News & Events

Prof. Peter Little (Emory University, USA) will give an ASCL Seminar on 5 October, in which he will address 'the litany of different development approaches' from the perspectives of marginal populations and geographies in rural Africa.

Mohamed Hassan Abdulaziz, known as the 'father of Swahili and African linguistics', died on 10 July in Nairobi at the age of 91. His book Muyaka: 19th Century Swahili Popular Poetry has become the reference book that every student of Swahili literature in Europe and East Africa must have been asked to study carefully, writes Annachiara Raia. 

On 19 July 1982, Ugandan poet, novelist, and social anthropologist Okot p’Bitek died in Kampala at the age of 51. His three verse collections - Song of Lawino (1966), Song of Ocol (1970), and Two Songs (1971) - are considered to be among the best African poetry in print.

The new film Le spectre de Boko Haram focuses on daily life in the village of Kolofata in the Far North Region of Cameroon, near the border with Nigeria, where the Islamic terrorist movement of Boko Haram has been active since 2013. What makes the film remarkable is that it concentrates on the life of the children in the village.

On 12 July 2010, Cameroonian journalist and director of Le Messager Pius Njawé died in a car accident in Chesapeake, Virginia, US. Arrested over 100 times for his reporting, Njawé won several awards for his work, including the 1991 CPJ International Press Freedom Award and the 1993 Golden Pen of Freedom.

The possibility of bearing witness to (remember) the horrors, trauma, and destitution of the human condition and to consider its implication for human rights education is what this volume of essays is about. The editors cogently accentuate how human rights violations in South Africa and the Netherlands ought to be expiated through teaching and learning.