Christoph Kalter is a historian of modern Western Europe in the world. He is the author of Postcolonial People: The Return from Africa and the Remaking of Portugal (Cambridge University Press, 2022). A conversation with Jacqueline Wagner.
Interview with Ulf Engel by Megan Maruschke. Ulf Engel, Professor of African Studies at Leipzig University, recently launched a five-part blog series on Africa and Russia’s war in Ukraine in Leipzig University’s Research Centre Global Dynamics blog.
By Diana Ayeh. When I first came to Houndé in 2016, the town of 150,000 inhabitants in southwestern Burkina Faso already had a certain gold-rush atmosphere. Not only was the landscape in and around Houndé marked with indications for future extraction, the construction of the first industrial gold mine in the urban municipality was also accompanied by the arrival of new actors and ideas that made extraction feasible.
By Ulf Engel. In October 2021, I published the Yearbook on the African Union (YBAU). This yearbook is the first of its kind. The YBAU is first and foremost an academic project that provides an in-depth evaluation and analysis of the institution, its processes, and its engagements.
By Angela Rabing. Abou Bakar Sidibé is a co-director of the films Les Sauteurs – Those Who Jump (2016) and My New European Life (2019). In both, he documents his life as migrant who tries to find a way to Europe and build a life there.
In the debate about colonial collections in ethnological and other museums, little attention has been paid to things acquired by European missionaries during conversion practices. These things do not fit into the current discussions of looted art and are barely subject to demands for repatriation.
By Alfred Tembo and Jochen Lingelbach. While World War II was ravaging Europe, thousands of Polish people found a safe haven in British colonial Africa. This forgotten history shows us that migration patterns are constantly changing.
By Christoph Kalter. The year is 1975, and the footage comes from the Portuguese Red Cross. Who, or maybe what, are these people? Returnees or retornados is the term commonly assigned to more than half-a-million people, the vast majority of them white settlers from Angola and Mozambique, most of whom arrived in Lisbon in 1975.
By Birgit Meyer. The volume Refugees and Religion: Ethnographic Studies of Global Trajectories, co-edited by Birgit Meyer and Peter van der Veer, disputes a hard and fast distinction between migrants and refugees by showing how shifting legal arrangements as well as people’s varying statuses make the concept of ‘refugee’ dynamic.
By Adérito Júlio Machava. During the period prior to the setting up of the Portuguese colonial administration in southeast Africa, there were important waves of forced migrations caused by, firstly, the Mfecane, and secondly the defeat of King Ngungunhane in 1895, and the subsequent overthrow of the Gaza Empire.
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research is a platform for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are interested in transregional exchange and research on current issues. TRAFO is the blog of the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin) and the Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland (Bonn).
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