News & Events

The African Studies Centre Leiden organized a conference (on invitation) about the nature and extent of connections between Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and various jihadi movements in Africa on 27 March 2015. During the conference - convened by Professor Stephen Ellis and Professor Benjamin Soares - participants discussed the history, nature and relations of IS, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and its Kenyan affiliate al-Hijra, and the African countries in which these movements are most active. You can now read the conference report.

Harrie Leyten's PhD thesis has been published in the African Studies Collection. In the book, Leyten describes how missionaries, anthropologists and curators of ethnographic museums have tried to come to grips with objects with power over the years. The research is based on available literature and makes use of the author’s own experiences as a missionary, anthropologist, Africa curator, and lecturer in museology.

The growing pauperization of the lower classes in Sub-Saharan Africa is giving birth to new religiosities. Unemployed and street-smart individuals try their luck by proclaiming themselves to be prophets. They combine the ‘prosperity gospel’ with shamanic practices to sell ‘miracles’ to desperate people. This unprecedented ‘religious’ fervor in countries like Cameroon, Nigeria and Congo-Kinshasa at times goes along with criminality. How much of these prophets' existence is the result of corrupt governance? This is the subject of the ASC seminar by Dieudonné Zognong (University of Yaoundé I) on 28 May.

This seminar investigates how the indigenous Nigerian cement company Dangote Cement Plc was able to displace long-established cement multinationals and become the dominant player in the country's cement industry. The company achieved this by exploiting its close relationship with the government to champion a ‘backward integration policy’ for the industry. In less than 12 years Nigeria moved from being heavily dependent on imported cement to become the leader in cement production in Africa. Speakers are ASC researchers Chibuike Uche and Akinyinka Akinyoade.

The ASC Library has compiled a web dossier on Muslim Scholarship in Africa to coincide with a workshop on the same topic co-organized by LUCIS and the ASC on 23 April. The web dossier provides titles on Muslim intellectuals and religious experts that are available in the ASC Library and have been published in the past 10 years. The social and political aspects of Islam in contemporary Africa cannot be fully understood without an understanding of the role of Muslim intellectuals, both past and present.

During the ASC seminar on 8 June, Gregg Pascal Zachary from Arizona State University will describe the current shift from pure absorption of Euro-American digital technologies to the rise of home-grown, indigenous innovation activities in computing and communications in Africa. Drawing on case studies from Nairobi (mobile money) and Kampala (computer science research), Zachary will argue that the spread of Africanized digital technologies is having profoundly positive effects on African society, culture and material life. Please note: this seminar takes place next Monday!