News & Events

Jamie Monson, Professor of History and Director of the African Studies Center, Michigan State University, will give the keynote speech during the 'Destination Africa' conference on 22 March. Prof. Monson will take the experience of railway porters on the Tanzania-Zambia Railway as a starting point, which allows a ‘view from the platform’ of transformations in local and regional economies that are taking place as investment, settlement and markets shift. The speech is open to the general public, but please register. 

Activist and main actor Silas Siakor as well as film maker Anjali Nayar will be present at this screening in The Hague on 28 March. The Liberian environmental activist Silas Siakor puts his heart and soul into fighting for community rights and exposing corruption. Growing up during the rule of Charles Taylor, Siakor saw valuable raw materials leave his country as weapons entered. The change promised by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf failed to come.

The footprints of the North Korean influence can be found all over Africa, most clearly in the form of monuments, museums and government buildings constructed by forced labourers. Such projects are symbols of African nationalism while simultaneously adopting the socialist realist style of Pyongyang. Less visible is the forced labour that precedes the joyful opening of a new monument. This is a chapter written by Tycho van der Hoog in the preliminary report People For Profit, North Korean Forced Labour On A Global Scale, edited by Remco Breuker & Imke van Gardingen.

Following the historical developments in November 2017, Mugabe’s 37 year long rule in Zimbabwe ended with his resignation. Since his installation as Mugabe’s successor, President Mnangagwa has raised hopes for the ‘new Zimbabwe’ by advocating for policy reforms that should address Zimbabwe’s economic crisis. To better understand the current transition, leading Zimbabwean political scientist Eldred Masunungure will outline the recent developments, provide an assessment of the changes, and consider the outlook for the elections later this year.

This project aims at digitally recording and safeguarding part of the immaterial cultural heritage of the Dogon in Mali, the baja ni, a major song cycle that forms an integral part of the funeral complex. ASCL researcher Wouter van Beek, who has been studying baja ni performances since 1980, has collected many hours of recordings, and has recently prepared a manuscript text which, together with the recordings, will serve as the starting point for this project. Due to Islamization and Christianisation, traditional funerals are becoming rarer, and the transmission of the baja ni is in peril.

This Library Highlight is about Les deux visages d'une femme bamiléké, one of the films that was on show during the International Film Festival Rotterdam. It is now available (on DVD, with English subtitles) at the ASCL Library. Filmmaker Rosine Mbakam was born in 1980 in a traditional bamiléké household in Cameroon. She left her country when she was twenty-seven. This film is an account of her journey back home, after having lived in Europe for seven years. Check out the Library Highlight!

André Leliveld (ASCL) and Peter Knorringa (ISS) are guest editors of a special issue of The European Journal of Development Research on why frugal innovations are increasingly important for development research. While the top-down business and management literature on frugal innovation has claimed developmental relevance, the editors in their introduction give at least equal importance to much longer-standing bottom-up development studies discourses on grass-root innovation, bricolage, and livelihood strategies. Leliveld and Knorringa are (co-)directors of the Centre for Frugal Innovation in Africa.