News & Events

This paper by Prof. Jon Abbink offers a political analysis of the development of the TPLF-induced armed conflict in northern Ethiopia and considers the international responses in media and international policy circles. In spite of the unilateral TPLF extension of the armed conflict since late June 2021, the responses of international policy circles, notably from the Western donor countries and the UN, have been negative towards the federal government and mild on the TPLF.

As a gift from a descendant of the authors, the ASCL library received a copy of Al Manhal, The Source in the History and Narratives of the Afar (Danakil). The book was published in Egypt in 2018 and is the English translation of the Arabic edition that appeared in 1997 in Egypt. It is written by two authors, Sheikh Gamal A-Din Ibrahim Khalil A-Shami, from Tio on the Red Sea coast (today’s Eritrea), and his son Hashim Gamal A-Shami, but father and son did not write the book together. The father’s two handwritten Arabic manuscripts were found only after his death in Tio in 1960. Al Manhal is the subject of our latest LIbrary Highlight!

ASCL PhD candidate Tycho van der Hoog is the winner of the British International Studies Association (BISA) African Affairs Postgraduate Paper Prize for 2021. He has been awarded the prize for 'The Military Alliance Between North Korea and Southern Africa', according to the awarding panel 'an exciting paper that uses original research to revisit the history of the Cold War from both Africa and North Korean perspectives'.

Het ASCL, het Zuid-Afrika Huis en Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society organiseren op 10 november een online Poëzieavond met Antjie Krog en Klimaatdichters Moya de Feyter en Saskia Stehouwer. Voertaal: Nederlands/Afrikaans.

During this country meeting Corinna Jentzsch (Institute of Political Science, Leiden University) will present her new book 'Violent Resistance: Militia Formation and Civil War in Mozambique'. Why do communities form militias to defend themselves against violence during civil war? 

Digital communication is assumed to have a severe impact both on how conflicts develop and how they are being mediated. There is, however, a need for more evidence on the role of digital media in regions of conflict. Addressing this challenge, the key goal of the DDMAC project is to gather empirical evidence defining and demonstrating the use, spread, content, and agenda-setting role of social media in regions of conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa. Read more about the project.

Jan-Bart Gewald, Professor of African History at Leiden University, has been selected as a fellow at Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) for the second semester of 2022. He will be working on the research project 'The "Big Hole", Kimberley South Africa, 1870-1920'. The chance find of a diamond on a small hillock in South Africa one hundred and fifty years ago initiated an industrial mining revolution, the effects of which continue to reverberate far into the future.

On 7 October 2021, Tanzanian novelist and university teacher Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2021 'for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents'. Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar. He arrived in England as a refugee in the end of the 1960s. He is the focus of our latest Library Weekly!

Global histories of East Africa have often focused on economic relationships. But engagement with the wider world also took place in the domain of ideas, increasingly, from the late 19th century, through the medium of print media. On 11 November, Prof. Emma Hunter (University of Edinburgh) will explore Tanzania’s Swahili-language print media as a space in which writers reflected on their place within an increasingly unequal world, in an online ASCL Seminar.

Knowledge about religion and spirituality is essential in dealing with migrants of West African descent in the Netherlands who may be victims of human trafficking. This is the main conclusion of a study conducted by the Centre against Child and Human Trafficking (CKM), the African Studies Centre Leiden, and the University of Humanistic Studies. A culture-sensitive approach in which knowledge about religion and spirituality is included is a primary condition for communication with this target group.