News & Events

Anthropologist Janneke Verheijen will defend her PhD 1 October at the University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation, published by the ASC, is noteworthy for two reasons. Her findings are contrary to the common assumption that poverty pushes women in Sub-Saharan Africa to exchange sex for material support, one of the explanations for the spread of HIV. And she will make all her raw data accessible online.

Ghanaian poet, writer and academic Kofi Awoonor was among those killed Saturday September 21st in the attack at Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya. Awoonor was in Kenya for the 2013 Storymoja Hay Festival. Kofi Awoonor’s literary work expresses the influence of Ewe poetic forms. He published several books of poetry, such as Rediscovery (1964) and Until the Morning After: Collected Poems (1987), novels, plays and political essays. Kofi Awoonor gained his PhD in English and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York. He was appointed as Ambassador of Ghana to the United Nations from 1990 to 1994, and as President of the African Literature Association from 1998 to 1999.

ASC researcher Jan-Bart Gewald has been appointed Professor of  Southern African history at Leiden University as of 1 September 2013. His research at the ASC has ranged from the ramifications of genocide, through to pan-Africanism and histories of technology. Inaugural lecture 6 June 2014.

The documentary 'Voices' will be screened on 9 December at 15:00. It deals with the future of the South African movie sector, the advancements, challenges and ways of finding a place in today’s globalizing world. The documentary’s major goals are to open up the minds of filmmakers to the challenges that other people face when making moving pictures. South African cinema is mostly known in English speaking countries; the director of this film, Joachim Landau, wants to give a French speaking audience access to it as well. Landau will be present at the screening.

The Africa Yearbook covers major domestic political developments, foreign policy and socio-economic trends in sub-Sahara Africa – all related to 2012. Several researchers of the African Studies Centre in Leiden have contributed to the Yearbook, while the editors are from different African Studies centres in Europe: Klaas van Walraven (Leiden), Andreas Mehler (Hamburg) and Henning Melber (Uppsala). The book aims at students, politicians, diplomats, journalists, teachers, development aid workers as well as business people.

The exhibition of African barbershop boards from Mali, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Cameroon and the former Zaire in the ASC Library has been extended until 25 April 2014. These brightly coloured messages were collected over the last forty years by Esger Duintjer in Africa's big cities.