News & Events

The ASC exhibits photos of colourful wall paintings in Northern Ethiopian churches until 1 July. The paintings represent scenes from the Old and New Testament and scenes of the history of the Ethiopian Orthodox (Christian) Church. Amateur photographer Pieter de Kleer travelled through Northern Ethiopia some years ago and was impressed by the beautiful religious paintings he found in places like Gondar, Lalibela, Aksum and around Lake Tana. Most of the paintings are several hundreds years old. The exhibition can be seen in the ASC Library (ground floor) and in the corridors at the third floor.

Many African countries have experienced sustained economic growth, but few have achieved the type of structural change, driven by rising productivity, that has transformed mass living standards in parts of Asia. In the Developmental Regimes in Africa Synthesis Report, editor David Booth examines how DRA research has shed new light on how developmental regimes might emerge and be sustained in Africa in the 21st century. Among the other authors are the ASC's Ton Dietz and André Leliveld, with a contribution on the Agricultural ‘pockets of effectiveness’ in Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda since 2000.

This weekend two great African writers died, one from the south of the continent (see 'A Dutch salute to André Brink' below) and one from the north: Assia Djebar (pseudonyme of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen) died in Paris on the evening of 6 February at the age of 78. Born in 1936 in the village of Cherchell (northern Algeria) where her father taught French, she was to become one of North Africa's most important francophone writers. She has published nearly twenty titles - novels, prose and poetry - which were translated into more than twenty languages. In her work she defended women's rights and the emancipation of muslim women.

André Brink, who died on 6 February 2015 (aged 79), was one of the most prolific writers of South Africa. Brink, who taught English literature at the University of Cape Town, died aboard a KLM flight when returning to Cape Town from Amsterdam after receiving an honorary doctorate at Leuven University. Though Brink was primarily known as an anti-apartheid writer, he was a many-sided author, who wrote novels, plays, travel literature and academic books. Brink wrote his novels simultaneously in Afrikaans and English. He was one of South Africa’s most outspoken literary figures.

Africa is often associated with oral traditions. Little is known that a formal school system was introduced in the West-Central African Kongo kingdom in the beginning of the 16th century, some years after Portuguese navigators first established contact with the Kongo royal elite. Inge Brinkman (Ghent University) will discuss the Kongo school system in terms of global integration and local appropriation during this ASC seminar on 23 April.