News & Events

It is with profound sadness that the African Studies Centre Leiden has learned that Prof. Dr Bert Ingelaere passed away on 4 February 2022. Bert, Associate Professor at Antwerp University, was a highly respected member of our academic community, a collaborator on many occasions, and a dear friend. He will be remembered for his profound knowledge of the long-term effects of conflict in the African Great Lakes region.  

In the 1930s, sociologist and anthropologist Sjoerd Hofstra spent almost two years among Mende people in the small village of Panguma, Sierra Leone. Here he took hundreds of photos. The Hofstra photo collection, based at the ASCL library, was recently uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Providing access to this collection does much to balance African imagery that is often dominated by negative representations, argues library intern Cameron Stone. Read his blog!

This month’s Library Highlight focuses on ‘De koerier van Maputo’ (The Courier of Maputo) by Jenne Jan Holtland. In this recently acquired Dutch-language non-fiction work by journalist Jenne Jan Holtland, the writer explores the surreal yet true story of Klaas de Jonge, a Dutch citizen who became involved in the armed struggle against Apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s, and who ended up spending over two years in diplomatic asylum in the Dutch embassy in Pretoria. Read the Highlight!

Dr Akinyinka Akinyoade is the new chair of the ASCL Researchers' Assembly. Akinyoade took over from Prof. Jan Abbink during the meeting of 19 January, where Prof. Abbink was thanked warmly for his exemplary leadership of and commitment to the Assembly for many years. Among other things, Dr Akinyoade wants to consolidate the continuous gains of the ASCL Collaborative Research Groups.

African Studies MA alumna Femke van Zeijl has been nominated for the Volkskrant IISG Thesis Award 2021 for her thesis 'The Curious Case of Casa do Fernandez: Challenges of Heritage Management in Nigeria’. The thesis award of Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant and the International Institute of Social History is yearly presented to a student who has written an excellent thesis about a historical subject. Van Zeijl is one of three nominees; the winner will be announced on 24 March.

The Leiden African Studies Assembly (LeidenASA) held its Annual Meeting on 6 December 2021 – online, because of the COVID-19 restrictions. LeidenASA is the network of Leiden based Africanist researchers. A lively panel discussion focused on decolonising academic education and research.

Independent writer and researcher Nanjala Nyabola gave the 2021 Stephen Ellis Annual Research Lecture on 9 December 2021. The title of her lecture was: African Feminism as Method. In her presentation, she proposed a possible theoretical framework for African women’s work and African feminisms as political science method. You can now watch the video of the lecture!

The ASCL is pleased to announce the launch of Duncan Money's new book 'White Mineworkers on Zambia's Copperbelt, 1926-1974: In a Class of Their Own' on Thursday 24 March. This book is the first that looks at the many thousands of white workers who migrated to Zambia's copper mines and became some of most affluent and wealthy groups of workers in the world. Money argues that this group was a highly mobile global workforce and constituted a racialised working class, a white working class.

How did colonised African elites who traveled to European colonial countries for sightseeing portray metropolitan cultures and peoples in their writings to African audiences? The focus in this seminar by Prof. Moses Ochonu (VanderBilt University) is on emirs and aristocrats from Northern Nigeria, who traveled to Britain between 1920 and 1960 for touristic adventures and returned with stories. Prof. Ochonu's book Emirs in London: Subaltern Travel and Nigeria’s Modernity has recently been published.

There are so many roadblocks in Central Africa that it is hard to find a road that does not have one. Peer Schouten, senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, has mapped over a thousand of them in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Central African Republic, and South Sudan. In this ASCL Seminar on 24 February, he will present the main findings of his latest book, which argues that roadblocks aren’t just a symptom of corruption or state failure but encapsulate a distinct and meaningful form of order-making.