News & Events

The ASCL is thrilled and relieved that Dr Merera Gudina has been released from prison in Ethiopia. Dr Merera is a political scientist and chairman of the Oromo Federalist Congress in Ethiopia, a legal opposition party. He was arrested on 1 December 2016. Dr Merera has been a visiting scholar to the African Studies Centre Leiden twice. We wish him a warm reunion with his family and loved ones. 

The ASCL will be presenting a new programme of outstanding seminars in 2018, for which you are kindly invited. The professors of the African Studies Centre Leiden - Rijk van Dijk, Jan Abbink, Chibuike Uche, Marleen Dekker, Jan-Bart Gewald and Mirjam de Bruijn - have been asked to invite internationally renowned speakers within their area of research for this series. This has resulted in a list of exceptional seminar speakers who will present their research and enter into discussion, chaired by the ASCL Professors.

Taking the African epigram “Until the lion has a historian of his own, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” as its starting point, this seminar on 7 June discusses how we may become the lion’s historians. Prof. Sandra Swart (Stellenbosch University) argues that including other species in understanding the past is another way of ‘doing history’ and not necessarily a separate ‘animal turn’ in historiography. All welcome!

This ASCL seminar on 24 May will address long-term outcomes from the first phase of Zimbabwe’s land reform, started in 1980. Particular attention is given to contrasts between the areas of origin of those who were resettled and their new homes in the land-reform areas. Bill Kinsey has directed the Zimbabwe Rural Household Dynamics Study since 1982. Chair: Prof. Marleen Dekker. 

Prof. Thomas Kirsch (University of Konstanz) will kick off the ASCL's new seminar programme on 8 February with a lecture about the proliferation of security in South Africa, and elsewhere. The seminar starts out from the empirical observation that, once they have been implemented, security measures like the employment of CCTV cameras, security guards or barbed-wire fences need to be secured if they are to be maintained in the face of potentially adversarial forces.