News & Events

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.

This seminar on 10 July will discuss resistance and collaboration during the Italian Fascist occupation of Ethiopia, 1935-41, the prelude to World Word II. Shiferaw Bekele, Associate Professor of History at Addis Ababa University, will cast a new glance on the topic on the basis of old and new sources: memoirs of Ethiopian veterans and patriots, autobiographies of Italian participants, and reports of members of the British armed forces who fought in Ethiopia to oust the Italians in 1940-41. Bekele's findings are that ’community collaboration’ from clans, parts of ethnic groups or religious communities, was quite large-scale. Except for the first year of the occupation, resistance was not widespread.

On Thursday 5 June Lieve Joris will give a presentation about her newest book 'Op de vleugels van de draak' (On The Wings of The Dragon). In this book, for which she won the VPRO Bob den Uyl prize 2014, Joris journeys between Africa and China. She submerges herself in the world of Africans and Chinese who venture into each other’s territory in the slipstream of the big business contracts. Seada Nourhussen, Africa journalist at Trouw, will interview Lieve Joris. Language: English.

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.

Protests and riots in African cities feature young men as key actors. Often depicted in ambivalent terms as 'Makers and Breakers' or 'Vanguard or Vandals', their diversity and ambiguity obviously challenge theory building. This seminar on 22 May by Joschka Philipps (Center for African Studies, Basel) argues for a more systematic empirical inquiry into youth and politics by taking a comparative perspective. It provides preliminary findings from research in Kampala, Uganda and Conakry, Guinea.

In 1994, Rwanda experienced the worst genocide in Africa in modern times. The UN General Assembly has designated 7 April, the day the genocide started, as International Day of Reflection on the Genocide in Rwanda to commemorate the terrible events that took place twenty years ago. The Embassy of Rwanda, the International Institute of Social Studies and the ASC are organizing a Kwibuka 20 conference on Friday 4 April to mark the tragedy. To coincide with this and other commemorative events, the ASC Library has compiled a web dossier that contains recently published titles on the Rwandan genocide that are available in the Library.

South Africans will go to the polls on 7 May in what promises to be the country’s most interesting election since 1994. There is no doubt that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) will win again, but the polls suggest a much reduced majority. What is the balance sheet of 20 years of democracy? Keynote speaker at this ASC Community Country Meeting on 22 April in The Hague is Prof Susan Booysen of the Witwatersrand University. After her introduction Dutch politicians will enter into a debate.

After an academic career of 27 years at the African Studies Centre, senior researcher Dick Foeken is retiring. Next to his research in the field of urban poverty, urban water supply and urban agriculture, Dick was a member of the management team and deputy director of the ASC. In the nineties he started to coordinate the publications department, thus arranging over 300 publications. Dick started working at the ASC in 1987, when he became part of the Food and Nutrition Studies Programme.

De Nederlandse anti-apartheidsbeweging was een van de sterkste sociale bewegingen van Nederland. Toch heeft de beweging slechts beperkte invloed gehad op het Nederlandse overheidsbeleid ten aanzien van Zuid-Afrika. De achtereenvolgende kabinetten hebben steeds gekozen voor de handelsbelangen van Nederland. Tijdens dit seminar op 1 mei zal onderzoeksjournalist en auteur Roeland Muskens de anti-apartheidsbeweging analyseren. Please note that this seminar will be held in Dutch.