News & Events

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.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace prize laureate who helped end apartheid in South Africa, has died on 26 December 2021. On the occasion of his 90th birthday, on 7 October 2021, we compiled a Library Weekly. Tutu, born in 1931 in Klerksdorp, was Bishop of Johannesburg from 1985 to 1986 and then Archbishop of Cape Town from 1986 to 1996, in both cases being the first black African to hold the position. He was one of the driving forces behind the anti-apartheid movement. Read the Library Weekly.

Bertus Haverkort is de oudste zoon van een boerengezin op de zandgronden in Slagharen. Hij geniet van modernisering op de boerderij van zijn jeugd, omdat dit het werk verlicht en de opbrengsten verbetert. Met in zijn bagage een dosis moderne landbouwkennis uit Wageningen, trekt hij eropuit. In Colombia, India, Bolivia en Ghana werkt hij aan programma’s waarbij overdracht van westerse kennis het doel is. De resultaten vallen tegen. De aanpak blijkt niet te werken. Hij plaatst geleidelijk aan vraagtekens bij de toepasbaarheid van de westerse kennis in situaties waar de ecologie, economie en cultuur zoveel verschillen.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dockside customs officials would leaf through publications looking for obscenity, politically objectionable materials, or reprints of British copyrighted works, often dumping these condemned goods into the water. These practices informed later censorship regimes under apartheid in South Africa. By tracking printed matter from ship to shore, Prof. Isabel Hofmeyr (University of the Witwatersrand) shows how literary institutions like copyright and censorship were shaped by colonial control of coastal waters.

Life and work on the Zambian Copperbelt - a concentrated industrialised mining region along the border with DR Congo - has been a perennial subject for Africanist historians. In this book, Duncan Money for the first time focusses on the white mineworkers who monopolised skilled jobs on the mines from the 1920s to the 1960s and became one of the most affluent groups of workers on the planet. Money argues that this group was a highly mobile global workforce which constituted, and saw itself as, a racialised working class.

On the occasion of the 'Africa 2020' year, the ASCL created Infosheets about the countries that became independent in 1960. One year later, Tanzania was the second in line (after Sierra Leone): it became politically independent as Tanganyika on 9 December 1961. In 1963 also Zanzibar became independent and in 1964 the two independent areas became the United Republic of Tanzania.

2021 has been a great year for African writing! This year’s key literary prizes, such as the Nobel Prize (Abdulrazak Gurnah), the Booker Prize (Damon Galgut) and the Prix Goncourt (Mohamed Mbougar Sarr), have gone to writers from Africa and the diaspora. Read the full article.

Many children’s books on COVID-19 have been published over the last 18 months. The ASCL Library has recently acquired a couple of these books that were created in Africa. They are about uncertainty and sadness, about measures such as washing hands and keeping your distance, about consequences such as not being able to visit one’s grandparents and not being allowed to hug, but also about the nice things that are still possible, such as calling each other and playing outside. Read the Library Highlight!

On the occasion of the 2021 Stephen Ellis Annual Research Lecture on 9 December by Nanjala Nyabola, the ASCL Library has compiled a web dossier on African feminism. Nanjala Nyabola is an independent writer and researcher based in Nairobi, Kenya. The web dossier has been introduced by PhD candidate Loes Oudenhuijsen and consists of titles from the ASCL Library Catalogue, complemented by sources available through the broader Leiden University Library collection. 

The Africa Thesis Award committee is glad to announce that this year’s winner is Tamia Botes (MA in Anthropology, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa) for her thesis 'Where have the midwives gone? Everyday histories of Voetvroue in Johannesburg'. This year a total of twenty seven high-quality Master’s theses were submitted to the Africa Thesis Award. The submitted theses were all based on independent research related to Africa and represented a diverse range of disciplinary fields.