The Africa Institute has unveiled plans for its new, 32,000-square-metre campus in Sharjah, designed by Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye.
The institute is slated to welcome its first set of students in 2023, said Hoor Al Qasimi, who founded the organisation in 2018. It has been programming events and research seasons since that first announcement, but with the confirmation of plans for the building, moves closer to its full ambition of being a premier research institute for African studies.
The new site will house archives, a library, and lecture and performance halls, as well as host visiting scholars and fellows, and stage art and music events. As a degree-granting institute for students earning their master's and PhD qualifications, the institute will also effectively function as a university campus.
Adjaye, who recently designed the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, said he was inspired by North African domestic architecture for his latest creation. He proposed a campus composed of five tower blocks, with air circulating between these structures allowing for pools and gardens on the ground floor as places for scholars to talk and meet. The reddish-brick colour of the design is a nod to the iron oxide typically found in North African soil.
“In making a new institute, we wanted to make sure that we were rooting the discourse in the north of Africa and the Arab and Middle East peninsula,” said Adjaye in a press conference. “We wanted to understand the architecture of communities that were incubating all kinds of scholarly life and also agrarian life – and to think about the modernity of cities, and to see if we could create an architecture that would understand the history, but also look to the future, to create a new skyline.”
The design for the building is superb, departing from the glass and steel style of recent constructions in the Mena region, in favour of a more authentic regional vernacular. It is also enormous, and a testament to the investment Sharjah is making in this new centre of research.
The institute will sit next to Africa Hall, the lecture theatre that Sheikh Sultan Al Qasimi built in 1976 to host the Afro-Arab Symposium. That event was a product of the solidarity movements of pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism, and brought together important African and Arab scholars, economists and thinkers to understand how the two regions could collaborate. In invoking this legacy, Hoor Al Qasimi knowingly returns to a moment of transnational support among non-western nations, which the institute will explore in the realm of culture and social sciences.
The geographical position of the UAE, the institute director Salah M. Hassan noted, makes it a natural site from which to understand the crossroads of migration and trade that traverse the Arabian Sea.
“This area has had a host of different types of population mixing and linkages with Africa,” says the scholar, who is also a professor at Cornell University. “One of the major assets of this institute is that it will be exploring lesser-known diasporas of the Indian Ocean, in addition to those across the Atlantic, which is very well known.”
Al Qasimi also revealed that influential curator Okwui Enwezor had given his archives to the institute. Enwezor was an important influence on Al Qasimi, who established the Sharjah Art Foundation in 2009. She has often told the story of her being exposed to the potential of contemporary art after seeing his 2002 Documenta. That year's version of the event, an art exhibition held in Kassel every five years, is widely credited with introducing works from the Global South to the contemporary art world, and Enwezor became the leader in a generation that substantially revised art's geographical boundaries.
Born in Nigeria, Enwezor also helped to define the field of contemporary African art, and Hassan worked with him on the journal Nka, which the two founded with Nigerian-American artist Olu Oguibe. Enwezor will also posthumously curate the next Sharjah Biennial, which he had been due to direct, via a team of curators and scholars who will carry out his ideas. That biennial has been postponed to 2023, when the Africa Institute should also open its doors.
The donation of Enwezor's archive is a high-profile starting point for what will become an important aspect of the institute. African archives – the key to understanding the past – are mostly held in European or American museums and universities, or have not been properly catalogued, digitised or stored.
“There are so many archives of intellectuals and families of major thinkers in Africa that have been scattered or are in disarray,” says Hassan. "We are hoping to be part of them … This is part of our rethinking the ideas of postcoloniality and decolonisation.”
Al Qasimi described Enwezor's donation as a great honour. "As he said, the West doesn't have to own or to monopolise the archives."
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Sanju
Produced: Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Rajkumar Hirani
Director: Rajkumar Hirani
Cast: Ranbir Kapoor, Vicky Kaushal, Paresh Rawal, Anushka Sharma, Manish’s Koirala, Dia Mirza, Sonam Kapoor, Jim Sarbh, Boman Irani
Rating: 3.5 stars
Medicus AI
Started: 2016
Founder(s): Dr Baher Al Hakim, Dr Nadine Nehme and Makram Saleh
Based: Vienna, Austria; started in Dubai
Sector: Health Tech
Staff: 119
Funding: €7.7 million (Dh31m)
ELIO
Starring: Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldana, Brad Garrett
Directors: Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, Adrian Molina
Rating: 4/5
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Sole survivors
- Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
- George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
- Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
- Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
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THE CLOWN OF GAZA
Director: Abdulrahman Sabbah
Starring: Alaa Meqdad
Rating: 4/5
The specs
Engine: 4.0-litre flat-six
Torque: 450Nm at 6,100rpm
Transmission: 7-speed PDK auto or 6-speed manual
Fuel economy, combined: 13.8L/100km
On sale: Available to order now
Ferrari 12Cilindri specs
Engine: naturally aspirated 6.5-liter V12
Power: 819hp
Torque: 678Nm at 7,250rpm
Price: From Dh1,700,000
Available: Now
Blackpink World Tour [Born Pink] In Cinemas
Starring: Rose, Jisoo, Jennie, Lisa
Directors: Min Geun, Oh Yoon-Dong
Rating: 3/5
Venue: Sharjah Cricket Stadium
Date: Sunday, November 25
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Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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Killing of Qassem Suleimani
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Our family matters legal consultant
Name: Hassan Mohsen Elhais
Position: legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants.
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
What can victims do?
Always use only regulated platforms
Stop all transactions and communication on suspicion
Save all evidence (screenshots, chat logs, transaction IDs)
Report to local authorities
Warn others to prevent further harm
Courtesy: Crystal Intelligence
UAE SQUAD
UAE team
1. Chris Jones-Griffiths 2. Gio Fourie 3. Craig Nutt 4. Daniel Perry 5. Isaac Porter 6. Matt Mills 7. Hamish Anderson 8. Jaen Botes 9. Barry Dwyer 10. Luke Stevenson (captain) 11. Sean Carey 12. Andrew Powell 13. Saki Naisau 14. Thinus Steyn 15. Matt Richards
Replacements
16. Lukas Waddington 17. Murray Reason 18. Ahmed Moosa 19. Stephen Ferguson 20. Sean Stevens 21. Ed Armitage 22. Kini Natuna 23. Majid Al Balooshi
Salah in numbers
€39 million: Liverpool agreed a fee, including add-ons, in the region of €39m (nearly Dh176m) to sign Salah from Roma last year. The exchange rate at the time meant that cost the Reds £34.3m - a bargain given his performances since.
13: The 25-year-old player was not a complete stranger to the Premier League when he arrived at Liverpool this summer. However, during his previous stint at Chelsea, he made just 13 Premier League appearances, seven of which were off the bench, and scored only twice.
57: It was in the 57th minute of his Liverpool bow when Salah opened his account for the Reds in the 3-3 draw with Watford back in August. The Egyptian prodded the ball over the line from close range after latching onto Roberto Firmino's attempted lob.
7: Salah's best scoring streak of the season occurred between an FA Cup tie against West Brom on January 27 and a Premier League win over Newcastle on March 3. He scored for seven games running in all competitions and struck twice against Tottenham.
3: This season Salah became the first player in Premier League history to win the player of the month award three times during a term. He was voted as the division's best player in November, February and March.
40: Salah joined Roger Hunt and Ian Rush as the only players in Liverpool's history to have scored 40 times in a single season when he headed home against Bournemouth at Anfield earlier this month.
30: The goal against Bournemouth ensured the Egyptian achieved another milestone in becoming the first African player to score 30 times across one Premier League campaign.
8: As well as his fine form in England, Salah has also scored eight times in the tournament phase of this season's Champions League. Only Real Madrid's Cristiano Ronaldo, with 15 to his credit, has found the net more often in the group stages and knockout rounds of Europe's premier club competition.
If you go
Flying
Despite the extreme distance, flying to Fairbanks is relatively simple, requiring just one transfer in Seattle, which can be reached directly from Dubai with Emirates for Dh6,800 return.
Touring
Gondwana Ecotours’ seven-day Polar Bear Adventure starts in Fairbanks in central Alaska before visiting Kaktovik and Utqiarvik on the North Slope. Polar bear viewing is highly likely in Kaktovik, with up to five two-hour boat tours included. Prices start from Dh11,500 per person, with all local flights, meals and accommodation included; gondwanaecotours.com