Boom2Dust blog: Diamonds To Dust

Jan-Bart Gewald is a socio-cultural historian of southern Africa and professor of African History at Leiden University.  He grew up and was educated at a variety of schools in several southern African countries. He began studying towards a BSc in Geology and Physics but graduated with a BA in African History and African Political Studies at Rhodes University in Makhanda (Grahamstown) South Africa. He subsequently completed an MA in history at Leiden University, with stints as an exchange student at Cologne University and the University of Ghana, Legon. He conducted extensive fieldwork and archival research in southern Africa and Europe and completed a PhD in History at Leiden University in 1996. Following postdoc positions in Germany (SFB 389) and Amsterdam (IISG), and residences in Niger, Eritrea, and Botswana, he was appointed as a full-time researcher at the African Studies Centre in Leiden. In Leiden he acquired significant external research funding and was appointed Professor of Southern African History at Leiden University in 2013. He became Professor of African History in 2017 and was Director of the African Studies Centre from 2017-2021. He is currently working on a multi-species history of diamond mining in Kimberley, South Africa, 1870-1920. In 2022 Jan-Bart Gewald was a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies (STIAS) in Stellenbosch, South Africa. In 2024 Prof. Gewald received an NWO Open Competition grant to conduct research on mining history in South Africa, Zambia, and Namibia. The project is entitled “Boom to Dust: The Environmental History of Three Industrial Mining Centres in Southern Africa, 1870-2020”. Visit the project website.