News & Events

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.

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.