Our Deputy Director Prof. Dr. Mamadou Diawara gave a keynote lecture at this year's European Conference of African Studies (ECAS) in Cologne.
You can find the programme here.
Making African Futures: Taming copyright
Copyright continues to gain ground, even beyond Europe, its birthplace. From a matter for connoisseurs, originally focused on the publication and distribution of written works, this legal concept extends to the oral domain, and is becoming a subject of economic development more or less imposed by international organisations and by the ex-colonies, which are adopting them. The hunt for 'pirates' is on. Despite the criticism of specialists, the voices of ordinary users, especially from sub-Saharan Africa, are rather rare. The following lines consider the considerable negative impact that copyright law, as a modern institution par excellence, is likely to have on those directly concerned.
