News & Events

Turtle 1: building a car in Africa tells the story of the Turtle, a car built entirely from reused or hand-made car parts, in Suame Magazine, an industrial zone in Kumasi, Ghana. This car-building project, initiated by visual artist Melle Smets and researcher Joost van Onna, is at the cutting edge of action research and art. It is the subject of our latest Library Highlight!

This LeidenASA lecture is organized by Dr Mamoudou Sy. The speaker, Biram Dah Abeid, is a Mauritanian politician and advocate for the abolition of slavery. He was listed as one of "10 People Who Changed the World You Might Not Have Heard Of" by PeaceLinkLive in 2014. He has also been called the Mauritanian Nelson Mandela by online news organisation Middleeasteye.net. Biram Dah Abeid received the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights in 2013. The lecture itself will be in French (see the abstract below). After the lecture a 20 minute film (in English) will be shown on contemporary slavery. The lecture will be introduced by Dr Mayke Kaag and Dr Mamoudou Sy. There will be time for questions and discussion.

We proudly inform you that our senior researcher Dr Chibuike Uche has been appointed as the Chair holder for the new Stephen Ellis Chair for the Governance of Finance and Integrity in Africa at Leiden University. The Chair starts on 1 April and will be funded by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the first three years. On 4 April, the Netherlands’ outgoing Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Bert Koenders, will officially launch the Chair with a special video message. Dr Chibuike Uche will give a presentation. You are kindly invited to this event.

How was Africa represented at the IFFR this year? Interesting section was 'Black Rebels'. According to the curators, 'many democratic societies are facing the implications of the cultural divide and emerging racism. In film history there is no other movement that has been investigating and addressing these issues as thoroughly as black cinema'. Elvire Eijkman, film specialist of the ASCL Library, reports.

The ASCL joins LeidenGlobal in putting 'heritage' in the limelight in 2017-2018 and has started a new online series of 'African Postal Heritage Papers'. While earlier papers (2015-2016) covered the five areas of German postal presence in Africa before World War I (Cameroon, Togo, German East Africa, German Southwest Africa and Morocco), three new papers have been added: the former Spanish Sahara, the Spanish Canary Islands and Mauritania.

Alice Kubo is a PhD candidate in the research project Society and Change in Northern Ghana: Dagomba, Gonja, and the Regional Perspective on Ghanaian History. She focuses on entrepreneurial developments within the Ghana shea industry and the implications for livelihoods. Initially a traditional business, the Ghana shea trade is currently governed by new standards for production and certification. Alice Kubo looks into the impact those transformations have had on entrepreneurship.

Journalist Kees Broere neemt afscheid van het continent waar hij ruim achttien jaar woonde en werkte. Voor de Volkskrant en de NOS deed hij, doorgaans samen met cameraman Sven Torfinn, verslag van belangrijke gebeurtenissen en liet hij zien hoe die de levens van gewone mensen beïnvloedden. Het ASCL wil Kees Broere bedanken voor de vele mooie reportages waarin hij het Afrikaanse continent en zijn diversiteit voor een groot publiek toegankelijk wist te maken.

In this seminar, ASCL visiting fellow 'Rantimi Jays Julius-Adeoye will focus on the representation of the Nigeria-Biafra war in popular culture, with an emphasis on film and literature. He will interrogate the role that fictional and non-fictional narration play in the memory of Nigerians in general and the Igbos in particular, while also looking at the link between the depiction of the war in popular culture and the renewed agitation for the nationhood of Biafra.

In this Roundtable the book Human trafficking and trauma in the digital era. The ongoing tragedy of trade in refugees from Eritrea will be launched. The editors, Mirjam van Reisen (Tilburg University, Leiden University) and Munyaradzi Mawere (Great Zimbabwe University) will give a presentation, after which participants will discuss on the main topics of the book: ICT, disruption and social cohesion in Africa. The Roundtable is held on the occasion of the inaugural lecture of Prof. Mirjam van Reisen at Leiden University on 10 March at 16:00.