Ineke van Kessel

Background

Ineke van Kessel was born on the 27th of June, 1948 in Roermond, Netherlands; the daughter of a florist Joseph and Ans (Teunissen) van Kessel.

Education

Ineke van Kessel attended the University of Leiden, where she received a Master of Arts degree cum laude in 1984 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1995.

Career

Ineke van Kessel began her career as a journalist at a foreign desk for Dutch National News Agency in The Hague, Netherlands, where she served from 1969 to 1988. In 1988, she joined the University of Leiden as a researcher at African Studies Centre (ASC). At the ASC, she served for more than 10 years as a member of the seminar committee, co-organizing seminar and conference programs. She was one of the co-organizers with Nina Tellegen of the public festivities around the 50th anniversary of the ASC in 1998, which included a very well attended public event around the theme of Africans in the Netherlands, with considerable attendant publicity in the media.

After van Kessel's retirement in 2013 she remained involved with student supervision, some teaching and a bit of journalism while continuing her research on contemporary South Africa and 19th century Gold Coast history. She also works as a freelance journalist specializing in current events in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Besides her scientific research and publications, Ineke van Kessel remained involved in journalistic work for Dutch media, following African current affairs for the monthly magazine Onze Wereld, now defunct, for more than 15 years.

As the author, Ineke van Kessel wrote South Africa: Media and Journalists in a Divided Society in 1988, Violence in the Vaal; report by a Dutch Violence Observation Mission to the Vaal Triangle in South Africa in 1993, Beyond Our Wildest Dreams: the United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa in 2000. Her book, Serdadu Afrika di Hindia Belanda 1831-1945 came out in 2011. She has published numerous articles in Dutch and in English.

Achievements

• Ineke van Kessel is an outstanding historian and prolific author of books on South Africa, as well as a contributor to other books, journals, and periodicals. Her research on the history of the Black Dutchmen (Belanda Hitam), West African soldiers in the Dutch East Indies Army, resulted in a book in Dutch, with a translation in Bahasa Indonesia and numerous articles in English, Dutch and French. It formed the basis of a successful exhibition in the Royal Tropical Museum in Amsterdam in 2005 which subsequently traveled for several years to quite a few Dutch museums. She received a Dutch journalism Award in 1985, for coverage of South African elections.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Vanguard or Vandals: Youth, Politics and Conflict in Africa (African Dynamics)

    (This book contains a range of original studies on one of ...)

    2004
  • Beyond Our Wildest Dreams: The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa (Reconsiderations in Southern African History)

    (As anyone who lived through that decade knows, the 1980s ...)

    2000
  • Nelson Mandela in een notendop 2010
  • Zwarte Hollanders : Afrikaanse soldaten in Nederlands-Indië 2005

Connections

Ineke van Kessel is married to Johan van Workum.

Father:

Joseph Kessel

Mother:

Ans (Teunissen) van Kessel

husband:

Johan van Workum