News & Events

Many children’s books on COVID-19 have been published over the last 18 months. The ASCL Library has recently acquired a couple of these books that were created in Africa. They are about uncertainty and sadness, about measures such as washing hands and keeping your distance, about consequences such as not being able to visit one’s grandparents and not being allowed to hug, but also about the nice things that are still possible, such as calling each other and playing outside. Read the Library Highlight!

2021 has been a great year for African writing! This year’s key literary prizes, such as the Nobel Prize (Abdulrazak Gurnah), the Booker Prize (Damon Galgut) and the Prix Goncourt (Mohamed Mbougar Sarr), have gone to writers from Africa and the diaspora. Read the full article.

On the occasion of the 2021 Stephen Ellis Annual Research Lecture on 9 December by Nanjala Nyabola, the ASCL Library has compiled a web dossier on African feminism. Nanjala Nyabola is an independent writer and researcher based in Nairobi, Kenya. The web dossier has been introduced by PhD candidate Loes Oudenhuijsen and consists of titles from the ASCL Library Catalogue, complemented by sources available through the broader Leiden University Library collection. 

The Africa Yearbook, published by Brill, covers major domestic political developments, the foreign policy and socio-economic trends in sub-Sahara Africa - all related to developments in one calendar year. Volume 17 of the Africa Yearbook covers the developments in 2020, a year dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Jon Abbink wrote the chapters on Somalia and Ethiopia, while Klaas van Walraven authored the chapter on Niger.

The Africa Thesis Award committee is glad to announce that this year’s winner is Tamia Botes (MA in Anthropology, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa) for her thesis 'Where have the midwives gone? Everyday histories of Voetvroue in Johannesburg'. This year a total of twenty seven high-quality Master’s theses were submitted to the Africa Thesis Award. The submitted theses were all based on independent research related to Africa and represented a diverse range of disciplinary fields.