|
Wim van Binsbergen's first (jointly supervised) PhD student (1982): Glimpses of the recent history of the African Studies Centre |
return to the Topicalities page | return to the Shikanda portal
Gerti Hesseling's imminent accession to the Koningsberger Chair on Law and Peace, Utrecht University, is another milestone in the history of the Leiden African Studies Centre, and a reason for rejoicing for anyone associated with the incumbent as friend, colleague, or relative. It is particularly a reason for celebration for the two scholars who supervised her PhD (1982): Leo Prakke and Wim van Binsbergen. Realising how, ever since, their careers have been intertwined as colleagues at the African Studies Centre, Wim van Binsbergen in the reminiscences below looks back upon over a quarter of a century of history of that institution, highlighting the steps taken in Gerti Hesseling's career as well as in his own. Despite the obvious danger of self-indulgence, there is a point in such a micro-historical overview. For we all know that institutional and individual memories tend to be short-lived, especially when new challenges and new reference groups invite new strategic self-definitions. However, a note of caution is due here: what follows is also based on one individual memory, and in addition to the grave sin of self-advertisement (to which the Internet has enticed us anyway), very likely suffers from similar one-sidedness. However, we cannot properly celebrate the present without an articulate (though provisional, and improvable) version of the past, and it is such a version that the present page seeks to present.
After working at the University of Zambia (South Central Africa) as Lecturer in Sociology (1971-73) and as Research Affiliate at the Institute for African Studies (the successor of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute) (1973-1974), Wim van Binsbergen returned to the Netherlands. First he held an appointment (1974-1975) as a researcher at the Anthropological Sociological Centre (ASC), Amsterdam University; this position was funded by the Netherlands Foundation for Tropical Research (WOTRO), a division of the Netherlands Science Foundation NWO. From 1975-1977 he acted in the Leiden chair of Sociology and Cultural Studies of Africa, succeeding John Beattie, and preceding Adam Kuper. In 1977 he joined the African Studies Centre, Leiden, where (in the context of the very diffuse, rambling research organisation prevailing there at the time) he soon published two edited collections (one, with the late Dr Robert Buijtenhuijs, on the theory of African religious movements; the other, with Henk Meilink, on African migration theory). He also finished his PhD, which was defended before the Free University Amsterdam 1979 (Religious change in Zambia: Exploratory Studies; supervisor Matthew Schoffeleers, Professor of Religious Anthropology; external examiner Terence Ranger; cum laude). In the academic year 1979-1980 Wim van Binsbergen held the prestigious Simon Professorship at the University of Manchester, in acknowledgment of the convergence of his research with that of the late Max Gluckman's Manchester School in social anthropology. Upon his return from Manchester, and in response to Adam Kuper's allegations before the African Studies Centre's Advisory Board as to the disintegrated nature and low standard of research at the centre at the time, Wim van Binsbergen was co-opted, along with his African Studies Centre colleague Jan Hoorweg, to establish two highly structured and integrated, high-performance research departments that were henceforth to comprise the entire research efforts of the centre: the Department of Socio-Economic Studies (Hoorweg), and the Department of Political and Historical Studies (van Binsbergen). Alongside the General Secretary Gerrit Grootenhuis, Hoorweg and van Binsbergen thus were to be the scientific co-directors of the African Studies Centre throughout the 1980s.
After graduating from Amsterdam University as a jurist and as a certified French-Dutch legal interpreter, Gerti Hesseling had written a dictionary of French legal terms, and had developed an interest in constitutional process in Senegal -- largely in association with the then African Studies Centre member Klaas de Jonge, who had headed a collective research project in Senegal in the mid-1970s. After collecting data on constitutional history in Senegal, Gerti Hesseling joined the African Studies Centre in 1979, in preparation for post-doc research on land law and legal reform in Senegal. However, her PhD project on Senegalese constitutional history, initially under the sole supervision of Leo Prakke (Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Amsterdam), was then still in an inchoate stage, and suffered from the absence of Africanist expertise in the Amsterdam constitutionalist context.
At the African Studies Centre, Gerti Hesseling had initially joined the 'Section on African Law' headed by Dr Emile van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal, who had launched a programme on the comparative study of land reform in West Africa. With the 1980 reorganisation, this small section could not be incorporated in the overall two-department conception of African Studies Centre research; the section became peripheral, internally strained and inevitably short-lived; for background documents (that represent only one, interested, side of the matter!) cf. Nieuwsbrief Nederlandstalige Rechtssociologen, Rechtsantropologen en Rechtssociologen NNR 2, 1984; and a biographical sketch of the Section's leader, 2003). Little wonder the section was soon to be dissolved, although the echoes of the attending organisational dilemmas were to reverberate through the corridors of the African Studies Centre until well into the third millennium.
However, effectively the lion's share of Gerti Hesseling's PhD supervision was given (1980-1982), in the context of the Department of Political and Historical Studies, by its Head, Wim van Binsbergen. Another senior member of that Department was the late Robert Buijtenhuijs; he was a political scientist strongly orientated towards French African Studies, and had worked for UNESCO in Senegal. Buijtenhuijs also made substantial, though informal, contributions to Gerti Hesseling's project by reading, and commenting upon, the thesis chapters. as they materialised.
The thesis was successfully defended before Amsterdam University in May 1982, with Leo Prakke as 'Promotor', and Wim van Binsbergen as 'Co-Referent' (i.,e. external examiner). At the time, the Co-Referent was at a par with the Promotor in the sense that the signature of both were necessary and sufficient to have a thesis accepted. Only from the late 1990s onwards, this arrangement has been altered throughout the Netherlands so as to require an 'Inner Committee' of usually four professors, including the professorial supervisor, to decide on the 'defensibility' (in effect: the approval) of a PhD thesis.
Robert Buijtenhuijs was a member of the committee. In recognition of the admitted imbalance between the two supervisors, and despite the specific formal definition of the supervisory structure in accordance with the PhD regulations of Amsterdam University, it was arranged that Gerti Hesseling actually received her doctoral diploma from the very hands of Wim van Binsbergen. She was effectively his first PhD student.
click
on the image to open the preliminary pages
By the time her thesis was defended Gerti Hesseling had effectively left the 'Section on African Law' in order to be accommodated, as the junior member she then was, within the Department of Political and Historical Studies. Here she collaborated with Wim van Binsbergen on two international conferences and voluminous edited collections on the African state, each with more or less extensive introductions:
 |
van Binsbergen, W.M.J. & Hesseling, G.S.C.M. (eds), 1984, Aspecten van staat en maatschappij in Africa: Recent Dutch and Belgian research on the African state, Leiden; African Studies Centre. (click here for the editors' introduction) |
 |
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., F. Reijntjens, F., & Hesseling, G.S.C.M.(eds), 1986, State and local community in Africa, Brussels: Cahiers du CEDAF [ Centre d’Études et de Documentation sur l'Afrique Noire ] (click here for the editors' extensive theoretical synthesis, pp. 369-400) |
In the same departmental context, early 1980s, Wim van Binsbergen and Gerti Hesseling also worked on a comparative study of the preambles of African independence constitutions -- a study initiated by, and with the full participation of, Martin Doornbos, Professor of African Political Science at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague.
It was as Head of the Department of Political and Historical Studies that Wim van Binsbergen managed to negotiate a second decisive step in Gerti Hesseling's career: her permanent appointment with the African Studies Centre -- a step whose wisdom was successfully put to the test when, more than a decade later (1996), after Dr Stephen Ellis' directorship (1990-1995) had come to an end, Gerti Hesseling was selected as the most suitable candidate to succeed to the directorship of that institution.
By that time Wim van Binsbergen had since long traded his administrative responsibilities at the African Studies Centre in order to take up the Chair in Ethnic Studies and Development which the African Studies Centre had created for him at the Free University Amsterdam (1990), through the good services, mainly, of Gerrit Grootenhuis, the late Professor Hans Tennekes of the Free University Amsterdam, and Peter Geschiere, who had succeeded Adam Kuper in the Leiden chair and had become the chairman of the African Studies Centre's Board.
However, the Netherlands Ministry of Development Cooperation (Jan Pronk) -- which despite academic independence of the African Studies Centre yet provides most of the Centre's funding and therefore has undeniable leverage -- turned out to impose strict conditions for Gerti Hesseling's accession to the directorship. The Minister stipulated the reorganisation of the African Studies Centre research activities into a small number of 'theme groups', each with their own negotiated budget, and an allotted time span of four to five years. Such groups did not yet exist and took long in materialising, and before they did, the new director designate could not take up her appointment. It was Wim van Binsbergen's privilege to offer a way out of this statemate. In 1992 Geschiere and van Binsbergen had initiated the national WOTRO Research Programme on Globalization and the Construction of Communal Identities, and extended this into the International Network on Globalisation -- with active and enthusiastic contributions from internationally high-ranking scholars such as Arjun Appadurai, Mamadou Diouf, Ulf Hannerz, Achille Mbembe, Partha Chatterjee, Jean and John Comaroff, Setany Shamy, and others. By 1996 this programme was effectively functioning on the basis of relatively lavish funding administered by a board of directors to which Professors Bonno Thoden van Velzen and Peter van der Veer had been coopted, and dozens of researchers were active within this network and programme. Wim van Binsbergen proposed to redesign the African Studies Centre branch of this programme, however modest within the overall structure, so as to constitute the first viable and convincing 'theme group'. Once this first sheep was across the bridge, other African Studies Centre colleagues followed suit, and the new directorship could become a fact.
In the upshot of these administrative changes, and at the new director's explicit request, Wim van Binsbergen was once more called to administrative responsibilities, this time as leader of the Theme Group on Globalisation and as member of the African Studies Centre's Management Team -- the centre's small executive body. In addition to his research work at the African Studies Centre, and his professorial duties outside the centre, he discharged these two functions during most of Gerti Hesseling's eight years of directorship. Under her enthusiastic and sociable leadership the African Studies Centre was turned from an inward-looking to a high-profile institution, with excellent internal and external relations, full use of new technologies, and with a full package of new policy documents addressing every aspect of the internal administration.
Freedom from administrative duties, and time to work on numerous greatly delayed and dangerously obsolescent book projects, only dawned for Wim van Binsbergen in 2002, when the life-span of the first set of theme groups had been spent, and he found a congenial and relatively sheltered collegial environment in the new theme group on Agency in Africa, initiated and headed by Dr Mirjam de Bruijn from 2002.
Already in 1998 he had traded his Amsterdam chair in a social science faculty (in which he was succeeded by his African Studies Centre colleague Jan Abbink), for the Chair of Foundations of Intercultural Philosophy in the Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam; Gerti Hesseling, in her capacity of director of the African Studies Centre, loyally facilitated this change-over, and further obliged by accepting membership of the Board of Trustees for this chair. In 2000, a festschrift for Robert Buijtenhuijs was published, Trajectoires de libération en Afrique contemporaine, under the editorship of Dr Piet Konings (another sometime member of the Department of Political and Historical Studies), Wim van Binsbergen, and Gerti Hesseling -- as the most recent tangible proof of their lifelong collaboration.
The intellectual promises implied in Gerti Hesseling's PhD thesis, in the course of a quarter of a century were to materialise in the form of her important work for the Club du Sahel (late 1980s-early 1990s), her directorship of the Leiden African Studies Centre (1996-2004), and most recently, her accession to the newly created Koningsberger chair on Law and Peace at Utrecht University (2006).
Even when we make full allowance for the narrator's interested perspective, yet against the above micro-historic background Gerti Hesseling's accession to the Chair of Law and Peace comes as a source of the greatest joy and pride. It is the culmination of a long process, for which she herself has spared no hard work, and towards which very many people have contributed, including Wim van Binsbergen, who has constantly sought to extend to her the combination of loyal support and critical feedback one may expect from one's sometime PhD supervisor.
At the time of writing, the text of Gerti Hesseling's inaugural address is still under embargo, and the details of the attending festivities still remain to be disclosed. However, the announced title of the inaugural address: Recht en vrede kussen elkaar (cf. Psalm 85: 10 'Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other'), in the ears of her two sometime supervisors can only mean that their expectations, a quarter of a century ago, have come to full fruition.
return to the Topicalities page | return to the Shikanda portal
click
the image to return |
||||
|
 |
 |