News & Events

The courage of ǁkabbo: celebrating the 100th anniversary of the publication of Specimens of Bushman folklore(2014) is the ASC library’s most recent acquisition relating to the famous ǀxam and ǃkung archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. ǁkabbo was the oldest of the speakers of the ǀxam language that stayed in the Bleek household at different times during the 1870s. He expressed the wish that the stories of his people would be known through books. Lucy Lloyd hadSpecimens of Bushman folklore published in 1911.The courage of IIkabbo contains papers presented at the conference with the same name in South Africa in 2011, and is the subject of ourlatest Acquisition Highlight.

ASC researcher Walter van Beek and William C. Olsen (editors) and the contributors to this volume of essays seek to understand how Africans have confronted evil around them. Grouped around notions of evil as a cognitive or experiential problem, evil as malevolent process, and evil as an inversion of justice, the essays investigate what can be accepted and what must be condemned in order to evaluate being and morality in African cultural and social contexts. The studies of evil entanglements take local and national histories and identities into account, including state politics and civil war, religious practices, Islam, gender, and modernity.

ASC researcher Marcel Rutten and PhD candidate Maru Shete Bekele contributed to the new book Africa's Land Rush: rural livelihoods and agrarian change. Their chapter deals with large-scale land acquisitions in Ethiopia and the implications for agricultural transformation & livelihood security, by taking an Indian agricultural company in Ethiopia's hinterland as an example. Former ASC visiting fellow Dzodzi Tsikata, currently president of CODESRIA, is one of the editors of the book.