NVAS 25th anniversary conference: a short impression

The Netherlands Association for African Studies (NVAS) held its jubilee conference on 9 and 10 December in Leiden. Its theme - conciliation and conflict: The role of language in bridging social differences in Africa - brought together specialists from universities from all over Europe and Africa, and from different fields of studies: linguistics, anthropology, communication studies, literature, rhetoric, history, politics, social media studies, and economics. Language has dual functions in social relations: it can break up or cement social cohesion, and many examples of these functions came to the fore in the panel discussions (see the full programme, pdf).

Felix Ameka, professor of Ethnolinguistic Vitality and Diversity in the World at Leiden University, gave the opening keynote lecture about ‘Strategic Silence and “Speaking Objects” as Double-Edged Swords in Social Interaction in Africa’, while Mirjam de Bruijn, professor of Contemporary History and Anthropology of Africa in Leiden, in her keynote focused on social media: ‘“On Social Media Everything is True” - Digital Cultural Violence in Mali and Chad’.

The role of language as a means to heal as well as to harm came back in several of the panels, as did the role of proverbs, poetry, persuasion and public rhetoric. For example, Olupemi Oludare (Utrecht University/University of Lagos) talked about and demonstrated street language in Yoruba Drum Language. 

Maud van Merriënboer presented her edited volume of the papers of the 2021 NVAS Conference ‘Entrepreneurial Responses to Covid-19 in Africa’, published by Eburon.

A full conference report will be published soon!