A Decade of Niger

Klaas van Walraven, Ph.D. (1997), University of Leiden, is an historian and political scientist at the African Studies Centre in Leiden, who earlier focused especially on West Africa, writing an historical study on Niger, The Yearning for Relief: A History of the Sawaba Movement in Niger (Brill, 2013), which traced the role of the Sawaba movement in the decolonisation of Niger and its rebellion against the French-protected regime during the 1960s (French translation Le desir de calme: L'histoire du mouvement Sawaba au Niger, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2017). Currently he works on the history of colonialism and decolonisation in French Equatorial Africa. Particularly interested in biographical perspectives on history, he is working on a contextualised biography of Barthelemy Boganda, priest and politician in Oubangui-Chari (the present-day Central African Republic), 1910-1959.