African Studies at the University of Basel
Studying with focus on Africa

The University of Basel and its Centre for African Studies offer numerous options to focus on Africa during your studies:

Since 2002 the Centre for African Studies Basel has offered an MA in interdisciplinary African Studies. The programme integrates the specific competencies in African Studies at the University of Basel into interdisciplinary training that combines natural and social sciences and humanities.

Africa-related courses are also offered within the framework of other BA and MA study programmes and several subject areas provide the option of choosing Africa as a regional focus.

Around 40 students are currently registered for the MA African Studies programme, and many students from other programmes participate in courses and engage with themes related to African studies.

MA African Studies at the ZASB

We study Africa to acquire knowledge about the continent and to understand our world. .Our specialized interdisciplinary Master’s Degree in African Studies draws on the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. Key thematic fields are media and imagination, knowledge production and transfer, governance and politics, public health and social life, and environment and development. All of these are brought to bear on the urgent task of educating critical and inquiring minds.

Why African Studies?

Colonial conquest and suppression has caused immense hardship for some and immeasurably benefitted others. The noble intentions of the ‘civilizing mission’ the colonizers’ put forward distracted from the exploitation of human and natural resources. But also actors in countries that never formally owned colonies were – and still are – among the beneficiaries of the colonial project, which laid the basis for the general economic structure of our world. To this day, charitable rhetoric concerning Africa conceals notions of superiority and tangible economic and geopolitical interests.

Degree programmes with focus on Africa

MA African Studies

An interdisciplinary focus on Africa

The MA African Studies program helps students develop knowledge about Africa’s past, current and future role in framing the globalized world. It also encourages them to critically engage with global knowledge production and the representation of reality.

MA Critical Urbanisms

Cooperation with the University of Cape Town

The Master’s Degree in Critical Urbanisms at the University of Basel is a four-semester English-taught program that trains a new generation of graduates to think and act beyond divisions of urban versus rural, and North versus South in order to address the complexity of urban lifeworlds in the twenty-first century.

History

Europe and Africa in a global perspective

Since 1989, African history has been taught at the Department of History; and since 2001, a professorship at the Department focuses on Africa. The history of Africa also plays a major role in the MA programme "Europäische Geschichte in globaler Perspektive" with a focus on the dimensions of entanglement, identity and conflict in the various periods.

Master of Science in Epidemiology

Interested in the health of populations?

The MSc degree in Epidemiology at the University of Basel is run by the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH). It centres on the links between epidemiology and public health and on epidemiological research topics such as population-based clinical or interventions research and analysis.

Compare, understand, explain cultures

BA Ethnology and MA Anthropology

The regional focus of anthropology at the University of Basel is sub-Saharan Africa, supplemented by Latin America, Oceania and South East Asia. Topical courses are centred on our research specializations in political anthropology, urban anthropology, visual studies, media anthropology, and medical anthropology.

Courses

Most Africa-related courses are linked to the MA African Studies in the university's online course directory. The detailed directory includes additional relevant courses offered by the University of Basel and other universities.