News & Events

Dr Akinyinka Akinyoade is the new chair of the ASCL Researchers' Assembly. Akinyoade took over from Prof. Jan Abbink during the meeting of 19 January, where Prof. Abbink was thanked warmly for his exemplary leadership of and commitment to the Assembly for many years. Among other things, Dr Akinyoade wants to consolidate the continuous gains of the ASCL Collaborative Research Groups.

African Studies MA alumna Femke van Zeijl has been nominated for the Volkskrant IISG Thesis Award 2021 for her thesis 'The Curious Case of Casa do Fernandez: Challenges of Heritage Management in Nigeria’. The thesis award of Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant and the International Institute of Social History is yearly presented to a student who has written an excellent thesis about a historical subject. Van Zeijl is one of three nominees; the winner will be announced on 24 March.

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.

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 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.

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.