Publications

According to a tenacious historical myth, first published in 1924 and recently revived by the British Museum, it was African veterans from the Dutch colonial army who introduced or popularised the colourful wax print textiles in West Africa. As the story goes, African...

Understandings of class have often been highly racialized and gendered. This article examines the efforts of white workers’ organizations in Southern Africa during the 1940s to forge such a class identity across the region and disseminate it among the international...

Although a textual relationship between Arabic Muslim texts and their rendition through Swahili epic poems (tendi) is acknowledged in Swahili poetry studies, “translation” is not a straightforwardexplanation of this relationship. Furthermore, Swahili narrative...

This thesis explores how same-sex intimacies are navigated by young women in contemporary urban Senegal. Central to this research are various social spaces where sociality and sexuality are co-constructed among women. The analysis is based on six months of ethnographic...

(Abstract) This article argues that the contemporaneous phenomana of the ‘third wave of democratisations’ and the ‘second wave of liberalisations’ – or neoliberalism as it were – has disrupted the promise of democracy in the Global South....

This research project aims at understanding the expectations and motivations of young women in Ghana's Upper East region with regard to starting their own business. Supporting the owners of small-scale businesses in the informal economy has become a central objective of...

Africa is at the lower end of internet use, but Facebook connectivity is rapidly increasing, linking diaspora and local people in mainly urban regions in Africa. A survey conducted in N'Djam‚na revealed that 1 in 10 people uses Facebook, which is an important...

The enduring experience of hardship, in the form of layers of various crises, can become deeply ingrained in a society, and people can come to act and react under these conditions as if they lead a normal life. This process is explored through the analytical concept of duress...

In this film, produced by Voice4Thought, we follow two researchers who, on their turn, follow people who live(d) through long periods of violence, conflict and hardship in Chad and Mali. The stories they encounter are stories of lost hopes, of feelings of being misunderstood...