News & Events

Rhodesia was founded as a colony in 1890; most of its white population only arrived after World War II. The country did not have a deep history to tie white settlers’ loyalty to the land. So why would citizens fight a 14-year guerrilla war for its sake? That question is complicated by the respective rights and obligations of citizenship and residency. This seminar on 3 April by Luise White will argue that this complexity can only be understood by considering many sources: especially memoir and fiction.

Nigerian scholar Chibuike Uche started as a senior researcher at the African Studies Centre as of 1 January 2014. Prior to joining the ASC, he was Professor of Banking and Financial Institutions at the University of Nigeria and a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank of Nigeria. Chibuike has a PhD in accounting and finance from the London School of Economics. His current research focus is on the political economy of foreign business operations in Africa.

January 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the so-called Zanzibar Revolution on Sunday 12 January 1964. In the week following the toppling of the newly elected government, the Sultan of Oman fled the island and thousands of people were killed. While a lot of African citizens of Zanzibar will celebrate these events and see them as marking the beginning of the real era of independence, the January Revolution and its aftermath will be mourned by many others. Among them is the Omani writer Nasser Abdulla Al-Riyami, author of Zanzibar: Personalities & Events (1828-1972), subject of our latest Acquisition Highlight. 

The longue durée history of personal capacity and spiritual agency in Gabon is the focus of this seminar by Florence Bernault of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Anthropologists and political scientists have been scrutinizing the role of witchcraft in Africa as an agent of everyday life and how it is constitutive of African modernities for the last fifteen years. However, few scholars have contextualized this within a longer history of power, capacity and misfortune. Bernault traces how colonialism was a crucial moment for reconfiguring ideas of personal and collective agency.

Mozambican author Mia Couto has been awarded the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. This biennial award is sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and its international literary magazine, World Literature Today. Like the Nobel Prize for Literature, to which it is often compared, the prize is awarded for an entire oeuvre. Read the Acquisition Highlight we wrote about Mia Couto.

Due to the closure of the Library of the KIT (Royal Institute of the Tropics, Amsterdam) all 450,000 books that belonged to this institute have been transferred to other libraries at the end of 2013. More than 3,000 books of the KIT collection have been given to the African Studies Centre. They are unique copies: no other library in the Netherlands has any of these books. The titles of all 3,029 books have immediately been made available via the library catalogue of the ASC and are available for loan.

The ASC has published three new thematic maps: Africa’s economic growth from a labour perspective; Sanitation in Africa; and Drinking water in Africa. The three maps visualize themes that are high on the development agenda. They can be viewed in Open Access on our website.

Read the column of ASC director Ton Dietz in the latest (December) issue of OneWorld Magazine. It's about the importance to keep in touch with African scientists in countries where working as a scientist is dangerous.

The African Studies Centre and ZAM Magazine invite you to commemorate Nelson Mandela on Wednesday 11 December. Several speakers will focus on the significance of Mandela and the roles he has played in a long liberation struggle. How does South Africa’s future look without Nelson Mandela? Ineke van Kessel (ASC) will illustrate the evolution of Mandela’s image. Harry Wels (ASC and VU) will address the question what happens after Mandela. ZAM editor-in-chief Bart Luirink will lead a roundtable discussion.

Nelson Mandela was the greatest statesman that Africa has produced. His reputation is based above all on the enormous dignity and magnanimity that he showed after he was released from prison, after 27 years behind bars, in 1990. He was able to reassure his countrymen and the wider world that looked on, entranced, there would be no race war in South Africa, as many people had feared. Among South Africans black and white, Mandela’s achievement endured throughout the years after he had stepped down as president in 1999, even though his dream of a rainbow nation began to look tattered. Worldwide, Mandela has become a revered figure in the mode of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.