News & Events

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dockside customs officials would leaf through publications looking for obscenity, politically objectionable materials, or reprints of British copyrighted works, often dumping these condemned goods into the water. These practices informed later censorship regimes under apartheid in South Africa. By tracking printed matter from ship to shore, Prof. Isabel Hofmeyr (University of the Witwatersrand) shows how literary institutions like copyright and censorship were shaped by colonial control of coastal waters.

Life and work on the Zambian Copperbelt - a concentrated industrialised mining region along the border with DR Congo - has been a perennial subject for Africanist historians. In this book, Duncan Money for the first time focusses on the white mineworkers who monopolised skilled jobs on the mines from the 1920s to the 1960s and became one of the most affluent groups of workers on the planet. Money argues that this group was a highly mobile global workforce which constituted, and saw itself as, a racialised working class.

On the occasion of the 'Africa 2020' year, the ASCL created Infosheets about the countries that became independent in 1960. One year later, Tanzania was the second in line (after Sierra Leone): it became politically independent as Tanganyika on 9 December 1961. In 1963 also Zanzibar became independent and in 1964 the two independent areas became the United Republic of Tanzania.

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.