News & Events

Due to personal circumstances Prof. Hussein Solomon will not be able to come to Leiden to give his seminar on the Sahel. Therefore we have to cancel this ASCL Seminar. The Africa Journalists Meeting that was to precede it will be postponed to 1 May and will precede the seminar South African Elections Approach, by Barry Gilder. We apologize for any inconvenience and will try to reach all those who have registered for the 11 April Seminar and the Journalist Meeting.

The ASCL is delighted that James Ferguson, Professor of Anthropology and Director of African Studies at Stanford University, will give a lecture in Leiden. In a 2015 book, Ferguson analysed the notion of sharing as a principle of distribution of social protection payments or “cash transfers”. As current schemes of distribution are limited by principles of nation-state membership, he concluded that it may be possible to detect new logics of social obligation that work according to a principle of “presence”. This seminar will elaborate that idea.

In the 2018 Stephen Ellis Annual Lecture ‘What is prosperity for Africa?’, Prof. Henrietta Moore, Director of the Institute for Global Prosperity, questioned current ways of thinking about economic growth, prosperity and development. ‘How does economic growth translate into sustainable prosperity? Economic growth needs new academic modelling.’ The full text and a video registration will be published soon, but take a look at Prof. Moore's presentation and the pictures!

On the occasion of the 2018 Stephen Ellis Annual Lecture by Professor Henrietta Moore on 6 December, the ASCL Library has created a web dossier 'Prosperity in Africa'. In recent decades, the realization that economic growth does not necessarily lead to better lives for all has become increasingly widespread. This web dossier showcases resources that challenge traditional economic models of growth, and that seek alternative ways of defining, measuring, and achieving prosperity. Read the web dossier.

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.