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Africa Week

Africa Week is an annual celebration of research, education and outreach activities on Africa. It brings together academics, researchers and students from across King's – and offers the opportunity to hear from African scholars, leaders and thinkers.

Hosted by the African Leadership Centre and Africa research group, Africa Week also platforms King’s internationalisation strategy highlighting the University’s global exchanges through research and engagement showcasing impactful collaboration with international partners and networks and our research links to intercultural learning.

Africa Week 2025 | 3-7 March

The African Leadership Centre and the Africa Research Group, Department of War Studies at King’s College London are excited to announce the annual King’s Africa Week 2025. Various activities and events will be hosted across King’s Faculties by Departments and Units undertaking research, education and engagement activities that relate to Africa.

Africa Week will comprise several high-level keynote events and roundtable discussions highlighting King’s engagement in Africa, with scholars from King’s and partner institutions exchanging and in dialogue around bridging dissonance and distances through leadership.

Theme: Disrupting Distances: Nations, Systems, and Leadership

There is a consistent framing and reframing of our world as core-periphery, developed- developing- and underdeveloped, Global North- Global South(s); Global minority- Global majority dichotomies.

This tendency speaks to the structural inheritance of coloniality that characterises how we understand and explain the relationships between nations and nation states within a global context. The distance between hegemonic and non-hegemonic nations shapes how humans move through the world that they inhabit with tensions that sometimes disturb the structure but never quite displace it.

Though the past has located these spaces at a disadvantage in global power hierarchies, there are important and salient conversations about reimagining these structures. In part, the very challenges that have historically marginalized Africa are sites for innovative leadership.

Read the full concept note

Stories

Africa Week 2024 | 4-8 March

Theme: "Owning agency: Africa's future and evolving path in the world"

The last five years have seen the world in a state of transition, with Africa itself having to navigate multiple changes. Amid these transitions, Africa has demonstrated its agency across many issues, including peace and security, climate change, health, and technology, among others. During Africa Week 2024, keynote addresses and panels explored how Africans exercise agency in global affairs, their effects, and where it might lead.

Read the full concept note

Watch the replay from Africa Week 2024

The topic of the inaugural event of Africa Week 2024 was intended to open the door to interrogation of what Africa’s agency is all about, outside the tight intellectual prism in which it is currently held.

It also discussed how the opportunity of the UN Summit of the future might be seized to reframe African agency.

See the full Africa Week 2024 playlist

Africa Week 2023 | 6-10 March

Theme: Changing Africa in a shifting global landscape

Africa Week 2023 asked, to what extent is Africa’s navigation of its complex contradictions offering opportunities to generate influence in global spheres? What is the situation with various constituencies on the continent currently in spaces of transition? How is projecting Africa’s voice in a global context also in great flux?

Throughout the week, our scholars and partners considered these dynamics across themes, including economic uncertainty, energy crises, violent conflicts and environmental challenges.

Read the full concept note.

Watch the replay from Africa Week 2023

In the keynote lecture, Professor Onikepe Folarin, Professor of Molecular Biology and Genomics at Redeemer's University, examined the significance of African scientists' development of a COVID-19 vaccine in Nigeria.

This talk speaks to transitions in Africa's role in medical innovation as a response to shifting global events and dynamics, particularly around the COVID pandemic, and the complexities around Africa's agency and collaborations.

See the full Africa Week 2023 playlist.

Africa Week 2022 | 3-9 March

Theme: Centring the arts and cultural production: Implications for health, physical and social sciences, and the humanities.

Africa Week 2022 interrogated how the arts and cultural production re(shape) the narratives and knowledge creation across disciplines including health, social sciences and the humanities.

This is a critical space through which African voice and agency has been platformed on a global scale. Through fashion, music, literature, art, photography and film many Africans have staked a claim on the global stage and have used these tools to engage in pertinent discourses.

This theme connects with global ambition for centring creativity in socioeconomic transition and change with the UN declaration of 2021 as the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development.

Read the full concept note

Watch the replay from Africa Week 2022

A conversation between renowned Fashion Designer, Ituen Basi, and Professor 'Funmi Olonisakin, African Leadership Centre and Vice Principal and Vice President International at King's College London. The two discuss how Fashion and the Arts, more widely, serve as connectors across themes including history, culture, education, geographies and value with a focus on Africa in the world.

See the full Africa Week 2022 playlist

Watch the replay from Africa Week 2020

Professor David Olusoga (University of Manchester) and Professor 'Funmi Olonisakin (King's) discuss the legacies that have brought us to this moment, drawing on the importance of global black histories in understanding contemporary struggles. Set against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the COVID-19 pandemic, this year has seen the emergence of a renewed struggle for justice.

See the full Africa Week 2020 playlist

 

Archives Collections Manager at King's, Kate O'Brien, takes us through a selection of historical pamphlets, booklets and maps which tell us about the relationship between Britain and Africa during the 20th century. Find out more