News & Events

The Liberian coastal town of Harper is no ordinary town. This much is immediately apparent when paging through the book A Dream Called Harper by Dutch photographer Martin Waalboer. The pictures, some in colour, others in black and white, show what remains today of this once-flourishing settlement of freed slaves who began to return from the southern states of the US to the land of their ancestors as early as the 1820s. A Dream Called Harper is the subject of our latest Acquisition Highlight.  

How can we imagine in today’s and tomorrow’s Africa a nation-state in which the cohabitation of ethnic groups forms a positive force? That is the crucial theme in the PhD Defence of Pascal Touoyem (Cameroon) on 18 February in Tilburg. The ethnic reality in Africa continues to be decisive as an absolute dimension of individual and collective life, which puts a heavy mortgage on the normal functioning of these nation-states. That is why the black continent is rich in failed states, or states on the road to failure or collapse. Please note that this PhD Defence will be in French.

Read the column of ASC director Ton Dietz in the latest issue of OneWorld Magazine. The title, 'Cultural Barbary', alludes to the decision making process related to the book collection of the Royal Tropical Institute, and its transfer to Egypt.

Some discomforting conclusions can be drawn from the latest ASC Infosheet. The authors, Nicky Pouw and Kini Janvier, examined the definition of the ‘poor’ and the impact of development interventions on the ‘poor’ and ‘very poor’ in Burkina Faso, using the PADev (Participatory Assessment of Development) methodology. They found that the number of ‘very poor’ people, according to PADev data, is significantly higher than official money-metric figures indicate. Moreover, the rich and very rich appear to benefit most from development interventions over time.