News & Events

On 20 June 1920, Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola was born in Abeokuta. When Amos was seven years old, he became a servant for F. O. Monu, an Igbo man, who sent him to the Salvation Army primary school in lieu of wages. Read the Library Weekly!

The ASCL calls for applications for its Visiting Fellowship Programme in 2024. Visiting fellows use their time in Leiden for data analysis and/or writing, often on a joint project with one or more ASCL staff members. Applicants must indicate the Collaborative Research Group they want to be linked with. Application deadline: 21 May 2023.

Azeb Amha will be a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh in June and July 2022. Dr Amha is a grantee of IASH’s 2021 European Fellow Programme. She will work on her research on the language-culture nexus in the Omotic language family of Ethiopia.

On 14 June 1995, Congolese novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and poet Sony Labou Tansi, born Marcel Ntsoni, died at the age of 47 in Brazzaville. Tansi was born on 5 July 1947, in the village of Kimwaanza, just south of Kinshasa in modern day Democratic Republic of the Congo. Read the Library Weekly!

During the 2021 acquisition trip to Rwanda, the staff of the ASCL library received back copies of reports drawn up by the Cahiers du Bureau Social Urbain by the Catholic NGO Caritas. These copies offer a wealth of information on societal life in Rwanda from the end of the 1980s until 2002. They are the subject of our latest Library Highlight!

Rahmane Idrissa has been awarded the Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellowship in Global African Studies at the The Africa Institute in Sharjah (United Arab Emirates). Idrissa will devote the Fellowship mainly to write a book on the Songhay Empire in the global context of the birth of modernity.