News & Events

The Centre for Frugal Innovation in Africa is one of the joint multidisciplinary centres of Leiden University, Delft University of Technology and Erasmus University Rotterdam. It investigates how frugal innovation can contribute to inclusive growth and transformation in Africa. Frugal innovation is usually defined as stripping down and re-engineering products to offer quality goods at very low prices to poorer consumers. André Leliveld of the African Studies Centre (Leiden), Peter Knorringa (Erasmus) and Cees van Beers (Delft) are the three principal researchers.

The African Studies Centre has been awarded  two research grants in the framework of the NWO-WOTRO programme on Inclusive Development. The first research project focuses on increasing the political influence of informal and formal workers’ organisations for inclusive development in Ghana and Benin. The second research project explores how Dutch multinationals can help promote sustainable productive employment and inclusive development in Sub-Sahara Africa, in particular Kenya and Nigeria.

The Africa Thesis Award is presented annually to a student whose Masters thesis has been completed on the basis of research conducted on Africa. The award consists of a prize of € 1.000 and publication of the winning thesis in the ASC’s African Studies Collection. Any final-year student who has completed his or her Masters thesis with distinction (80% or higher) at a university in Africa or the Netherlands may apply. The award aims to encourage student research and writing on Sub-Saharan Africa and to promote the study of African cultures and societies. Deadline for the 2014 award is 11 July! Read more about the application procedure.

Brazil is hosting the FIFA 2014 World Cup from 12 June to 13 July. Thirty-two teams are taking part in the tournament, including five from Africa: Algeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Nigeria. To mark this event, the Library of the African Studies Centre has compiled a web dossier on football in Africa. It contains titles from the library's collection published since 2004 including monographs, articles, films and web resources.

At least once a year an ASC Library staff member heads for Africa to collect books that are otherwise hard to come by. The motivation behind these trips is partly an awareness that collection practices are inherently biased. To illustrate this, two books bought on a recent ASC visit to Kampala are the focus of our latest ‘Acquisition Highlight’, one book arguing that Tony Blair became "the face of African dictators whom he networked and advised as they plundered and looted their nations and killed their people",  and the other praising Idi Amin for his "positive contributions" to Uganda. Read the Acquisition Highlight.

To coincide with the general elections in South Africa on 7 May, the ASC Library has compiled a new web dossier, containing titles on (the current and former) elections in South Africa from the library's online catalogue published since 1993. It includes monographs, articles and chapters from edited works, a selection of links to relevant web sites and an introduction to South African elections since the end of apartheid. Read the web dossier!

The South African general elections will be held on 7 May 2014. The ASC offers the opportunity to follow these elections closely, using different sources like Twitter, newspapers, tv stations and news websites. Check out the ASC liveblog from 6-8 May! Please refresh the webpage to see the latest updates. Tip:  In almost all browsers, pressing F5 (CTRL+F5) will force the browser to retrieve the webpage from the server instead of loading it from the cache.

The ASC seminar on 26 June by visiting fellow Samuel Ntewusu (University of Ghana) is about the 'Great North Road' linking the north of the Gold Coast (present day Ghana) to the south. Scholars usually discuss the road in terms of the role it played in the movement of goods. Yet the focus of this presentation will be on the road itself. Ntewusu will discuss labour issues, the development of settlements, important religious rituals and trajectories of diseases that emerged on the road.

South Africa’s rural areas experienced important changes since the start of colonial rule. ‘Native reserves’ were transformed into ‘homelands’ in a system that was only undone in 1994. However, the long shadow of the past is evident in current ‘cooperative governance’ by traditional leaders and municipalities. By 2013 protests against poor service delivery across the country pointed to government’s inability to meet expectations since democratisation. Kees van der Waal (Stellenbosch University) unpacks the disputed transformations of the last few decades in one rural settlement in the Lowveld of the Limpopo Province at the ASC seminar on Thursday 12 June.

On the occasion of the recently published book ‘Among the Mende in Sierra Leone. Letters from Sjoerd Hofstra, 1934-36’ the ASC organizes a seminar on 3 July about anthropologist Sjoerd Hofstra, who did the first major ethnographic study of the Mende people in the Upper West African forest (Sierra Leone) in the 1930s. Hofstra never completed his study, yet made a few hundred photos and wrote extensive letters home. These letters, edited by Hofstra’s daughter and sociologist Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, form the basis of the book. At the seminar, Paul Richards of Njala University, Sierra Leone, will evaluate the significance of Hofstra's contribution to our understanding of the Mende.