News & Events

Jochem Scheelings, MA student African Studies, is doing an internship that is as fascinating as it is fun. With Angus Mol en Mirjam de Bruijn as supervisors, he is researching the role of video games in education, more specifically, in educating histories of Africa. Within the video game The New Order: Last days of Europe, an alternative world history has been written, but Scheelings noticed that Africa was missing from this game. 'I decided I would like to write that missing history’, he says in an interview.

Are you looking for a master's programme offering you in-depth knowledge about different aspects of the African continent? Find out all about the master's and the research master's programmes in African Studies during the Online Master's Week 10-12 March 2021! Online presentations on African Studies will be given on Friday 12 March from 15.30 - 16.30 (CET). Register now!

The Africa Knows! conference (2 December 2020-25 February 2021) has come to an end. It straddled many boundaries: geographical (if only for its virtual character), disciplinary, but also between academia and practitioners. In their reflections, the organisers look back as well as forward: on the ‘lessons learnt’ in terms of decolonising academic minds and practices, and on five layers of impact of the conference.

Since the late 1970s, education-based migration from Madagascar to France has been joined by another form of migration: that of Malagasy women who largely come from the coastal regions of Madagascar and have migrated to France in the context of marriage. Prof. Jennifer Cole (University of Chicago) will talk about how these women find French husbands and get to France during the online ASCL Seminar on 22 April. 

Unlike what late Jan Vansina took as the point of departure for his magisterial work Paths in the Rainforest (1990), the life of the peoples in the Congo rainforest was not shaped by the continuity of a common tradition over four millennia. Discontinuities in the population history of Central-African Bantu speech communities urge scholars of ancient African history to rethink how to extract the past from the present, as Koen Bostoen (Ghent University) will explain during this online seminar on 17 June.