For an overview of Prof. Jan-Bart Gewald's research and publications, visit his profile on the ASCL website.

Jan-Bart Gewald is a socio-cultural historian of southern Africa and professor of African History at Leiden University.  He grew up and was educated at a variety of schools in several southern African countries. He began studying towards a BSc in Geology and Physics but graduated with a BA in African History and African Political Studies at Rhodes University in Makhanda (Grahamstown) South Africa. He subsequently completed an MA in history at Leiden University, with stints as an exchange student at Cologne University and the University of Ghana, Legon. He conducted extensive fieldwork and archival research in southern Africa and Europe and completed a PhD in History at Leiden University in 1996. Following postdoc positions in Germany (SFB 389) and Amsterdam (IISG), and residences in Niger, Eritrea, and Botswana, he was appointed as a full-time researcher at the African Studies Centre in Leiden. In Leiden he acquired significant external research funding and was appointed Professor of Southern African History at Leiden University in 2013. He became Professor of African History in 2017 and was Director of the African Studies Centre from 2017-2021. He is currently working on a multi-species history of diamond mining in Kimberley, South Africa, 1870-1920.  In 2022 Jan-Bart Gewald was a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies (STIAS) in Stellenbosch, South Africa.

CV Jan-Bart Gewald.

Inaugural Lecture: To Grahamstown and Back: Towards a Socio-cultural History of Southern Africa, Leiden University, 6th June 2014.

Key publications

Monographs:

• “We Thought we Would be Free”: Socio-Cultural Aspects of Herero History in Namibia 1920-1940 (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag) 2000, pp. 272.
• Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia 1890 - 1923 (Oxford: James Currey; Cape Town: David Philip; Athens OH: Ohio University Press) 1999, pp. x + 310.

Co-authored:

• With Jos van Beurden, From output to outcome?: 25 years of IOB evaluations, Aksant Academic Publishers: Amsterdam 2004.

Edited:

• Jan-Bart Gewald, Marja Hinfelaar and Giacomo Macola, Living the end of Empire: Politics and society in late colonial Zambia, Leiden, Boston: Brill 2011.
• Jan-Bart Gewald, Sabine Luning and Klaas van Walraven, The Speed of Change: Motor Vehicles and People in Africa, 1890-2000 Leiden, Boston: Brill 2009.
• Jan-Bart Gewald, Marja Hinfelaar and Giacomo Macola, One Zambia, Many Histories: Towards a History of Post-coolonial Zambia, Leiden, Boston: Brill 2008. (Reprinted by Lembani Press in Zambia 2010).

Publications

Activities