News & Events

The African Studies Centre Leiden is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year! We will organise a day full of festivities highlighting this anniversary, which will take place on Thursday 8 September at the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden. 

The student members of the African Studies programme committee have nominated Akinyinka Akinyoade for the Faculty Education Award. Each year, the Faculty of Humanities awards the Faculty Education Prize to the best university lecturer. Akinyoade's nomination relates to the Master's programme, in which he teaches several courses.

On 27 June 2011, Mozambican writer, journalist and political activist Lina Júlia Francisco Magaia died in Maputo. While still at school she joined the Mozambican Liberation Front and was imprisoned for three months for political activities. Read the Library Weekly!

We are saddened by the news that fellow Africanist Paul Hebinck passed away on 21 June. Paul worked at Wageningen University until his formal retirement three years ago. He was involved in the ASCL as a teacher in the Research Master African Studies, in various conferences, and as a Community member.

On 20 June 1920, Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola was born in Abeokuta. When Amos was seven years old, he became a servant for F. O. Monu, an Igbo man, who sent him to the Salvation Army primary school in lieu of wages. Read the Library Weekly!

The ASCL calls for applications for a 90-day research fellowship in 2023. Visiting fellows use their time in Leiden for data analysis and/or writing, often on a joint project with one or more ASCL staff members. Preference will be given to applicants based in Africa. Application deadline: 24 July 2022.

Azeb Amha will be a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh in June and July 2022. Dr Amha is a grantee of IASH’s 2021 European Fellow Programme. She will work on her research on the language-culture nexus in the Omotic language family of Ethiopia.

On 14 June 1995, Congolese novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and poet Sony Labou Tansi, born Marcel Ntsoni, died at the age of 47 in Brazzaville. Tansi was born on 5 July 1947, in the village of Kimwaanza, just south of Kinshasa in modern day Democratic Republic of the Congo. Read the Library Weekly!

During the 2021 acquisition trip to Rwanda, the staff of the ASCL library received back copies of reports drawn up by the Cahiers du Bureau Social Urbain by the Catholic NGO Caritas. These copies offer a wealth of information on societal life in Rwanda from the end of the 1980s until 2002. They are the subject of our latest Library Highlight!

Rahmane Idrissa has been awarded the Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellowship in Global African Studies at the The Africa Institute in Sharjah (United Arab Emirates). Idrissa will devote the Fellowship mainly to write a book on the Songhay Empire in the global context of the birth of modernity.