News & Events

Prof. Jan-Bart Gewald has been appointed as the new director of the African Studies Centre Leiden from 1 September 2017, for a period of five years. Prof. Gewald will be the successor of Prof. Dr Ton Dietz, who will retire in September 2017. Jan-Bart Gewald has lived in Botswana, DR Congo, Eritrea, Ghana, Namibia, Niger, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. He joined the ASC in Leiden as a researcher in 2003 and became Professor in the History of Southern Africa in 2013.

Prof. Chibuike Uche, the first chairholder of the Stephen Ellis Chair for the Governance of Finance and Integrity in Africa, was interviewed by Mare magazine about Nigeria: the corruption, Shell, multinationals departing the country, and what may help the Nigerian economy. He also talks about his childhood years in Biafra. The interview is in Dutch.

Ton Dietz's latest blog post is based on his notes for the High-level Taskforce on Migration in the Netherlands. He argues that rising levels of development (also successful development assistance) produce more migration. His message to politicians: 'Get used to it'. Creating more legal migration opportunities in Europe for selected groups of African youth, and stimulating circulatory migration and remittance-strengthening behaviour will ease some of the tension and undermine the profitability of the international migration industry, Dietz writes. 

In the presence of familiy and former colleagues of our late researcher Stephen Ellis (who died in 2015) and with a personal video message of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Bert Koenders, the Stephen Ellis Chair in the Governance of Finance and Integrity in Africa was officially launched on Tuesday 4 April at Leiden University.

Current land tenure literature is mostly geared towards the various regimes of tenure, land registration, and establishing a cadastre in order to reduce transaction costs and guarantee investor confidence. The crucial role played by land brokers is rarely mentioned. Indeed, the term ‘land broker’ or equivalent is entirely missing from the land tenure lexicon. In this working paper, Marcel Rutten and Moses Mwangi share the most recent experiences in the emergence of formal land markets, and examine the underrated role of brokers in the transfer of land in Kenya.