Lecture series in African and Global History 2024-2025
The ECC is proud to convene the second Lectures series in African and Global History for the academic year 2024-2025.
The series consists of lectures delivered by scholars with celebrated expertise in their respective fields.
Each lecture takes place in Auditorium Vandenhove* (Rozier 1, next to the Book Tower, 9000 Ghent), on selected Thursdays from 10h00 to 12h00.
Administrative cooperation from Dineke Riët Slotman.
For contact: Samuel.Coghe@ugent.be
*Except for the first lecture, see below.
First term
10/10/2024
Non-standard venue: Auditorium F, Plateau-Rozier (Jozef Plateaustraat 22, 9000 Ghent)
Evander Ruthieri da Silva
The Politics and the Making of African Studies in Brazil
This lecture will explore the development of African and Afro-Brazilian studies throughout the 20th century. It aims to examine the intellectual debates concerning Brazilian national identity that emerged in the post-abolition context, culminating in the recognition of African cultural influences, particularly through the works of Gilberto Freyre, Edison Carneiro, and Arthur Ramos between the 1920s and 1940s. Subsequently, the lecture will address the institutionalization of African studies in Brazil, focusing on the redefinition of geopolitical and diplomatic relations and the efforts of social movements inside and outside of Brazilian universities. Engaging with global and transnational histories, the lecture seeks to illustrate how the formation of the field of African studies in Brazil involved networks of researchers and the cultural exchange between people and institutions from the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Finally, it will discuss the recent political impacts on African studies and debates concerning African/Afro-descendant memory, especially during the administrations of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro.
Evander Ruthieri da Silva is an Assistant Professor of African History at the Federal University for Latin American Integration (UNILA – Brazil). Prof. Silva is the author of “Entre o escudo e a azagaia: uma história política do reino Zulu no século XIX” (Between Shield and Assegai: A Political History of the Zulu Kingdom), published in 2023. He is currently researching literature, colonial politics, and post-colonialism in Southern Africa. Previously, he was a visiting professor at the Department of African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham, and at the Faculty of Portuguese Philology, Jagiellonian University.
24/10/2024
Iva Peša
Pluralising Environmentalism in Johannesburg, the Copperbelt, and the Niger Delta
Since the 1990s, environmental NGOs and prominent activists such as Ken Saro-Wiwa have addressed the environmental devastation caused by mining and oil drilling across the African continent. This talk traces the longer historical roots of environmentalism in Johannesburg, the Zambian Copperbelt, and the Niger Delta. By foregrounding lived experiences through oral histories, I equally argue that notions of environmentalism need to be pluralised. Considering acts of care (such as sweeping a dusty interior), religious expressions, and grassroots community meetings suggests that environmentalism has been much more prominent than hitherto acknowledged.
Iva Peša is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Groningen. Between 2022 and 2027 she leads the ERC Starting Grant AFREXTRACT: Environmental Histories of Resource Extraction in Africa. Her work in social and environmental history builds on oral history, photography, literature, and music.
21/11/2024
Nadin Heé
(De) Colonizing Transimperial Waters? Horizontal and Vertical Expansion in the Pacific
This talk explores the entangled histories of horizontal and vertical expansion in the Pacific, focusing on the 20th Century. It argues that a transimperial approach helps to understand how the region’s resource extraction, colonial expansion, and sovereignty disputes are linked. The Pacific is seen as a transimperial “hotspot” where various transimperial actors – ranging from colonial settlers, labor migrants, or colonial experts to entrepreneurs and companies – participated in an intensifying scramble for both resources and territoriality. Transimperial capitalism, so the thesis, was not only structuring resource extraction in the first half of the 20th Century but also influenced extraction modes during the era of decolonization and the Cold War.
Nadin Heé is professor of Modern Japanese History in Global Perspective at Leipzig University. Previously, she was chair for Global History at Osaka University and Junior Professor for Global History of Knowledge at Free University Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her work can be situated at the intersection of Empire Studies, History of Knowledge, and Environmental History. She is currently writing a book on why tuna became a global commons. An edited volume “Oceanic Japan” (Hawaii UP) and a co-authored book “What is transimperial History?” (Columbia UP) are forthcoming.
28/11/2024
Camille Lefebvre
How colonisation began in the Sahel: violence, persuasion, and social hierarchies
At the very end of the 19th century, a few clueless foreign warriors with violent behaviour, 80 French soldier and 500 tirailleurs, arrived in the central Sahara and Sahel. A few years later, they had managed to take control of large parts of the area and especially of two powerful states and societies: the Sultanate of Damagaram with its capital Zinder and the Sultanate of Agadez, today both in Niger. To understand how colonial occupation imposes itself and how societies lost control, you have to look closely at the materiality of colonial domination, and how it enters the everyday life of people and pushes them to take a side and to act on it. In fact, in a deeply unequal society, not everybody had the same interest, tirailleurs and tirailleur’s wives, the sultan and his court slaves and eunuchs, renowned Muslim scholars and pagan peasants or enslaved people each had a different understanding of what was happening and it is crucial to consider all the points of view in presence. Extreme violence and military defeat can make a city fall, but it cannot alone allow to establish colonial domination, take over states, and build an empire. To grasp how despite numeral inferiority colonization had imposed itself, you need to look at the everyday practices of colonial occupation, at what happened inside the palace of the sultan and in the tirailleurs’s camp, through colonial archives and in the people’s own narratives and languages..
Camille Lefebvre is a historian Research Professor at the CNRS and at the EHESS in Paris France, specialist of the central Sahara and Sahel in the nineteenth and the twentieth century. She received the CNRS Bronze Medal in 2016 and is the PI of ERC-Langarchiv project. She has published three books Frontières de sable, frontières de papier: histoire de territoires et de frontières, du jihad de Sokoto à la colonisation française du Niger, xixe-xxe siècles (Publications de la Sorbonne, 2015), Des pays au crépuscule. Le moment de l’occupation coloniale (Fayard, 2021) and A l’ombre de l’histoire des autres (Éditions de l’EHESS, 2022). In 2022, her second book Des pays au Crépuscule was awarded by the Prix du livre d’histoire du Sénat/French Senate History Book Prize.
5/12/2024
Baz Lecocq
Toward a History of Civil Aviation in East Africa: Connections, Communities, and perhaps even a Comparison
In this paper I use the history of African civil aviation as a vehicle to look at the continent’s postcolonial economic, social and political history. To do so, I use the concept of ‘aeromobility’, split between ‘aeromobility and the reconfiguration of space’ and ‘aeromobility and the reconfiguration of modernity’, and the concept of ‘commercial speed’, which allow us to combine explorations of the technical development, material production and consumption of aviation with explorations of the imaginaries, expectations, politics, access and status ascribed to aviation. I will here apply these concepts to a brief and general history of civil aviation in Africa, based in a scattered and incomplete literature on the subject. At present, the continent’s aviation history remains to be written.
Baz Lecocq is Professor of African History at the Humboldt University of Berlin’s Institute for Asian and African studies. He previously held the chair in African History at Gent University’s Department of History. He has specialised in the contemporary history of the continent, looking at a broad set of social-political and social-cultural topics, including nationalism, religious developments, state-society relations, racism, and post-slavery situations in the West African Sahara and Sahel. His recent focus is on the global connectivity of the continent, which he approaches by looking at transport technology in relation to national and religious modernity and the making of locally positioned global identities in West and East Africa.
Second Term
13/02/2025
Ned Bertz (University of Hawaii at Mānoa)
Dilemmas and Dreams of Decolonization: Mobility and Internationalism in East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean
This paper previews one section of a book project in preparation that explores the following question: how did the processes of decolonization – ranging from those surrounding and following the Partition of India in 1947 through independence and into the early postcolonial era in East Africa in the 1960-‘70s – restructure people’s lives in the western Indian Ocean region?
While recent scholarship on decolonization has examined topics such as political connections between anti-colonial nationalists based in different colonies and how individual people affectively experienced decolonization, the question of its impact on the Indian Ocean as a region remains lightly addressed. A scholarly focus on connections across regional maritime worlds enables an analysis of Africa and Asia in the same frame, bridging area studies divides which separate scholarship into different spheres. It also has the potential to contribute to the project of writing decolonized histories of internationalism with a greater attention to the agency of actors who were located in the Global South.
Drawing on exploratory research, the paper narrates a series of historical episodes, at the entangled levels of community and state, that shed light on intertwined themes common to the decolonization of British territories located around the western Indian Ocean – such as exciting possibilities for reshaped international relations, disrupted diasporic networks, transformed patterns of mobility and exchange, and newly unstable and creative modes of belonging. Shifting the scholarly focus away from high geopolitics opens up space to recover the agency of everyday actors in the Global South who dreamed of novel internationalist futures and ways of belonging in the world, all the while struggling to navigate the many dilemmas that decolonization posed to their desires as they maneuvered daily lives through a rapidly changing global order. It is important to take their visions and agency seriously, and to write their ideas and experiences into histories of decolonization – especially from the perspective of Africa, often neglected or treated separately in South Asia-centric veins of scholarship on the Indian Ocean.
Dr. Ned Bertz is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Hawai‘i, which he joined in 2006. He specializes in modern African and South Asian history, with a focus on exchanges and entanglements across the Indian Ocean between East Africa and India. He is the author of Diaspora and Nation in the Indian Ocean: Transnational Histories of Race and Urban Space in Tanzania (2015), which was shortlisted for the International Convention of Asia Scholars Africa-Asia Book Prize for 2015-18. In 2010, he was awarded the University of Hawaiʻi Board of Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Teaching. Prof. Bertz was a Fulbright scholar in Tanzania during academic year 2021-22 while working on his current research project examining the history of decolonization by reframing the dissolution of empire as a longer-term process in which new ideas about territoriality, mobility, and belonging reshaped people’s everyday lives around the western Indian Ocean region.
20/02/2025
Benoît Henriet (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Multispecies Colonialism: Locusts and Humans in Colonial Burundi
This lecture uses the massive locust invasions that took place in the mandate territory of Urundi in the first half of the 20th century as a vantage point to study interspecies entanglements in imperial contexts. These swarms of insects indeed inserted themselves in the fraught entanglements tying Burundian farmers to Belgian public servants. By doing so, they set in motion new forms of governance, new environmental endeavours, and new engagements between humans and non-humans. By adopting a diachronic approach embracing subsequent locusts invasions, I hope to show how the shifting responses devised by both colonial actors and agrarian communities shed light on the porosity and the stark divides existing between their respective ecologies.
Benoît Henriet is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant FORAGENCY. Foraging, Colonialism and More-than-Human Agency in Central Africa (www.ercforagency.eu). He is particularly interested in microhistorical approaches, and in the bottom-up and interspecies experiences of and responses to colonialism and capitalism.
27/02/2025
Fenneke Sysling (Universiteit Leiden)
Plague outbreaks, postmortems and resistance in colonial Indonesia
This lecture will explore the role of resistance to European medical procedures in colonial Indonesia. From the 1910s to the early 1940s, plague spread through the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies. Perhaps more than for any other disease, the plague prompted colonial intervention in people’s private lives, with measures such as home improvement schemes and the introduction of compulsory postmortems for all deceased individuals in plague affected areas. This specific measure led to repeated bouts of resistance, most notably in the early 1930s. The richness of the historical record on this period of unrest allows us to go beyond simply noting that resistance existed, enabling a deeper exploration of how it was shaped. This lecture will show how the treatment of the dead body became central to a broader negotiation over religion and colonial governance.
Fenneke Sysling is an assistant professor at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. She specializes in the history of science, medicine and colonialism and her interests include colonial heritage, museum objects, race, the body and natural history. She is author of Racial Science and Human Diversity in Colonial Indonesia (2016). She currently leads a project on humans as medical subjects in colonial Southeast Asia, and one on informants, go-betweens and assistants in the history of science in colonial Indonesia.
This lecture is co-organised by the Sarton Centre for History of Science and Humanitie and TAPAS.
13/03/2025
Béatrice Touchelay
Que nous apprennent les statistiques coloniales ? Approches croisées sur les colonies belges et françaises, XIX-XXe siècles
Trompeuses, manipulées, au service exclusif des puissants, les statistiques officielles produites en situation coloniale suscitent autant la méfiance de leurs contemporains que des historiens. Pourtant ces statistiques existent, elles ont été financées et fabriquées, ont donné lieu à de nombreuses directives, circulaires et réglementations et abouti à des décisions et à de volumineuses publications. Ces statistiques sont incontournables dans les archives. Nous proposons d’en faire un objet d’étude et de leur faire dire tout ce qu’elles peuvent nous apprendre des sociétés qu’elles sont censées représenter, de la violence de la colonisation, des rapports hiérarchiques – entre colons et colonisés, entre enquêteurs et enquêtés, entre la métropole et le territoire ultramarin – et des illusions créées par ces mises en chiffres. Il s’agira aussi de préciser dans quelle mesure ces statistiques influencent les sociétés dont elles proviennent et comment elles sont influencées par ces sociétés. Quelques exemples concernant la mesure du travail et des inégalités serviront à éclairer ces questions dans quelques territoires colonisés par la Belgique et la France en Afrique sub-saharienne.
Béatrice Touchelay est Professeure d’histoire contemporaine à l’Université de Lille et rattachée à l’IRHiS UMR CNRS 8529 depuis 2011. Spécialiste de l’approche critique des chiffres statistiques et comptables elle consacre une partie de ses recherches aux statistiques coloniales et post-coloniales des empires belges, britanniques et français et coordonne actuellement un programme ANR-21-CE41-0012 « Compter en situation coloniale et post coloniale. Afrique francophone XIX-XXe s. » (COCOLE) -2022-2026-, un International Research Network (IRN) intitulé COUNT, financé par le CNRS INSHS (2023-2027), qui réunit plusieurs centres de recherches au Cameroun, en Côte d’Ivoire, au Gabon, à Madagascar et au Sénégal, un Laboratoire International Associé (LIA) avec Samuël Coghe de l’Université de Gand (2024-2027) est en cours d’organisation. Un Carnet de recherche https://chiffrempire.hypotheses.org/ présente les activités menées dans le cadre de ces programmes.
20/03/2025
Alessandro Iandolo (University College London)
The Cultural Cringe in Political Economy: Imperialism, Structuralism, and the Specter of the West in the Soviet Union and Latin America
Soviet and Latin American economists had much in common. Both looked at the world economy from the periphery, both focused on inequality, and both railed against global capitalism. The works of Latin Americans like Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado borrowed extensively from the Soviet tradition of analyzing “backwardness.” Likewise, their Soviet contemporaries incorporated Latin American studies of “dependency” in their thinking. Yet, both groups strenuously denied any connection between socialism and dependency theory. Why? This paper explores the exchanges, misconnections, and misunderstandings between two groups of intellectuals who fought against Western hegemony, but remained enamored of Western culture.
Alessandro Iandolo is Lecturer in Soviet and Post-Soviet History at University College London. His first monograph, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968 (Cornell University Press, 2022), won both the Bruce Lincoln and the Mashall Shulman book prizes from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.
27/03/2025
Jonathon Glasman (Northwestern University)
Race and the construction of caste in precolonial Africa: a problem in comparative history
Jonathon Glassman, Northwestern University, has taught African history and the comparative history of race and slavery for over three decades. Among his works are Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888, which won the Herskovits Prize in African Studies, and War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar, winner of the Martin Klein Prize from the American Historical Association. He is currently at work on a comparative study of racial thought in African intellectual traditions.
24/04/2025
Giacomo Macola (Sapienza Università di Roma)
A Longue-Durée History of Violence in the Congo Basin
Elaborating on previously published material, this paper draws on the concept of “warlordism” to make sense of the bloody history of the Congo basin between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. After examining the rise of “warlord states” in the second half of the nineteenth century, the era of the long-distance caravan trades in ivory and slaves, the paper argues that these politico-military formations anticipated, and therefore easily adapted to, the looting economy of the Congo Free State. The paper then raises the question of historical continuities and asks whether the concept of warlordism is helpful in accounting for the Congo’s exceptionally violent postcoloniality.
Giacomo Macola teaches at “La Sapienza” University of Rome. A specialist in Central African political history, he is the author of Liberal Nationalism in Central Africa: A Biography of Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); The Gun in Central Africa: A History of Technology and Politics (Ohio University Press, 2016); and Una storia violenta. Potere e conflitti nel bacino del Congo (XVIII-XXI secolo) (Viella, 2021). His articles have appeared in several Africanist journals, including the Journal of African History, the International Journal of African Historical Studies and History in Africa. With Alicia Decker, he co-edits the series “War & Militarism in African History” (Ohio University Press).
08/05/2025
Sebastian Conrad
From ancient queen to global icon: Nefertiti’s 100-year trajectory, 1924-2024
The characteristic image of Nefertiti is known all over the world. Discovered in 1912 and first exhibited in 1924, her bust has turned into an icon of universal beauty that is globally recognized. How did this transformation happen, from ancient queen to modern icon? How can we explain her worldwide resonance – in places like Germany and Britain, Brazil and Egypt, Bengal and the United States, places with vastly different aesthetic traditions? This talk addresses the worldwide reach of her fame. This is a story of struggles over legal ownership and restitution; it is also a story about competing beauty standards in a globalizing world. But it is more: Claiming Nefertiti was about making claims on modernity. Understanding Nefertiti’s global fame, from German Egyptologists to Michael Jackson and Beyoncé, tells us much about the changing patterns of cultural globalization, from the era of high imperialism to the neo-liberal global age.
Sebastian Conrad is professor of global history at Freie Universität Berlin. His most recent books are Die Königin: Nofretetes globale Karriere, Berlin (Propyläen) 2024; An Emerging Modern World, 1750-1870 (A History of the World, vol. 4), Cambridge, Mass. (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) 2018 (edited, together with Jürgen Osterhammel); What is Global History? Princeton (Princeton University Press) 2016.
This lecture is co-organised by TAPAS.
Lecture series in African and Global History 2023-2024
ECC is proud to convene its first Lectures series in African and Global History for the academic year 2023-2024.
This academic year the series consists of seven lectures, delivered by scholars with celebrated expertise in their respective fields.
Each lecture takes place in Auditorium Vandenhove (Rozier 1, next to the Book Tower, 9000 Ghent), on selected Thursdays from 14h00 to 16h00.
The series is co-funded by the Ghent Centre for Global Studies.
Administrative cooperation from Amber Frateur.
For contact: Samuel.Coghe@ugent.be
12 October 2023:
Mariana Candido (Emory University)
Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola: A history of dispossession, slavery, and inequality
Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption,and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana Candido presents a revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights informed the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labor. By centering the experiences of West Central Africans, and especially African women, this book challenges dominant historical narratives and shows that securing property was a gendered process. Drawing attention to how archives obscure African forms of knowledge and normalize conquest, Candido interrogates simplistic interpretations of ownership and pushes for the decolonization of African history.
Mariana P. Candido is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor of History at Emory University and the Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Fall 2023. Prof. Candido is a specialist in West Central African history during the era of the transatlantic slave trade. She has also authored An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and its Hinterland (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and is co-editor of the journal African Economic History.
26 October 2023
Tomás Bartoletti (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich)
Towards a Multispecies History of Capitalism Economic Entomology and the Expansion of Ecological Frontiers, circa 1880—1930
By reassessing the development of pest control research in the tropical world between c. 1880 and 1930, Tomás will examine the interlocking of agricultural economics in processes of multispecies territorialization and imperial capitalism. During this period, the propagation of insect pests beyond imperial and state borders challenged the cost-effective exploitation of tropical raw materials.A branch of the scientific study of insects, economic entomology,was intensively applied to improve land use, becoming a prominent field in global scientific research. Tomás’ project focuses on the role of European entomologists expanding the ecological frontier and profit aspirations through commodification processes in Latin America, East Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific Islands. The global circulation of knowledge about pest control has transformed socioecological dynamics in these regions, and also powerfully shaped the model of agricultural production both in tropical lands and in the European context until our times.
(in collaboration with the Sarton Centre for History of Science)
Tomás Bartoletti is Senior Lecturer at the Chair for History of the Modern World of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich. His current project “Insect Pests and Economic Entomology in Plantations, c. 1870–1930s: A Multispecies History of Global Capitalism” is granted by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
29 February 2024
Morgan Robinson (Mississippi State University)
A language for the world: The standardization of Swahili
[Abstract TBA]
14 March 2024
Ulbe Bosma (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam)
The world of sugar: How the histories of sugar and capitalism are linked
For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. After all, it serves no necessary purpose in our diets, and extracting it from plants takes hard work and ingenuity. Hence, sugar remained marginal in the diets of most people for a long time. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How did sugar find its way into almost all the food we eat, fostering illness and ecological crisis along the way?
Presenting his newest publication, The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years(Harvard University Press, 2023), Professor Bosma will discuss the earliest evidence of sugar production and explain how traders brought small quantities of precious white crystals to rajahs, emperors, and caliphs during the Middle Ages. Later, when European consumers discovered the sweet stuff, increasing demand spawned a brutal quest for supply, based on enslaved labor. Two-thirds of the 12.5 million Africans taken across the Atlantic were destined for sugar plantations. By the twentieth century, sugar had become a major source of calories in diets across Europe and North America. Sugar has been at the heart of capitalism, and this goes a long way in explaining why it poses such a threat to our bodies, our environment, and our communities.
Ulbe Bosma is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History and Professor of International Comparative Social History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He has published widely on colonial and postcolonial history, commodity production, migration, and slavery, particularly on the Dutch colonial empire. His books include The World of Sugar How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years (Harvard University Press, 2023), The Making of a Periphery (Columbia University Press, 2019) and The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He is member of the coordinating team of the global network Commodity Frontiers Initiative.
21 March 2024
Kalle Kananoja (University of Oulu)
From African medicinals to global pharmaceuticals: Lusoafrican trajectories, 18th century – present
How have African medical knowledge and medicinals been exported and marketed outside of Africa? How have herbal home remedies been developed into pharmaceutical products? What are the historical contours and current prospects of global interaction and co-operation in these undertakings? Despite the potential of harnessing African genetic resources for medicinal plant and pharmaceutical trade, the continent continues to be a minor player in the global market for these products. As local markets tend to focus on selling unprocessed materia medica and the industry remains informal and diffuse, only a limited number of plant species garner international interest.
Taking eighteenth-century Angola and Mozambique as starting points, and engaging with recent historiography about African plant medicines, this paper demonstrates the role played by dynamic and mobile cross-cultural medical encounters in Lusoafrican contexts and identifies lacunae to be addressed in future research. Discussing the sustained but modest scientific attention and commercial interest given to African phytotherapies and vernacular knowledge during Portuguese colonial rule, this paper notes that the prospects for heightened development of Lusoafrican pharmaceutical industries seem to lie in South-South co-operation rather than neglectful North-South relationships.
Kalle Kananoja is a Finnish historian with a background in African and (southern) Atlantic studies, and work (since August 2021) as a lecturer in History of Science and Ideas at University of Oulu. His research focuses on social, cultural and intellectual histories of slavery, religion and medicine. His book Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2021; included on the ALA’s Choice list of outstanding academic titles 2022) analyses continuous knowledge exchanges and perceptions of health, disease and healing in West Central and West Africa in the early modern period. Kananoja co-edited Healers and Empires in Global History (Springer 2019), which explores cross-cultural medical encounters and the intertwined and plural medical histories involving non-Western healers from the Arctic, Asia, Africa, Americas and the Caribbean.
28 March 2024
David Mwambari (KU Leuven)
The politics of vernacular memory in post-colonial African contexts
This lecture will explore the evolution of memory politics in post-colonial Africa over the last two decades. Societies take different paths when coming to terms with violent pasts. Some undertake active commemorations (e.g., rituals, memorials, and ceremonies), while others elect for silence, forgetting uncomfortable memories or remembering privately through vernacular platforms for many reasons. These memories and silences interact in public—in national, regional, and international politics. They shape the memory politics of the past and modern lived experiences as societies negotiate transitions. The influence peace and (in)security for these societies and beyond. This lecture will draw on empirical examples from research in postwar states in East, Central, and West Africa and beyond.
David Mwambari is an associate professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium and the principal investigator for the European Research Council (ERC)-funded TMSS project. He is core faculty and a board member at the Oxford Consortium on Human Rights, University of Oxford.
Previously, he was an assistant professor of African Security and Leadership Studies in the African Leadership Centre at King’s College (UK), an FWO postdoctoral research fellow with the Conflict Research Group at Ghent University (Belgium), and an assistant professor of International Relations at the United States International University–Africa in Nairobi, Kenya. Professor Mwambari was also a fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge (UK), African Academic Diaspora Fellow at The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Senegal), and a visiting professor at Mackenzie University in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
18 April 2024
Nicole Eggers (University of Tennesse-Knoxville)
Unruly ideas: Kitawala, everyday intellectuals, and power in Congolese history
This talk will explore the multifaceted history of the Congolese religious movement Kitawala, which has roots in the African Watchtower (Jehovah’s Witness) movement. Drawing on a rich body of original oral, ethnographic, and archival research, Nicole Eggers will consider how the history of Kitawala illuminates the complex relationship between politics, religion, healing, and violence in Congo, offering important insight into the work of everyday intellectuals in 20th century central African history. More than a case study of a particular religious movement, the talk will investigate how communities and individuals in the region have historically imagined power, sought to access it, wielded it, and policed the morality of its uses.
Nicole Eggers is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee. Her research interests include 20th-21st Century Congolese history, health and healing, refugees, and religion and politics in Central Africa.