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Cape Town, South Africa
About
The Africa World Initiative is a center located at Princeton University that aims to optimize the university initiatives focused on Africa. The center serves as a hub for public-facing research, policy, and entrepreneurial work and encourages engagement and collaboration with African businesspersons and private and public institutions. It facilitates a multi-way exchange of ideas with stakeholders on the African continent and helps negotiate relationships between African countries and the rest of the world.
Events and Programs
The Achebe Colloquium on Africa, the legacy project established by the famed Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, brings together an international cast of leading and emerging scholars, high-level representatives of African governments, international agencies, the United States, the European Union, and civil society and policy organizations and stakeholders for intense deliberation on pressing issues affecting the African continent, from good governance, economic growth, and resource management, to climate change, cultural loss, health and education.
A high-level platform for imagining, assessing, and keeping pace with the ideas, realities, and futures of Africa by the continent’s finest minds. The lectures are established to bring greater visibility, from the perspective of Africa to Princeton’s support of knowledge production about Africa. The lectures will take place in October.
AWI aims to mobilize additional resources to enhance cutting-edge research and academic exploration in the field of African Studies. As part of this goal, AWI proudly sponsors seven postdoctoral fellows within the Program in African Studies. These scholars represent a diverse array of disciplines and research interests, each contributing uniquely to our understanding of Africa’s rich cultural, historical, and socio-political landscape.
We will host researchers and scholars from African public and private sector institutions on short term visits. Visitors will not be expected to teach; rather they will work on specific research projects alongside their sponsoring Princeton collaborators.
Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic, known for his novels about the effects of colonialism and displacement in the world. In 2021, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism”.
His novels include Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988), Dottie (1990), Paradise (1994), Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001), Desertion (2005), The Last Gift (2011), Gravel Heart (2017) and Afterlives (2020).
Short stories: Cages (1984), Bossy (1994), Escort (1996), The Photograph of the Prince (2012), My Mother Lived on a Farm in Africa (2006), The Arriver’s Tale (2016), and The Stateless Person’s Tale (2019).
Mr. Gurnah will be giving a lecture on October 30th, 2024.
Notable Quotes
“Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren’t many of them available, and they weren’t quite as easy to find as the foreign books. But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. So, what the discovery of African writers did for me was this - it saved me from having a single story of what books are.” Chimamanda Adichie, Nigerian writer.
"If we provide the young with a strong foundation, we can leave behind a legacy substantially greater than most are able to bequeath. As for the women, the adage that you invest in a woman, you invest in a generation, still rings true today," Joyce Banda, 4th President of Malawi.
"It is clear that we must find an African solution to our problems, and that this can only be found in African unity. Divided we are weak; united, Africa could become one of the greatest forces for good in the world," Kwame Nkrumah, First President of Ghana.
"African entrepreneurs have ideas, they have products, but they don't have support... Mentorship for entrepreneurs in Africa is the key," Marieme Jamme, Founder of iamCODE.org.
"In Africa today, we recognize that trade and investments, and not aid, are the pillars of development," Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda.