News & Events

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dockside customs officials would leaf through publications looking for obscenity, politically objectionable materials, or reprints of British copyrighted works, often dumping these condemned goods into the water. These practices informed later censorship regimes under apartheid in South Africa. By tracking printed matter from ship to shore, Prof. Isabel Hofmeyr (University of the Witwatersrand) shows how literary institutions like copyright and censorship were shaped by colonial control of coastal waters.

Life and work on the Zambian Copperbelt - a concentrated industrialised mining region along the border with DR Congo - has been a perennial subject for Africanist historians. In this book, Duncan Money for the first time focusses on the white mineworkers who monopolised skilled jobs on the mines from the 1920s to the 1960s and became one of the most affluent groups of workers on the planet. Money argues that this group was a highly mobile global workforce which constituted, and saw itself as, a racialised working class.

On the occasion of the 'Africa 2020' year, the ASCL created Infosheets about the countries that became independent in 1960. One year later, Tanzania was the second in line (after Sierra Leone): it became politically independent as Tanganyika on 9 December 1961. In 1963 also Zanzibar became independent and in 1964 the two independent areas became the United Republic of Tanzania.

2021 has been a great year for African writing! This year’s key literary prizes, such as the Nobel Prize (Abdulrazak Gurnah), the Booker Prize (Damon Galgut) and the Prix Goncourt (Mohamed Mbougar Sarr), have gone to writers from Africa and the diaspora. Read the full article.

Many children’s books on COVID-19 have been published over the last 18 months. The ASCL Library has recently acquired a couple of these books that were created in Africa. They are about uncertainty and sadness, about measures such as washing hands and keeping your distance, about consequences such as not being able to visit one’s grandparents and not being allowed to hug, but also about the nice things that are still possible, such as calling each other and playing outside. Read the Library Highlight!

The Africa Yearbook, published by Brill, covers major domestic political developments, the foreign policy and socio-economic trends in sub-Sahara Africa - all related to developments in one calendar year. Volume 17 of the Africa Yearbook covers the developments in 2020, a year dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Jon Abbink wrote the chapters on Somalia and Ethiopia, while Klaas van Walraven authored the chapter on Niger.

On the occasion of the 2021 Stephen Ellis Annual Research Lecture on 9 December by Nanjala Nyabola, the ASCL Library has compiled a web dossier on African feminism. Nanjala Nyabola is an independent writer and researcher based in Nairobi, Kenya. The web dossier has been introduced by PhD candidate Loes Oudenhuijsen and consists of titles from the ASCL Library Catalogue, complemented by sources available through the broader Leiden University Library collection. 

The Africa Thesis Award committee is glad to announce that this year’s winner is Tamia Botes (MA in Anthropology, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa) for her thesis 'Where have the midwives gone? Everyday histories of Voetvroue in Johannesburg'. This year a total of twenty seven high-quality Master’s theses were submitted to the Africa Thesis Award. The submitted theses were all based on independent research related to Africa and represented a diverse range of disciplinary fields.

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Tanzanian publishing house Mkuki na Nyota, a student of the Minor African Dynamics interviewed the publisher, Walter Bgoya, a key personality in African publishing. Mr Bgoya is outspoken about the importance of printed books for education, and about the language of instruction: 'To believe that English, French and Portuguese are the languages through which knowledge will be transmitted to the majority of our people is a colonial hangover.' Read the interview in the Minor African Dynamics Students' Blog!

Black Minds Matter tells the story of one of the most outspoken clerics of Africa, Emmanuel Milingo, who was Archbishop of Lusaka from 1969 to 1983. Milingo became widely known for his healing ministry, which was rooted in African spiritual ideas. This brought him into years of conflict with the dominant powers in the Catholic Church, and eventually led to his excommunication in 2006. Black Minds Matter was written by Gerrie ter Haar, emeritus Professor of Religion and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam.