News & Events

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.

Mozambican author Mia Couto has been awarded the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. This biennial award is sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and its international literary magazine, World Literature Today. Like the Nobel Prize for Literature, to which it is often compared, the prize is awarded for an entire oeuvre. Read the Acquisition Highlight we wrote about Mia Couto.

Interested in how our Research Masters students are doing? David Drengk wrote the latest contribution to the Research Masters blog: 'Interdisciplinarity for critical Africanists of tomorrow!' Beware: Drengk dares to state that the era of single disciplinary research approach has come to an end.

Due to the closure of the Library of the KIT (Royal Institute of the Tropics, Amsterdam) all 450,000 books that belonged to this institute have been transferred to other libraries at the end of 2013. More than 3,000 books of the KIT collection have been given to the African Studies Centre. They are unique copies: no other library in the Netherlands has any of these books. The titles of all 3,029 books have immediately been made available via the library catalogue of the ASC and are available for loan.