News & Events

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!

This Wednesday South Africa will be going to the polls, in a national election where for the past 25 years the ANC has led the government. Will President Cyril Ramaphosa be given a chance to continue ‘cleaning up’ the ANC and the country of the remains of the many Zuma factions and loyalists? Read the latest contribution to the ASCL Africanist blog!