Sara Marzagora, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. The last year in Ethiopia has seen a resurgence of regional and political conflicts. Triggered in November 2015 by the government’s proposal of a new master plan for Addis Ababa, protests soon spread across the country. The demonstrators denounced youth unemployment, economic inequality, […]

Zoe Cormack and Abdikadir Kurewa Based on their fieldwork (April-May 2016) at the site of Lake Turkana Wind Power, Zoe Cormack and Abdikadir Kurewa discuss the reasons for local tensions around the project – and why the past is important for understanding the social impact of infrastructure developments. The largest wind farm in Africa is […]

Miles Larmer It has been a tumultuous period for African history at Oxford University. Rhodes Must Fall, which began life at the University of Cape Town in March 2015 with protests against its statue of Cecil Rhodes, arrived in Oxford in summer 2015 and has dominated headlines about the university ever since. This blog post […]

Thomas Lowman During the 2016 election campaign in Uganda, presidential candidate Amama Mbabazi made some waves with a promise to return the remains of former President Idi Amin to his home district of West Nile. Uganda’s former dictator is currently buried in Saudi Arabia, where he spent his final years in exile after fleeing the […]

Martin Ochaya has been awarded the inaugural Sudan Archive Visiting Library Fellowship for Easter 2017. Martin, a South Sudanese Roman Catholic priest, holds degrees in Sociology and Social Anthropology, Theology, and a diploma in counselling; he was awarded a Masters Degree in African Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Bradford, where he is […]

At the end of September, in the newly refurbished Palace Green Archives next to Durham Cathedral, researchers and doctoral students from across the UK, US, Europe, and from Sudan and South Sudan came together to discuss new research and reflect on shared methodological, theoretical, ethical and practical issues across history and anthropology in Eastern Africa […]

Emma Lochery In early May 2016, Kenya’s government announced the closure of Dadaab refugee camp complex, located around 100 kilometres from the Somali border and home to over 300,000 people. Government statements framed Dadaab as a space where Al Shabaab operates with ‘an alarming degree of freedom’. Officials claimed Kenya was facing an ‘existential terrorist […]

Justin Willis At the press conference where they presented their preliminary report on Uganda’s February 2016 elections, the European Union observation mission refused to answer a question as to whether the elections were ‘free and fair’. Instead, they directed the audience to read the report, and ‘draw their own conclusions’. The report is a classic […]

Bronwen Everill  The expansion of ethical consumption in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries may seem like a new phenomenon, linked as it is to internet campaigns, globalized supply chains, hashtags,consumerism, and innovative marketing.  But many of the processes that created the ethical consumption movements we are experiencing now were also in place in […]

Justin Pearce, University of Cambridge In April 2013, Mozambican riot police dispersed a gathering of veterans from the one-time rebel movement Renamo in Muxúnguè, a small town in Sofala province in central Mozambique. The next morning Renamo retaliated, shooting at the police post and killing at least three police officers. Over the following year Renamo […]