News & Events

You are cordially invited to the opening of the ASC's new exhibition 'Look at you' on Tuesday 11 February. The exhibition is a duo-expo of works by visual artist Frouwkje Smit and documentary photographer Karine Versluis. How do we look at the African continent, and how do they look at us? How is our perception of the other formed? There will be lectures and a discussion with Professor Felix Kaputu from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who for the last seven years worked in the USA, Japan and Europe.

The prestigious American journal Foreign Affairs has listed 'External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960-1990' by ASC researcher Stephen Ellis as one of the three best books of 2013 on Africa. The selection was done by Nicolas van de Walle, Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. Ellis' book about the ANC was awarded the Recht Malan Prize for non-fiction by the Media24 group in South Africa in June 2013. This is one of South Africa's top two literary prizes. 

The longue durée history of personal capacity and spiritual agency in Gabon is the focus of this seminar by Florence Bernault of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Anthropologists and political scientists have been scrutinizing the role of witchcraft in Africa as an agent of everyday life and how it is constitutive of African modernities for the last fifteen years. However, few scholars have contextualized this within a longer history of power, capacity and misfortune. Bernault traces how colonialism was a crucial moment for reconfiguring ideas of personal and collective agency.