News & Events

River Spirit is the most recent novel by the first-ever Caine Prize winner Leila Aboulela. It is a historical novel set in the Sudan of the 1880s, during the final years of the Turco-Egyptian regime (1820-1885). Aboulela takes the reader, through her characters, into Sudanese ways of thinking, Sudanese values and Sudanese (religious) considerations.

On 4 April Rose Boswell (Nelson Mandela University) will present the 'Blue Values Journey', a project that seeks to bring academia, the private sector and government together to advance the resilience of coastal communities in times of climate change and coastal development. Focus is on South Africa, Namibia, Kenya and Seychelles.

The first ASCL Seminar of 2024 will be given by Sandra Calkins, associate professor at the University of Twente, on 1 February. She will examine forms of human-plant intimacy emerging in a transnational research project that aims to introduce nutritionally improved banana plants to Uganda. 

On 28 December 2018, Malian writer and politician, Seydou Badian Kouyaté died in  Bamako at the age of 90. He wrote the lyrics to the Malian national anthem, "Le Mali".

On the occasion of the Stephen Ellis Annual Lecture, to be given by Dr Mercy Iroaganachi on 7 December, the ASCL Library has created a web dossier on African archives. The web dossier starts with a selection of titles on archives in Africa, followed by a list of African archives which are available online. 

Applications for the GROW Research Programme are now open! Within GROW (Graduate Research on Worldwide Challenges) Leiden University and four other Dutch universities will appoint 51 PhD candidates to conduct solution-oriented research for and with the African continent. Application deadline: 31 January.