Habari no. 7 - April/May 2013

Retrospective: ASC Community Country Meetings
How well do you know your African flags? In the past six months, my knowledge of them has improved considerably as I carefully put an African flag on the cover of country dossiers no fewer than 19 times while assembling the dossiers for the ASC Community’s country meetings. The following nine meetings, which were held between November 2012 and April 2013, had an average attendance of 40.
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Fieldwork Report: Inge Butter in Chad, CAR and Cameroon
In October 2012 I embarked on an Air France flight to Bangui where I would spend about a month, visiting the family members of the nomads I had met earlier that year in Central Chad. I really enjoyed being in Bangui, its location alone, in the bend of a fast-flowing river, overlooked by Congo Zaire (as everyone referred to it). It spoke to the imagination. Obviously it wasn’t all as idyllic as it sometimes felt.
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ResMA fieldwork report: The Sounds of Young Afrikaners: A Search for Processes of Identification in Pretoria
November 17th 2012: 6.45 am: I park my car at the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria. Bakkies (pick-up trucks) and old, white cars fill the fields and I see a few Oranje-Blanje-Blou flags – this was South Africa’s official flag between 1928 and 1994. Thirty thousand people are gathering in the amphitheatre at the Voortrekker Monument for the Pretoria Musiekfees (Pretoria Music Festival).
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Africa Thesis Award 2013
The award aims to encourage student research and writing on Sub-Saharan Africa and to promote the study of African cultures and societies. It 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 € 1000 and publication of the winning thesis in the ASC’s African Studies Collection.
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Klaas van Walraven launches his book ‘The Yearning for Relief’ in the Netherlands, Niger and France
The Sawaba movement and its rebellion are a totally neglected subject. Van Walraven has traced this story from a social history perspective, placing an entire generation of activists, removed from the official record, back into the mainstream of Niger’s history. His book, The Yearning for Relief, is based on numerous interviews with survivors and a vast range of archival sources, including France’s secret service.
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Workshop for the collaborative project ‘Roads to Prosperity’
On 4 April people linked to the collaborative project ‘Roads to Prosperity and their social zones of transit: comparing cases in Southern and West Africa through time’ had a workshop.
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New colleagues
The library of the African Studies Centre has two new staff members: Angela Robson and Heleen Smits.

Current visiting fellows
At this moment Dr. Jessica Achberger from the Southern African Institute of Policy and Research in Lusaka and Dr. Friday Mufuzi, Acting Director with the Lusaka National Museum, are the visiting fellows at the ASC.

Our webshop is online!
Most of the books published by the African Studies Centre in Leiden can be found in our webshop. Purchase the books at cost price or read them online for free. Our webshop also has a huge number of used books on Africa, mainly non-fiction but also some novels. The collection is regularly updated with new titles. There is lots to discover.
Have a look!

Blog Research Masters
This blog is written by students of the 2-year Research Masters African Studies in Leiden. In this first edition they tell about the fieldwork they did in the first semester of the second year. But they will also talk about the courses they did in the first year of their studies, and tell us about the exciting jobs they have acquired.
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ASC in the Media
Calendar
New ASC Publications
New acquisitions of the ASC Library
New Community Members
ASA Online (abstracts of recent publications)
Filmed ASC seminars