News & Events

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 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.

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.

The African Studies Centre Leiden is delighted to announce the ASCL Seminar Series speakers for the first half of 2022. The ASCL Seminars are invited (online) lectures given by some of the most prominent researchers in the field of African Studies. Dr Barbara Bompani of The University of Edinburgh will kick off the series with a lecture on documenting loyalties, identities and motivations to political action in the Ugandan Pentecostal Movement.

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.