New publications

Wouter van Beek (ASCL) and Emilie Guitard are the editors of a new book on the rites and religions in the Lake Chad Basin. From the cover: "Trois grand thèmes sont analysés: la relation dialectique entre les changements sociaux et l’evolution de phénomènes religieux, les liens entre religion, pouvoir et territoire, et enfin l’idée de communitas qui met à jour le travail de la religion dans la cohesion sociale. L’ouvrage est indispensable pour la comprehension du phénomène religieux dans la region du bassin du lac Tchad et de son évolution à travers le temps, au moment où le ‘religieux’ s’y exprime parfois de manière extrême et violente."

The African Studies Centre Leiden's Annual Report for 2016 is out now! In addition to an excellent list of publications by our researchers, you will find other highlights such as the African Arts and Literatures Today series, the Voice4Thought Festival, the Africa Works conference and the Stephen Ellis Annual Lecture by Professor Muna Ndulo of Cornell University.

'Van Walraven set out to write a fundamentally social history, centering the voices and experiences of individual people. (...) It is satisfying to imagine him reporting back to the aging Sawabists he interviewed for his research, reassuring them that their stories will not be forgotten.' Louise Mueller wrote an excellent book review of Le Désir de calme, the French translation - by Rahmane Idrissa - of Klaas van Walraven's The yearning for relief: a history of the Sawaba Movement in Niger. 

This book is based on Tanja Hendriks' Master's thesis ‘Home is always home’. (Former) Street Youth in Blantyre, Malawi, and the Fluidity of Constructing Home, winner of the 2016 African Thesis Award. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Blantyre, the author argues for a conceptualization of ‘home’ as a fluid field of tensions (re)created in the everyday. As such, home leaves space for people’s life roots and routes.

This book by ASCL Honorary fellows Martin Doornbos and Wim van Binsbergen illuminates key aspects of how, historically, the dynamics of power and identity interact in the African context, generating the kind of political structures and collective actions that have often appeared characteristic for the continent. It examines some salient dimensions of the broader frameworks of hegemony and power imposed upon African societies in the context of larger geopolitical and historical processes.