News & Events

Africa’s richest state per capita, Equatorial Guinea, is governed by the continent’s longest serving non-monarchical head of state, assisted by one of the continent’s most corrupt and violent ruling clans. Recent developments suggest that, if gone unchecked, respect for human rights could sink to a new, frightening low. Read the latest contribution to the ASCL Africanist Blog.

Anthropologist Sjoerd Zanen was interviewed by NRC Handelsblad on the occasion of his book Tong Mabior. In het gebied van de Boven-Nijl - tussen verleden en toekomst, published by the ASCL in October 2018. The book deals with the history of South Sudan and the confrontation of the local population with the various strangers that have intruded the area through the ages: explorers, Arabic rulers, colonists, development workers, peace missions and humanitarian workers.

Meike de Goede, currently working at the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and earlier at the History Institute of Leiden University, has won the French History Article Prize 2018 of Oxford University Press. She won the prize for an article on the Matsouanists of Congo-Brazzaville. De Goede - a member of the Collaborative Research Group 'Rethinking African History' - and ASCL researcher Klaas van Walraven collaborate on issues concerning the history of French Equatorial Africa. Congratulations Meike!

Women’s nude curse was a predominant socio-cultural practice and ritual performance in Yoruba land before the advent of colonial contact, imported religions and their conception of nudity as obscenity. Owing to this conception from the late 18th century onward, ex-colonial and imported religions prohibited their faithful from engaging in nude nurse which they considered heathen. With the degenerating spate of political misrule in the 20th century colonial and postcolonial Yoruba land, however, Yoruba women broke away from the religious strictures on nudity and reclaimed their nude protest performance as a counter-check to socio-political malaise perpetrated by corrupt and oppressive rulers. This study seeks, among other things, to analytically document the contexts of women’s political struggle using the 2009 Ekiti  women’s nude protest and theorize the dynamics of power relations in Yoruba women’s nude curse vis-à-vis socio-cultural and political developments in Yoruba land.

Loes Oudenhuijsen, alumna of the Research Master in African Studies at Leiden University and currently a PhD candidate at the ASCL, is the main winner of the 2019 LOVA/Marjan Rens MA Thesis Award. Loes won the award for her thesis ‘You Have to Know How to Play, Otherwise They Will Catch You’. Young Women and the Navigation of Same-Sex Intimacies in Contemporary Urban Senegal, on which she graduated in 2018. Congrats Loes!