News & Events

Private wildlife conservation is booming business in South Africa. Nick Steele stood at the cradle of this development in the politically turbulent 1970s and 1980s, by stimulating farmers in Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) to pool resources in order to restore wilderness landscapes, but at the same time improve their security situation in cooperative conservancy structures. His involvement in Operation Rhino in the 1960s and subsequent networks to save the rhino from extinction, brought him into controversial military (oriented) networks around the Western world. Harry Wels' unique access to Steele's private diaries paints a personal picture of this controversial conservationist.

Burkina Faso is a young but prolific terrain for industrial gold mining projects, with ten mines built in the last ten years. Gold mines are built in the vicinity of local populations that must organize their livelihoods under difficult ecological circumstances. Only now are the effects of industrial gold mining becoming clear to local administrators and populations. Resistance is growing rapidly. During the ASC seminar on 24 September, anthropologist Sabine Luning (Leiden University) will explore the company-community engagements and relations between mining companies. 

The African Studies Centre's Annual Report for 2014 is out now! In addition to an excellent list of publications by our researchers, you will find other highlights such as the Africa Works! conference in October and the ASC's Annual Event by Phillippa Yaa de Villiers in December. You can read the Annual Report online or order a copy.

The ASC congratulates Prof. Dzodzi Tsikata as the newly elected president of CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa). Prof. Tsikata holds a PhD in Social Science from Leiden University and was visiting fellow at the ASC in 2002. Prof. Tsikata is the Director of the Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy (CEGENSA) and Associate Professor at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) at the University of Ghana.

This seminar, which accompanies the new exhibition at the ASC of photographs taken by Akintunde Akinleye, maps the conversion of Nigeria’s former capital, Lagos (often described as an ‘apocalyptic megacity’) into a Prayer City. Since the late 1980s, numerous Christian and Muslim prayer camps have sprung up along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. Subsequently, this highway has grown into a stage for the performance of public religiosity, earning it the moniker, the ‘Spiritual Highway’. Speaker: Dr Marloes Janson, SOAS (London).