News & Events

ASC researcher Rijk van Dijk (1959) has been appointed Professor at the University of Amsterdam as of 1 October. He is appointed Professor by special appointment of Religion and Sexuality in Africa. The Chair was established on behalf of the African Studies Centre. He will be affiliated to the research group Health, Care and the Body of the Amsterdam International School of Social Science Research (AISSR).

Anthropologist Janneke Verheijen will defend her PhD 1 October at the University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation, published by the ASC, is noteworthy for two reasons. Her findings are contrary to the common assumption that poverty pushes women in Sub-Saharan Africa to exchange sex for material support, one of the explanations for the spread of HIV. And she will make all her raw data accessible online.

Ghanaian poet, writer and academic Kofi Awoonor was among those killed Saturday September 21st in the attack at Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya. Awoonor was in Kenya for the 2013 Storymoja Hay Festival. Kofi Awoonor’s literary work expresses the influence of Ewe poetic forms. He published several books of poetry, such as Rediscovery (1964) and Until the Morning After: Collected Poems (1987), novels, plays and political essays. Kofi Awoonor gained his PhD in English and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York. He was appointed as Ambassador of Ghana to the United Nations from 1990 to 1994, and as President of the African Literature Association from 1998 to 1999.

The documentary 'Voices' will be screened on 9 December at 15:00. It deals with the future of the South African movie sector, the advancements, challenges and ways of finding a place in today’s globalizing world. The documentary’s major goals are to open up the minds of filmmakers to the challenges that other people face when making moving pictures. South African cinema is mostly known in English speaking countries; the director of this film, Joachim Landau, wants to give a French speaking audience access to it as well. Landau will be present at the screening.

The exhibition of African barbershop boards from Mali, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Cameroon and the former Zaire in the ASC Library has been extended until 25 April 2014. These brightly coloured messages were collected over the last forty years by Esger Duintjer in Africa's big cities.

'Dangerous Flowers' is a seventy-minute investigative documentary about the cut-flower industry in Kenya. It was shot in Kenya and the Netherlands over a period of seven years. The film takes the viewer through the flower-industry to discover the environmental, health, gender and cultural implications of this multi-million-euro sector. Film maker Khamis Ramadhan will be present at the screening of 'Dangerous Flowers' on Tuesday 29 October, and will participate in the subsequent discussion.

Matatus (mini buses) provide transport for about 70 percent of Nairobi’s population. The sector is one of the largest in Kenya and has been thriving since the 1950s. In this seminar on 21 November Kenda Mutongi, Professor of History at Williams College (USA), focuses on the social, economic, cultural and political history of matatus and how they have become so deeply rooted in Kenyan life.

Artisanal Mining & Youth. Livelihoods, leisure and love in Tanzanian urbanizing mine settlements. Over the last three decades, artisanal gold mining has increasingly provided a source of employment for hundreds of thousands of miners in Tanzania. Gold strikes in the country’s ‘ring of gold’ have catalyzed widespread labour migration. Many of the migrants are youthful, having hopes of economic improvement. Dr Deborah Bryceson of the University of Glasgow will speak about this Wednesday 2 October.

Fred van der Kraaij’s boek ‘Liberia: van Vrijheidsideaal naar Verloren Paradijs’ wordt vrijdag 18 oktober tijdens een speciale Liberia-bijeenkomst gepresenteerd. Het boek is Van der Kraaij's persoonlijke relaas van het veelbelovende land waar hij in de jaren 70 werkte, en dat veertig jaar later bezig is te herstellen van twee gruwelijke burgeroorlogen. Bijdragen deze middag komen o.a. van de consul van Liberia in Nederland, van de NABC over de handelsmissie naar Liberia en van Stephen Ellis over verzoening.  

Transnational corporations are increasingly important players in the development arena under the banner of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The CSR movement promises to use the global resources of corporations to the benefit of local development. In today’s seminar, Dinah Rajak of the University of Sussex argues that CSR generates new processes of exclusion and inequality, inspiring deference and dependence, rather than autonomy and empowerment. Rajak takes the world’s third biggest mining company, from their headquarters in London to the platinum mines of South Africa, as an example.