News & Events

Tikam Sall and Bernardo Tiberi are two of our new Research Master students in African Studies, Alma Ionescu and Melat Pusch are two of our new Master students. Curious about their background, their motivation to do African Studies and their career expectations for the future? Read the interviews we did with them to get to know them better!

This conference will bring together some of today’s most influential thinkers on African affairs. Independence from colonial rule, to many, was a turning point in African history, but what has changed, and what has persisted? Confirmed speakers: Lungisile Ntsebeza (African Studies, University of Cape Town), Birgit Meyer (Religious Studies, Utrecht University), Carolyn Hamilton (Archive and Public Culture, UCT) and Jan Abbink (ASCL, Leiden University).

Michel R. Doortmont, coordinator of the research programme 'Society and Change in Northern Ghana: Dagomba, Gonja, and the Regional Perspective on Ghanaian History', has been awarded the 2019 ASA Service Award by the American African Studies Association (ASA). He receives the award together with his colleagues Jan Jansen (Leiden University), Dmitri van den Bersselaar (University of Leipzig) and John Hanson (Indiana University) in their role as editors of the scientific journal History in Africa.

Just more than 60 years ago Barthélémy Boganda, ‘father’ of the Central African Republic, met a premature death in an air crash (29 March 1959). In a new ASC Working Paper, Klaas van Walraven investigates the possibility of long-term causation in the political history of the Central African Republic by looking at the biography of Barthélémy Boganda. He argues that the upheavals of European colonisation at the beginning of the twentieth century, as experienced by Boganda as a child, exercised an enduring influence on his persona and remained relevant for his life and work throughout the later part of the colonial era.

Les études déjà anciennes de Lebeuf Jean-Paul (1938, 1939, 1948, 1970, 1973) et de Lebeuf Annie (1969), (archéologie / anthropologie) ont mis à jour à Makary une mythologie extrêmement originale, qui ne repose pour l’instant que sur des traductions en français.  Celle-ci vise à rechercher les traces cette mythologie dans un corpus en langue originale. Il s’agit d’une vingtaine de contes kotoko de Makary sélectionnés en vue d’une édition scientifique (texte original, analyse interlinéaire, traduction française et notes linguistiques et anthropologiques).

Proverbs are held in high esteem in African societies, as are the people, often elderly, who know many and are able to apply them appropriately and convincingly. To mark the Year of Indigenous Languages, the ASCL Library has compiled a web dossier on proverbs in African languages. It also includes a Wikidata Map, indicating geolocated topics co-occurring with African proverbs as main subjects. Check out the web dossier!