Journey to Southern Africa

Andrew Apter is Professor of History and Anthropology at UCLA, where he directs the James S. Coleman African Studies Center and co-organizes the Atlantic History Colloquium. His four books focus on Yoruba ritual and politics in Nigeria, the paradoxes of Nigeria’s oil prosperity, African ritual language genres (and what makes them powerful), as well as the legacies of Yoruba culture in the Atlantic world—all with the University of Chicago Press. He is currently working on History in the Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery and the Spirits of Capitalism, a study—supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship—that reveals how Atlantic slavery remains deeply buried within the core of modern capitalism. His work on a variety of research and policy projects have taken him to Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Zambia, where he lived with Congolese refugees. His African Studies Center initiatives include “Africa’s Readiness for Climate Change,” “Refugee Worlds, Refugee Lives,” “The Greening of a Continent: Smart Solar Grids for Rural West Africa,” and “Ritual Histories in Ghana’s Slave Forts and Castles.”