News & Events

On 23 September, Iva Peša will defend her PhD thesis Moving along the roadside: A social history of Mwinilunga District, 1870s-1970s, at Leiden University. This thesis aims to understand how the process of social change has been negotiated in the area of Mwinilunga, a district in the north-west of Zambia, between the 1870s and the 1970s. It looks at the process of social change by tackling four aspects in detail: production, mobility, consumption and social relationships.

Jo Jordan describes herself as one of those who would rather “hear the flatulence of camels than the prayers of the fishes”. This perfectly sets the tone of the book she writes about her life and the adventures she has travelling through Africa’s vast geography and cultures. Inspired by a grainy black and white film of an overland journey across the Sahara to Nigeria and stumbling across a small ad in the Observer announcing an 18-week overland trip to South Africa, the author left 'swinging sixties' London behind and never looked back.

The South African writer Nadine Gordimer has died on 13 July, in Johannesburg, at the age of 90. Nadine Gordimer was born on 20 November 1923 in the small East Rand mining town of Springs, the daughter of Jewish immigrants. She published her first story - Come Again Tomorrow - in a Johannesburg magazine at just 15 years of age. She continued to write more than 30 books. In 1974 Gordimer won the Booker Prize for The Conservationist and she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991. The Nobel committee honoured Gordimer for her "great, epic writings centering on the effects of race relations in her country", which had been "of very great benefit to humanity".

The African Studies Centre's Annual Report for 2013 is out now! In addition to an excellent list of publications by our researchers and our well-attended seminars, you will find other highlights such as the launch of LeidenGlobal in November and the ASC's Annual Lecture by Morten Jerven. Read the Annual Report online or order a hard copy.

The ASC Library has been given valuable archival material from the estate of the Dutch anthropologist Sjoerd Hofstra (1898-1983), appointed Professor of African Anthropology at the University of Leiden in 1947. Between 1934 and 1936 Hofstra did research among the Mende in Sierra Leone, but he never fully wrote up his study of the Mende community. The ASC selected 67 publications from his archives; these have been incorporated into the library collection. The remaining boxes contain fieldwork notes that are handwritten (mostly in English) and cover e.g. the social organization of the Mende, but also interviews with local people. The Hofstra archives are the subject of our latest Acquisition Highlight.

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.