Penguin Books announced today a new literary award for writers from the African continent. The Penguin Prize for African Writing has two categories: a previously unpublished full-length work of adult fiction and one of non-fiction. The prize in each category will be R50 000 and a publishing contract with Penguin Books South Africa, with worldwide distribution via Penguin Group companies.

Penguin Prize for African Writing Fiction Criteria

Penguin Prize for African Writing Non Fiction Criteria

 

Thanks to Fareeda Jadwat for this information.

Dress and the African diaspora network
This is the website for the AHRC-funded Dress & the African Diaspora Network, which provides a series of focussed research forums for new and established researchers to “discuss the consumption, production, collection and display of dress, textiles and beauty regimes” of the African diaspora. The network aims to identify new areas of study and create scholarly information resources for the field. From Intute.ac.uk
http://www.transnational.org.uk/projects/15-dress-and-the-african-diaspora-netwo

http://www.philb.com/cse/africa.htm

Aardvark http://www.aardvark.co.za/
AfricaOnline http://www.africaonline.com/site/
African Information http://www.externalharddrive.com/countries/africa/index.html
Africa Portal http://www.esoek.co.za/XcDirectory.asp
AllofAfrica http://www.AllofAfrica.com
Click Africa http://www.clickafrique.com/directory.asp
Safarichasers http://www.safarichasers.com/
Stanford's Africa Pages http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/africa/search.html
Woyaa http://www.woyaa.com/

Take a look at Flickr photographs from Africa

See what people are writing about Africa in weblogs over at Technorati

David Rycroft Africa recordings
A South African-born linguist and musicologist, Rycroft made many field trips to villages, townships and settlements around South Africa between the 60s and 80s. Fascinated by the relationship between oral traditions and musical structure, Rycroft focussed on unaccompanied choral singing, songs composed for indigenous musical instruments, and urban music. The bulk of this material is previously unpublished.British Museum Archival recordings

...

The recruitment and retention of new faculty members has emerged as a top priority for institutions across the continent, as they have scrambled to hire enough faculty members to keep pace with recent rapid growth in enrollment. Many African institutions are staffed disproportionately by academics in their 50s and nearing retirement, on the one hand, and by younger academics who often lack advanced degrees, on the other, according to participants at the University Leaders' Forum conference, which continues through today in Accra, Ghana...

By MEGAN LINDOW , Chronicle of Higher Education

 

Fellowship competitions in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda (2008-2009 academic year)

Deadline for receipt of applications at ACLS: December 1, 2008.

 

With financial support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, ACLS announces competitions for:

 

1. Dissertation-completion fellowships (Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda)
2. Early-career postdoctoral fellowships for research and writing (Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda) 

Fellowship recipients may request an allowance for residence away from the home institution.
In future years, post-doctoral awardees who complete manuscripts under terms of
Carnegie/ACLS fellowships will be eligible to apply for publication subsidies.

 

Stipends will be $9,000 for dissertation and $16,000 for postdoctoral fellowships, with cost of living adjustments for each of the five countries.  The fellowships are intended to release recipients from teaching and other duties for an academic year to devote full-time to research and writing.  Approximately 40 fellowships will be awarded in all five countries combined during the first competition year. Applications will be evaluated by an international peer-review committee of distinguished humanities scholars. 

 

Eligibility: Applicants 
Dissertation applicants must be doctoral candidates in their final year of writing the dissertation.   
Postdoctoral candidates must be scholars who have obtained the Ph.D. within the past five years.   
All applicants must be citizens of an African country residing in, and having an institutional affiliation in, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, or Uganda. 

 

Eligibility: Projects
Projects proposed must be in the humanities, defined by the study of history, language, and culture, and by qualitative approaches.  The list of humanities disciplines includes anthropology, studies of the fine and performing arts, history, linguistics, literature studies, studies of religion, and philosophy.  Projects in social sciences such as economics, sociology or political science, as well as in law or international relations, are not eligible unless they are clearly humanistic in content and focus.

 

Selection criteria
the intrinsic interest and substantive merit of the work proposed
the clarity with which the intellectual agenda is presented
the contribution the work is likely to make to scholarship in the region as well as internationally
the feasibility of the workplan. 

 

The ACLS African Humanities Program seeks to promote diversity (in terms of discipline, institution, region, gender, and historical disadvantage) for the sake of excellence in humanities scholarship. Applications are welcome from all eligible scholars in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda.

 

Application forms and instructions are available from September 2008 on the ACLS website: http://www.acls.org/grants/Default.aspx?id=3210.  For printed versions of application forms and instructions, please write to the African Humanities Program: ahp@acls.org  

 

Deadline for receipt of applications at ACLS: December 1, 2008.

 

Thanks to Fareeda Jadwat for this.

 

Bioprospecting the African Renaissance: The new value of muthi in South Africa
Hanspeter CW Reihling
Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 2008, 4:9 (27 March 2008)  Full text: http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/pdf/1746-4269-4-9.pdf

Abstract

This article gives an overview of anthropological research on bioprospecting in general and of available literature related to bioprospecting particularly in South Africa. It points out how new insights on value regimes concerning plant-based medicines may be gained through further research and is meant to contribute to a critical discussion about the ethics of Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS). In South Africa, traditional healers, plant gatherers, petty traders, researchers and private investors are assembled around the issues of standardization and commercialization of knowledge about plants. This coincides with a nation-building project which promotes the revitalization of local knowledge within the so called African Renaissance. A social science analysis of the transformation of so called Traditional Medicine (TM) may shed light onto this renaissance by tracing social arenas in which different regimes of value are brought into conflict. When medicinal plants turn into assets in a national and global economy, they seem to be manipulated and transformed in relation to their capacity to promote health, their market value, and their potential to construct new ethics of development. In this context, the translation of socially and culturally situated local knowledge about muthi into global pharmaceuticals creates new forms of agency as well as new power differentials between the different actors involved.

Wealth of Africa

This web resource, produced to accompany an exhbition of the same title, provides a short history of the use of money in Africa, illustrated with examples from the British Museum collection – from the silver ingots used in ancient Egypt through different local measures of wealth like cloth and Manillas (copper bracelets), to the coins and notes of colonial and post-independence states. Research related to the exhibition and resource received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. From Intute.ac.uk
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/online_tours/africa/the_wealth_of_africa/th

Quarterly Index of African Periodical Literature
This website is maintained by The Library of Congress Office, Nairobi, Kenya. It contains a free searchable database of references to articles from over 300 journal titles published in over 25 African nations from 1991 to the present day. These include: Angola, Botswana, Burundi, the Comoros, Congo (Democratic Republic), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mayotte, Mozambique, Namibia, Reunion, Rwanda, the Seychelles, Somalia, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe; Cameroon, Gabon, Ghana and Senegal. Although the titles indexed are not full text, they include citations to scholarly journals and periodicals published by non-governmental and civil society organisations difficult to trace elsewhere. A wide range of subject areas from the sciences, social sciences and humanities are covered. From Intute.ac.uk
http://memory.loc.gov/misc/qsihtml/

Africana Periodical Literature Bibliographic Database

This work was originally begun in September of 1974 as an effort to index all the issues of each periodical/journal title and place them all in one source.

This English language database indexes over 33,000 articles from over 280 English language and multi-lingual journals and periodicals that specialize in African Studies or consistently cover the African continent. The titles were originally chosen from the library at California State University-Chico and that number were later expanded by using materials from Northwestern University and other major university libraries as well as the Library of Congress.

Each title is indexed from its first day of publication to the present or, either its date of ceasing or a date where the journal or periodical no longer covered Africa on a regular basis. In only in a few cases were titles dropped due to the difficulty in obtaining copies or irregularities in the journal's publishing schedule.

Of the over 280 journals and periodicals indexed, more than half have ceased being published. Until the mid-1960's few Africana journals were indexed in major indexing tools. This work hopes to fill the gap by indexing Africana materials from the mid-nineteenth century to today all in one index.

A title list of all journals and periodicals indexed, including the years the journals or periodicals were published and indexed is included by a link from the front page of this database.

The titles indexed in this database represent Africana materials published in from over 22 nations within North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

http://www.africabib.org/africa.html

 

African postcolonial literature in English

Part of the Postcolonial and Postimperial Web created by Professor George P. Landow, English and Art History, Brown University with contributions by Brown University students, postgraduate students, lecturers from the Univ. of Zimbabwe, and others. The site provides information on authors writing in or about a post-colonial setting. The website gives access to the information through an index of authors' names or through sections focusing on individual countries. There are also pages giving the political, economic, religious and demographic details of the countries in which the authors write in order to enable users to put the writers' lives in context - this detail is almost entirely taken from the CIA world factboook. Some authors have long sections - especially those who have been politically active, who get pages about their political actions, speeches etc. as well as their writings - while others have a simple page about one of their works. The indexes do not always correlate, either: J.M. Coetzee, for example, can be found in the South Africa section, but not on the list of authors. This is, however, a comprehensive and useful site for students of African literature. Intute.ac.uk
http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/misc/africov.html

http://www.foundation-partnership.org/

Created in 2000, The Partnership for Higher Education in Africa is an initiative supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Ford Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The primary goal of the Partnership is to support the renaissance of higher education in Africa. From the year 2000 to 2005 these partner organizations have contributed more than $150 million to support special initiatives and build core capacity in Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. First-time visitors may wish to read the introductory piece titled "What is the Partnership?" and then continue on to the "Focal Areas" section. Higher education scholars and policy analysts will want to make sure and look through the "Publications" section. Here they will find a number of publications, including recent works like "Public & Private Universities in Kenya: New Challenges, Issues & Achievements" and "Gender in the Making of the Nigerian University System". Finally, the "Resources" area contains a fine selection of external links that address African universities, consortia, networks, and think tanks. [KMG] Scout Report

Africa research central was first launched in 1998. Its aim is to provide a guide to primary resource materials about Africa held in museums, archives and repositories worldwide. It includes a searchable directory of African resources with details on holdings, access and links to websites where available.The site also offers extensive directories of links to key organisations and archives associated with African studies. This includes coverage of African politcs, history, culture and social life. Intute.ac.uk
http://www.africa-research.org/