News & Events

ASC researcher Jan-Bart Gewald has been appointed Professor of  Southern African history at Leiden University as of 1 September 2013. His research at the ASC has ranged from the ramifications of genocide, through to pan-Africanism and histories of technology. Inaugural lecture 6 June 2014.

The documentary 'Voices' will be screened on 9 December at 15:00. It deals with the future of the South African movie sector, the advancements, challenges and ways of finding a place in today’s globalizing world. The documentary’s major goals are to open up the minds of filmmakers to the challenges that other people face when making moving pictures. South African cinema is mostly known in English speaking countries; the director of this film, Joachim Landau, wants to give a French speaking audience access to it as well. Landau will be present at the screening.

The Africa Yearbook covers major domestic political developments, foreign policy and socio-economic trends in sub-Sahara Africa – all related to 2012. Several researchers of the African Studies Centre in Leiden have contributed to the Yearbook, while the editors are from different African Studies centres in Europe: Klaas van Walraven (Leiden), Andreas Mehler (Hamburg) and Henning Melber (Uppsala). The book aims at students, politicians, diplomats, journalists, teachers, development aid workers as well as business people.

The exhibition of African barbershop boards from Mali, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Cameroon and the former Zaire in the ASC Library has been extended until 25 April 2014. These brightly coloured messages were collected over the last forty years by Esger Duintjer in Africa's big cities.

'Dangerous Flowers' is a seventy-minute investigative documentary about the cut-flower industry in Kenya. It was shot in Kenya and the Netherlands over a period of seven years. The film takes the viewer through the flower-industry to discover the environmental, health, gender and cultural implications of this multi-million-euro sector. Film maker Khamis Ramadhan will be present at the screening of 'Dangerous Flowers' on Tuesday 29 October, and will participate in the subsequent discussion.

Both in northern Uganda and South Sudan people driven away by violence in the past are now returning to their home communities. Some of them, however, find their lands occupied by others and end up in conflict. Why is there so much confusion and contestation about land when violent conflict is over? And what makes land issues so difficult to resolve? ‘Governance off the ground’ is a film by Mathijs van Leeuwen, Doreen Nancy Kobusingye and Peter Hakim Justin of the African Studies Centre.