Publications

Ordinary social violence, - i.e. recurrent mental or physical aggression occurring between closely related people - structures social relationships in Africa, and in the world. Studies of violence in Africa often refer to ethnic wars and explicit conflicts and do not enter...

This book critically interrogates emerging intertconnections between religion and biomedicine in Africa in the era of antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. Highlighting the complex relationships between religious ideologies, practices and organizations on the one hand, and...

In this lecture I describe and expand upon a painting by Thomas Baines that depicts Amaxhosa migrant labourers leaving the Cape Colony in 1848. It is my belief that what is depicted in this painting is representative of what happened in Southern Africa as a whole between 1650...

This article is a historical study of a 'motor road' linking the north of the Gold Coast (present day Ghana) to the South. Historians concerned with routes and trade in nineteenth century Gold Coast usually end their accounts at the onset of colonial rule. While...

Africa's population has grown extremely rapidly over the last fifty years from 289 million inhabitants in 1961 to more than 1 billion today. This is a growth rate of 350% in just half a century and the number of urban residents has increased even more quickly: from 65...

After almost fifty years of Dutch-Zambian relationships, the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Lusaka closed its doors in 2013. Earlier, the development cooperation with this African country was ended. A lively Dutch community of entrepreneurs and (former) development workers stay...

In this article, I focus on the historiography of Islam in West Africa while also reflecting upon and assessing existing scholarship in the broader field of the study of Islam in Africa. My position as an anthropologist who conducts historical research informs my perspective...

This chapter considers the work of charities from the Gulf region in Africa. After a historical overview of Gulf charities’ presence on the continent and a discussion of the ways in which diverse African contexts impact on their work, it continues by exploring how...

This book offers a unique look behind the scenes of anthropological fieldwork amongst the Mende in Sierra Leone in the mid-1930s. The Dutch anthropologist and sociologist Sjoerd Hofstra (1898-1983), Rockefeller research fellow of the International Institute of African...