News & Events

At least once a year an ASC Library staff member heads for Africa to collect books that are otherwise hard to come by. The motivation behind these trips is partly an awareness that collection practices are inherently biased. To illustrate this, two books bought on a recent ASC visit to Kampala are the focus of our latest ‘Acquisition Highlight’, one book arguing that Tony Blair became "the face of African dictators whom he networked and advised as they plundered and looted their nations and killed their people",  and the other praising Idi Amin for his "positive contributions" to Uganda. Read the Acquisition Highlight.

To coincide with the general elections in South Africa on 7 May, the ASC Library has compiled a new web dossier, containing titles on (the current and former) elections in South Africa from the library's online catalogue published since 1993. It includes monographs, articles and chapters from edited works, a selection of links to relevant web sites and an introduction to South African elections since the end of apartheid. Read the web dossier!

The South African general elections will be held on 7 May 2014. The ASC offers the opportunity to follow these elections closely, using different sources like Twitter, newspapers, tv stations and news websites. Check out the ASC liveblog from 6-8 May! Please refresh the webpage to see the latest updates. Tip:  In almost all browsers, pressing F5 (CTRL+F5) will force the browser to retrieve the webpage from the server instead of loading it from the cache.

The African Studies Centre, the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC), the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS/EUR) and globalization think tank The Broker are excited to announce that they will be hosting the Secretariat for the Knowledge Platform on Development Policies. The core themes developed in this Platform are productive employment, strategic actors for inclusive development and social protection. The Knowledge Platform on Development Policies is one of the five Knowledge Platforms that the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched in June 2012.

The ASC seminar on 26 June by visiting fellow Samuel Ntewusu (University of Ghana) is about the 'Great North Road' linking the north of the Gold Coast (present day Ghana) to the south. Scholars usually discuss the road in terms of the role it played in the movement of goods. Yet the focus of this presentation will be on the road itself. Ntewusu will discuss labour issues, the development of settlements, important religious rituals and trajectories of diseases that emerged on the road.