Islamization and Christianisation, traditional funerals are becoming rarer, and the transmission of the baja ni is in peril.

This Library Highlight is about Les deux visages d'une femme bamiléké, one of the films that was on show during the International Film Festival Rotterdam. It is now available (on DVD, with English subtitles) at the ASCL Library. Filmmaker Rosine Mbakam was born in 1980 in a traditional bamiléké household in Cameroon. She left her country when she was twenty-seven. This film is an account of her journey back home, after having lived in Europe for seven years. Check out the Library Highlight!

André Leliveld (ASCL) and Peter Knorringa (ISS) are guest editors of a special issue of The European Journal of Development Research on why frugal innovations are increasingly important for development research. While the top-down business and management literature on frugal innovation has claimed developmental relevance, the editors in their introduction give at least equal importance to much longer-standing bottom-up development studies discourses on grass-root innovation, bricolage, and livelihood strategies. Leliveld and Knorringa are (co-)directors of the Centre for Frugal Innovation in Africa.

The ASCL has established five new Collaborative Research Groups, focusing on: Politics, governance and law; Governance, entrepreneurship and inclusive development; Collaboration and contestation in words; Pioneering futures of health and well-being; and Trans-Species perspectives on African Studies. Two CRGs that have already existed for several years will continue: Africa in the world; and Rethinking African history. The CRGs form the heart of the new research programme 2018-2023 that is currently being developed.