News & Events

Diaspora communities and organisations are becoming increasingly influential actors on the international humanitarian stage, often providing assistance in ways that differ from those of the traditional international humanitarian donor community. Diaspora communities provide direct cash transfers, send skilled volunteers that have local knowledge, and compile first-hand crisis information from affected populations. Mobile telephony, e-banking and social media networks have facilitated the establishment of virtual connections between the Diaspora and the populations affected by disasters in their home countries. On 30 March, an expert meeting about the role of these Diaspora actors will take place at the ASC.

The documentary film The Supreme Price tells the story of Nigerian human rights activist Hafsat Abiola and her family. In 1993, Hafsat Abiola's father M.K.O. Abiola was elected President of Nigeria, but he was shortly after arrested. While he was imprisoned, his wife Kudirat took over leadership of the pro-democracy movement, winning international attention for the human-rights violations perpetrated by the military dictatorship. Hafsat Abiola was about to graduate from Harvard when her mother was murdered. Her father died in prison two years later. Hafsat is now at the forefront of a progressive movement to empower women. She will be present and interviewed at this film seminar on 25 March that is organized in collaboration with Movies That Matter.

The Leiden University Centre for Islamic Studies (LUCIS) and the ASC are organizing a workshop on 23 April that will bring together scholars working on questions of Muslim intellectual production in Arabic in the past and the present in Africa. The focus is on African Muslim literary production. The workshop will help to understand how scholars and preachers situate their work simultaneously locally, as well as in relation to the broader Islamic traditions and centers of intellectual production.

The Centre for Frugal Innovation in Africa has received funding from the Responsible Innovation programme of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for a four-year project. Researchers of the Centre - in which the Leiden, Delft and Erasmus universities work together with Dutch companies and African entrepreneurs - aim to develop new 'inclusive business models' for successful innovation in Africa. The project is co-funded by three Dutch companies: Royal Philips and the water companies OASEN and Hatenboer.

Filmmaker Bert Haitsma kindly donated copies of two South African documentaries to the ASC Library: 1994: The Bloody Miracle, directed by Meg Rickards and Bert Haitsma, and Forerunners: South Africa's new middle class, directed by Simon Wood. The first film reveals the plans for a military coup and a plot to kidnap Mandela and other new leaders in the run-up to the elections in 1994. The second film is about the first generation of black South Africans to join the country's middle class. The films are the subject of our latest Acquisition Highlight!

The Kenya Coast - Social Sciences Portal is a service provided by the African Studies Centre in Leiden for students, researchers, development workers, government officials and all others interested. The Kenya Coast is a region with distinct geographical, economic and social characteristics. It has a long history of intercontinental trade and cultural exchange with other communities along the East African coast as well as with the Middle East and South Asia. Due to its cultural diversity and varied history, the Coast has attracted the attention of many researchers over the years. This Portal provides digital follow-up to the Kenya Coast Handbook (2000).

The ASC exhibits photos of colourful wall paintings in Northern Ethiopian churches until 1 July. The paintings represent scenes from the Old and New Testament and scenes of the history of the Ethiopian Orthodox (Christian) Church. Amateur photographer Pieter de Kleer travelled through Northern Ethiopia some years ago and was impressed by the beautiful religious paintings he found in places like Gondar, Lalibela, Aksum and around Lake Tana. Most of the paintings are several hundreds years old. The exhibition can be seen in the ASC Library (ground floor) and in the corridors at the third floor.

Many African countries have experienced sustained economic growth, but few have achieved the type of structural change, driven by rising productivity, that has transformed mass living standards in parts of Asia. In the Developmental Regimes in Africa Synthesis Report, editor David Booth examines how DRA research has shed new light on how developmental regimes might emerge and be sustained in Africa in the 21st century. Among the other authors are the ASC's Ton Dietz and André Leliveld, with a contribution on the Agricultural ‘pockets of effectiveness’ in Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda since 2000.

This weekend two great African writers died, one from the south of the continent (see 'A Dutch salute to André Brink' below) and one from the north: Assia Djebar (pseudonyme of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen) died in Paris on the evening of 6 February at the age of 78. Born in 1936 in the village of Cherchell (northern Algeria) where her father taught French, she was to become one of North Africa's most important francophone writers. She has published nearly twenty titles - novels, prose and poetry - which were translated into more than twenty languages. In her work she defended women's rights and the emancipation of muslim women.

André Brink, who died on 6 February 2015 (aged 79), was one of the most prolific writers of South Africa. Brink, who taught English literature at the University of Cape Town, died aboard a KLM flight when returning to Cape Town from Amsterdam after receiving an honorary doctorate at Leuven University. Though Brink was primarily known as an anti-apartheid writer, he was a many-sided author, who wrote novels, plays, travel literature and academic books. Brink wrote his novels simultaneously in Afrikaans and English. He was one of South Africa’s most outspoken literary figures.