News & Events

We are delighted that award winning journalist and photographer Howard W. French will give the Stephen Ellis Annual Lecture on 10 December. French, an associate professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, will talk about the processes that began drawing large numbers of new Chinese migrants to Africa in the early to mid 1990s, and address the question of the global geopolitical and economic setting that pushed events in this direction. Also read the Library's new web dossier on Africa-Asia relations!

ASC senior researcher Wouter van Beek will present his Africa memoirs Thuis in Afrika, een dubbelleven (At home in Africa, a double life) on Friday 6 November at the ASC. The book has become a highly personal account of his life with the Kapsiki in North Cameroon and the Dogon in Mali. Wouter will retire as a Professor of Anthropology of Religion at Tilburg University on 20 November. The first copy of his memoirs will be presented to Erica Terpstra, former State Secretary of Sports.

The text of the Stephen Ellis Memorial Lecture, delivered by Jonathan Jansen, Vice-Chancellor and Rector of the University of the Free State, on 9 October at the Netherlands Embassy in Pretoria, is now online. The lecture, entitled ´A quiet contemplation on the new anger: The state of transformation in South African universities´, was held in tribute to the recently deceased Vrije Universiteit Desmond Tutu Professor and senior researcher at the African Studies Centre, Stephen Ellis (1953 - 2015).

To coincide with the NVAS Africa Day – 'Africa and Technology' – on 17 October in Delft, the ASC Library has compiled a new web dossier, containing a selection of recent titles on Renewable Energy in Africa from the library's online catalogue, published since 2013. The dossier has sections on Renewable Energy Resources, Planning & Policies, and Local Impact stories, illustrating how applied renewable energy technology can change lives, as in the case of improved fuel efficient cook stoves and photovoltaics. Read the web dossier!

This new ASC Infosheet focuses on the relations between South Korea and Africa. South Korea’s primary goal in establishing diplomatic relations in the 1980s was its own political recognition. After it was admitted to the United Nations and recognized as a state, the country’s interest in Africa waned. In the mid-2000s South Korea began to take diplomatic relations with Africa seriously again, establishing trade relations, as well as official development assistance.

The Africa Yearbook 2014 covers major domestic political developments, foreign policy and socio-economic trends in sub-Saharan Africa, all related to developments in 2014. It contains articles on all sub-Saharan states, each of the four sub-regions, an article on continental developments and one on African-European relations. The book is a joint effort of the Africa Institute of South Africa, The Nordic Africa Institute, the German Institute of Global and Area Studies and the ASC Leiden. For this edition, Klaas van Walraven, co-editor of the first ten volumes, wrote the chapter on Niger.

Ethiopia hosts migrants and produces migrants; it hosts diasporas and produces diasporas. It is precisely at that interface between Ethiopia and its diasporas, that this special issue of African Diaspora is situated, Giulia Bonacci writes in her introduction. ASC researcher Rijk van Dijk is editor-in-chief of African Diaspora, which is published by Brill. The journal seeks to understand how African cultures and societies shape and are shaped by historical and current diasporic and transnational movements.