News & Events

The winner of the Africa Thesis Award 2019 is Nsima Udo for his thesis Visualising the body: photographic clues and the cultural fluidity of Mbopo institution, 1914 – 2014. Nsima Udo graduated cum laude for the MA in History at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His thesis unpacks the history of mbopo, a form of female initiation in Southern Nigeria: how it emerges historically, is discredited in the 1990s as a form of female mutilation and is re-appreciated in recent reality TV shows.

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).

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.

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.