In this piece Bethlehem Attfield shares her experiences attending the African Studies Association of Africa Conference (ASAA) which took place in September of 2025.
The first time I attended and presented at an international African Studies conference was last year, at the University of Oxford’s Brookes campus. Hearing leading African voices discuss various issues affecting the continent was exhilarating. Several experienced participants shared how powerful and impactful the conferences held in Africa were, and encouraged me to attend the ASAA Sixth biennial conference which was scheduled in Cabo Verde in Praia, in September 2025. The choice of venue for the conference is significant, as this year marks the fifty year anniversary of the country’s independence.
The conference theme explored, ‘African Responses to Global Vulnerabilities: Building Hope for the Future’. This was examined through five remarkable keynote speeches by Toussant Kafarhire Murhula (President of ASAA), Carlos Lopes (Developmental Economist), Kelechi Kalu (The University of California), Cristina Duarte (UN Special Adviser on Africa), Isaias Barreto da Rosa (UNESCO Representative) and various interdisciplinary sessions.
Questioning the Normalisation of Injustice in Africa
To open the conference, the President of ASAA, Toussant Kafarhire Murhula thanked the President of Cabo Verde, José Maria Neves for attending the opening ceremony, noting that his presence showed support for knowledge production and the future of the African continent. Murhula explained that the conference’s goal was to identify global vulnerabilities impacting Africa and to envisage a hopeful future for Africans, whose ingenuity and creativity is yet to be fully unlocked.
Murhula went on to point out that one of the core issues is the refusal to let Africans define their own problems and the denial of their humanity. He also questioned the moral standards used to assess African issues. Why do we accept normalising abnormalities? For example, at this conference, he explained that many participants had expressed frustration over visa difficulties or the failures of airlines that stranded attendees. He reminded everyone that in Africa, often our rights are regarded as ‘privileges’ and then urged participants to question these perspectives.
Navigating turbulent waters: Africa’s Key dilemmas and choices
In the second keynote speech, development economist Carlos Lopes reflected on how the once-universal humanitarian duty to act wherever there is human suffering has been weakened in today’s turbulent times. What remains, he argues, is the selective empathy shaped by politics – as seen in the crises of Gaza and Sudan. Despite the entire world watching the devastation and carnage unfold, the key actors remain immobilised, choosing paralysis over responsibility. Lopes challenged the audience to consider how we can transform this turbulence into experience, and then that experience into agency.
Lopes noted that by 2050, one in four people will be African, and the continent holds nearly a third of essential minerals required for the green transition. However, he warned that being vital does not necessarily equate to influencing decisions, as Africa often merely follows global rules made elsewhere. He then argued that Africa can no longer drift with the prevailing geopolitical currents: “The continent is already accustomed to disruption from climate driven natural disasters to coup d’état, and debt crises—and we must now leverage these experiences to confront these three challenges head-on”.
- Neglect vs transformation: How do we respond to urgent crises like Sudan without losing sight of the need for long-term structural change?
- Presence vs influence: How do we turn seats at the table earned through indispensability into genuine agency and the power to change the agenda?
- Coping with shocks vs thriving in disruptions: How can African nations move beyond survival to build resilience and lead through uncertainty?
These dilemmas have no easy answers, but Lopes explained that they compel Africans to choose clarity over drift, courage over hesitation, and imagination over routine. Addressing them demands a profound shift in mindset.
Lopes had some two key recommendations:
Governance should become anticipatory, not reactionary. Leaders should not get accustomed to responding to crises. Instead, they should anticipate disasters ahead of time and put coping mechanisms in place.
Economies too, must be shock-ready. As latecomers to industrialisation, Africa must not solely develop our economies around it. We need a regional biosphere with diversified finance with innovation that embraces volatility. Finally, we must acknowledge that disruptions cause anxiety but also create opportunities for solidarity. Digital participation is one; youth-led movements are another. New ways of belonging need to be developed.
Lopes concluded his rousing speech by emphasising that Africa has never known calm waters. Turbulence has always been our constant companion, but turbulence can serve as a teacher, and he ended his remark with a quote from his book on Africa in Transformation: Economic Development in the Age of Doubt ‘Calm waters do not produce experienced sailors.’
No sovereignty without scholarship: Making African knowledge central to policy
In her keynote speech, Cristina Duarte, the UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser on Africa to the UN Secretary General, stressed that African knowledge is essential for shifting narratives of dependency, which are often associated with the continent. She continued by saying that, for too long, power has been dominated by states, military forces, and international diplomacy. However, in this century when algorithms increasingly influence policy, the definition of power must change.
True sovereignty, she noted, extends beyond politics and economics to include epistemic control and the power to define and produce knowledge. This is why African scholars must play a key role in shaping the continent’s future.
Duarte emphasised that Africa must control its finances to regain power. While much of the continent’s development funding is generated internally, international actors and even some African institutions still see Africa as struggling and in need of rescue, reflecting a deep mindset gap.
However, she went on to say that making this mindshift requires Africans to face the knowledge paradox, which has four interconnected aspects:
- Pursuing peace while neglecting development: To foster peace, we need sustainable development. Poverty, exclusion, and unemployment are the primary drivers of conflict in a society. Unless they are addressed, any peace deal and ceasefire agreements will remain temporary.
- Chasing development without sustainable finance: Africa loses approximately $500 billion annually to illicit financial flows, primarily related to the ownership of natural resources. Resolving this issue could help the continent move towards self-reliance.
- Accessing finance without the power of sovereignty: If resources are secured but come with conditions, they undermine self-determination.
- Producing knowledge without the power to influence policy: Without a system where African knowledge informs Africans’ decisions, Africa will continue to rely on borrowed frameworks to solve deeply local problems. This is why we say there is no sovereignty without scholarship.
Duarte concluded her speech by emphasising the need for scholars to make their research relevant to African realities and for African policy makers to base their strategies on such research.
ASAA Launches Its First Pan-African Fellowship Programme
Vice President of the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA), Divine Fuh from the University of Cape Town, officially launched the First ASAA Pan-African Fellowship Programme (2025-2027) supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York. The aim of the fellowship is to mentor and prepare early to mid-career scholars, primarily women, who are rooted in African epistemologies for future leadership roles within African Studies institutes across the continent.
Fuh went on to express his regret that a few of the fellows were stranded in Dakar due to the challenges of air travel in Africa. Moreover, he highlighted the association’s commitment to continuing to host future conferences in hard-to-reach areas of the continent, thereby affirming the pan-African spirit highly valued within the association. I was delighted to learn that one of the twelve fellows selected for the first cycle of the programme was a Global South Hub’s contributor and PhD candidate at the University of Ghana, Nancy Owusuaa.
At the conference, I caught up with Nancy to discuss what the Fellowship means to her. She shared, “For me, it represents more than an academic milestone. It embodies a shared Pan-African vision, amplifying African voices, fostering South–South collaboration, and building a sustainable network of inclusive, interdisciplinary scholars committed to reimagining African knowledge production that speaks to both local realities and global audiences.”
Nancy plans to use this platform to mentor emerging scholars, particularly young women in Ghana and across Africa, who aspire to bridge academia, technology, and cultural heritage.
Launch of Bokutani, the Journal of African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA)
Bokutani journal was officially launched by its Editor in Chief, Cheikh Thiam who is aa Professor of English and Black Studies at Amherst College during the conference’s closing ceremony. Thiam explained the peer-reviewed journal aims to promote critical dialogue and scholarship from and about Africa. He also touched on how the journal takes its name from the Lingala (primarily spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) word meaning “conversation” or “encounter”.
The journal is dedicated to highlighting African agency and promoting African-centred knowledge across multiple disciplines, languages, regions, and epistemologies. In line with the mission of the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA), it emphasises African epistemologies and intellectual traditions, offering a platform for dialogue, critique, and knowledge creation that reflects Africa’s diversity and complexity, including its diasporas.
The inaugural issue of Bokutani focuses on the theme “Ecologies of Knowledge in Global Africa,” setting the stage to explore how African knowledge traditions intersect, adapt, and respond to global contexts. The featured articles approach this theme by examining African language policies, knowledge production as a discourse of power, and the transmission and archiving of indigenous knowledge.
Cape Verde Culture, History and Tourism
The conference was further enriched by cultural performances and documentary films, which were screened at various times during the sessions. I particularly enjoyed Honoring Amilcar, a documentary film made to honour the founding hero of Cape Verde, Amílcar Cabral (1924–73). Additionally, the organisers arranged a tour of Santiago Island, the largest island in the Cape Verde archipelago.
As my fellow attendees from the Oxford conference observed, discussing Africa’s issues on African soil was especially powerful. This was partly evidenced by the prominence of the Cape Verdean government and media who both came to the conference.
Throughout the conference, it was repeatedly emphasised that African scholars and policymakers must do more than just acknowledge vulnerabilities; they need to develop resilient systems that can withstand and manage unexpected disruptions in the future. This is crucial for leaders at all levels. As the ASAA president highlighted, the key lesson is not to accept issues and challenges as normal or inherent to the continent, but to view them as valuable opportunities for learning, innovation, and growth.
I am grateful for receiving the Global South Colloquium fund, which partly enabled me to attend the conference and visit Cape Verde.
