News & Events

On Friday 8 March South African poet Ronelda Kamfer will come to Leiden University Libraries to read from her novel Kompoun and discuss her work as a writer and poet. The Dutch translation of Kompoun (by Alfred Schaffer) is expected in May. This event will be held in Dutch and Afrikaans.

The effects of air pollution are broadly studied in the ‘global north’. Much less is known about the status and impact of air pollution in developing countries, particularly on the African continent. The objective of this new working paper is to review the existing academic and grey literature on the use of satellite-based air quality data.

On  8 February 2002, Ghanaian businesswoman and micro-credit pioneer Esther Afua Ocloo died in Accra at the age of 82. She received the 1990 African Prize for Leadership and numerous other awards honouring her work for the economic empowerment of women and families.   

The Quagga was literally shot out of existence as a species in the second half of the 19th century, with the last attested reports of Quagga in the wild dated to 1878 in South Africa. In a new ASCL Working Paper Jan-Bart Gewald explores the possible connection between the rise of diamond mining in South Africa and the passing of the quagga.