Category News & Opinion
Scholarship out of Africa
“In his article, Writing history: flow and blockage in the circulation of knowledge, Dr. Steven Feierman, author and professor Emeritus at University of Pennsylvania wrote about the need for local scholars to be on the forefront of research in Africa.” — Quoted from Lee Walton at https://www.thirdchapter.org/scholarship-out-of-africa/
CFP: Arabic-Script Manuscripts in Africa
Deadline extended and travel funding available. Please find more information about the event, which will feature six panels and six workshops about original, current research on the Arabic-script manuscript cultures of North and Sub-Saharan Africa and the care and management of manuscript collections across the continent, on its website asmiaconference.org) and Facebook (@Arabic-Script Manuscripts in Africa) and Twitter (@ASMIACONFERENCE) accounts. This 2020 Conference, […]
Dialogue with Boko Haram: back on the agenda?
From the Institute for Security Studies 02 JUL 2019 BY AKINOLA OLOJO There is a hurting stalemate in the Lake Chad Basin. Countries under the mandate of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) are locked in a protracted struggle against two factions of the terror group Boko Haram. Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria all have their military […]
The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin
Events this week celebrate the opening of an exhibit featuring 200 photographs of Ugandan president Idi Amin, together with film and radio material generated by the Amin government. The exhibition, curated by Nelson Abiti, Richard Vokes, Edgar Taylor and Derek Peterson, grows out of a very large trove of recently-discovered photographic negatives digitised at the Uganda […]
Archivists race to digitize slavery records before the history is lost
From PRI’s The World April 04, 2019 By Rupa Shenoy Listen here. The story includes an interview with Dr. Katrina Keefer of Trent University (in Canada), who came to realize that records of captured Africans’ facial scarification in African archives could help to identify the ethnic origins of African-Americans descended from enslaved people. The era of the trans-Atlantic slavery is […]
Shakespeare’s plea for tolerance towards immigrants
Recently heard, “history may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” From the British Library: “At some point in the development of Sir Thomas More, Shakespeare seems to have been commissioned to write the play’s emotional highpoint, in which the heroic More – who is at this point in the play the sheriff of London – […]
Elsevier should not provide free open access to retracted papers
In a recent interview published by Retraction Watch, Judit Bar-Ilan of Bar-Ilan University and Gali Halevi at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai report that many scholarly articles continue to be cited after retraction: “despite all the awareness efforts around this topic, retracted articles continue to be read and cited positively.” That’s the disturbing result of their research. “We should […]
African scientific journal will be open access
Scientific African, a new open-access journal from Elsevier, will showcase Africa’s often-overlooked scientific research to give the continent’s scientists better global recognition. The publisher claims it will be the first “mega-journal” in Africa. Introduced recently in Kigali at the Next Einstein Forum (NEF) conference, the first issue is scheduled to be published at the end of summer […]
Kinshasa street comic artist Papa Mfumu’eto’s papers the focus of international workshop
This week, February 8-10 the University of Florida, Center for African Studies’ 17th Gwendolen M. Carter Conference devotes a critical public forum to new methods and politics in curation and text-image studies. The focus is on a newly acquired vernacular manuscript collection under the curation of Dan Reboussin, and accessioned in the Department of Special and Area Studies Collections at […]
White rhino conservation in South Africa
Zoliswa “Zoe” Nhleko gave up a great job at home, enrolling in UF’s IFAS Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Department http://www.wec.ufl.edu/about/overview.php to study what triggers White Rhinos infrequent but long migrations at Kruger National Park: https://spark.adobe.com/page/3eRsZis2x0YKx/ “They stay in an area for a long time, then seem to just pack up and move great distances before […]
African Studies library 