News & Events

The formation in 1929 of the United Africa Company (UAC) was a watershed in business-government relations in British West Africa. Not only did its emergence upset the balance of power among commercial firms, it also transformed business-government relations in the region. This seminar by Ayodeji Olukoju (University of Lagos) examines dimensions and repercussions of this fraught relationship based on correspondence and confidential minutes between officials and the UAC.  

Ironically, 24 years after the ending of the apartheid state, a new generation of politicians in South Africa appear to be more than prepared to resurrect the terms, identities and categories of the past. It seems as if the centre-ground has been abandoned in the interests of extreme positions on the outer fringes of the political spectrum, in which race and ethnic identity have once again been allowed to come to the fore. Read the latest contribution to the ASCL Africanist Blog by Jan-Bart Gewald.

To conincide with the publication of Nature Conservation in Southern Africa. Morality and marginality: towards sentient conservation? the ASCL Library has compiled a web dossier which focuses on wildlife conservation. The dossier consists of selected titles from the ASCL Library Catalogue, extended with sources available through the UBL Catalogue. It has entries to, among other things, animal studies, wildlife conservation, poaching and law enforcement. Read the web dossier.

The 1976-1992 civil war which opposed the Government of Frelimo and the Renamo guerrillas (among other actors) is a central event in the history of Mozambique. Aiming to open up a new era of studies of the war, this book re-evaluates this period from a number of different local perspectives in an attempt to better understand the history, complexity and multiple dynamics of the armed conflict.

This is the latest volume in the African Dynamics series. In this volume scholars from Southern Africa and Europe take a refreshing look at (the history of) nature conservation in Southern Africa. On the basis of overwhelming scientific evidence, they suggest that we should enter a new phase in nature conservation: sentient conservation. For although the subjectivity of people has been rendered visible in earlier publications on histories of conservation in Southern Africa, the subjectivity of animals is hardly ever seriously considered or explicitly dealt with.