News & Events

US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin recently asked the Board of the African Development Bank (AfDB) to revisit its decision that cleared the Bank’s president, Akinwumi Adesina, of allegations of nepotism and corruption. The US is the largest non-African shareholder of the Bank. ASCL researchers Chibuike Uche and André Leliveld ask themselves: what is the utility value of the widespread influence of non-African countries in the AfDB for Africa’s development? Read their post in the ASCL Africanist Blog!

Prof. Hendrik Ulbo Eric ('Bonno') Thoden van Velzen became a researcher at the African Studies Centre in 1966, the year in which he completed his PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. His PhD research – carried out together with his wife and anthropologist Ineke van Wetering – was on Maroons who escaped slavery in Suriname, while his work at the ASC focused on Tanzania. Together with his wife and children, Thoden van Velzen spent three years doing fieldwork in Tanzania, where he took part in an interdisciplinary research group.

The legacy of the independence wave in 1960 has had an impact on Africa for a long time, but the current political instability and mismanagement are no longer due to the break with the colonial past. In his contribution for the Clingendael Spectator series 'Afrika: 60 jaar onafhankelijkheid' ('Africa: 60 years of independence'), Jon Abbink distinguishes seven factors that determine the political prospects in Africa and the opportunities for good governance.

Fiction never foretells the future. But sometimes it comes quite close. In 2016, South African writer Deon Meyer published his novel Koors (Fever), a story about a pandemic fever raging over the world, and wiping away 95% of the population, leaving only a few people left, including father and son Willem and Nico in South Africa. Elements of the COVID-19 pandemic seem present in the book. Two staff members of the ASCL Library, ardent fans of Deon Meyer’s novels, interviewed Meyer by email.

Nationalism is often seen as emerging from European historical developments, also in postcolonial countries outside Europe. Yet the precolonial Kingdom of Barue in what is now Mozambique already showed characteristics generally associated with nationalism, giving the country great resilience against colonial encroachment. Postcolonial Mozambique, on the other hand, has so far not succeeded in creating national coherence. This book by André van Dokkum has been published in the Afrika-Studiecentrum Series by Brill.