News & Events

What is it like to be a civil servant in Nigeria? Among the books collected during the ASCL library’s acquisition trip of last year to Nigeria are some (auto)biographical documents about working in the Nigerian civil service. They draw a picture not only of the civil service, but also of the political, economic and home circumstances of the times described. Two of them, Memoirs of mixed blessings (2009) and Living the dream (2015), are the focus of our latest Library Highlight.

The Anglophone regions in Cameroon, the North West and South West, have experienced violent clashes in recent months following plans of the government to impose the use of French language in schools and courts. Protests have led to a shutdown of the Internet in these regions. ASCL Community fellow Francis Nyamnjoh (member of the editorial board of Langaa Publishers) compiled a list of relevant books providing background to the crisis. Almost all publications are available in the ASCL Library.

The Africa Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies AEGIS fully supports the ASA colleagues in the USA and share their great worries on the anti-immigration policies. They are profoundly opposed to policies or actions that exclude or inhibit students and scholars from undertaking learning, teaching or research on the basis of their race, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability or place of birth. They published a statement, in which they also speak on behalf of the 34 African Studies centres in Europe and of thousands of Africanist scholars all over Europe.

This new article by Akinyinka Akinyoade, Chikbuike Uche and guest researcher Ogbuagu Ekumankama investigates attempts by Nigerian Breweries (a subsidiary of Heineken) to increase its use of local raw materials for beer brewing. It argues that the greatest threat to this initiative has been inconsistent Nigerian Government policies, especially with respect to promoting the cultivation of local raw materials such as sorghum, replacing imported barley.

In 1997 Mt. Kenya, a mountain region in Central Kenya, received World Heritage status. The designation rested entirely on natural scientific arguments. In her PhD thesis Marlous van den Akker disentangles a number of administrative, historical and political conditions that complicate Mt. Kenya but that have no place in the typical nature conservation discourse. During this seminar she will focus on such conditions. For example, a set of modifications were made to Mt. Kenya World Heritage Site in 2013, justified on the basis of biological and ecological arguments, yet truly initiated by white landowners’ anxieties over land expropriation.

ASCL senior researcher Klaas van Walraven was interviewed by VPRO Bureau Buitenland about the situation in the Gambia. President Yahya Jammeh refuses to step down, while the newly elected president, Adama Barrow, has already been installed, in Senegal. Listen to the fragment (in Dutch).

This seminar is co-organized with African Architecture Matters. Coen Beeker is a Dutch urban planner working in Africa between 1978 and 2010. He  focused primarily on urban redevelopment in Ethiopia, Tunis, Sudan and Burkina Faso, most notably in Ouagadougou. The ‘Beeker Method’ is about redevelopment carried out by residents themselves. How can contemporary and future urban planners benefit from his work? Coen Beeker and colleagues will give presentations and a book will be launched.