SIETAR Europa – Special Interest Group on Africa

Welcome to the Website of the SIETAR Europa Special Interest Group on Africa

In recognition of the role of French in Francophone Africa our website will be in both French and English. We will also organise events in French.

What is this Special Interest Group on Africa?

This group was born out of a love of and passionate interest in Africa. There have been many conversations over the years about a need to increase awareness of Africa among interculturalists. It has been a long time in the making but now we finally have a group that will focus on African culture.

The current purpose of the group, and it may evolve, can be summarised as follows:

Increase awareness:

To counter the low awareness in SIETAR Europa of the complexity of African culture, the SIG will seek to increase awareness of Africa in all its wonderful complexity.

Make Material available:

What material there is on African cultures is not readily visible. The SIG will create a repository of available material and, working with suitable partners, identify possible opportunities for research.

The SIG will look to its members and associates to contribute knowledge and insights and foster the development of the group.

Membership

Who is this SIG for? While the SIG is created by members of SIETAR Europa and SIETAR Switzerland we consider it imperative that we also have input from those not currently SIETAR members and we would like them to join as SIG Associates.

But most of all we want to encourage Africans to join or group as we want the perspective to be largely an African one. While the perspective of non-Africans is important, we are after all talking about intercultural matters, without the African perspective we will not meet our purpose.

See our Membership page to read more.

SIETAR AFRICA?

Many have asked if this is the start of the formation of SIETAR Africa – it is not. This SIG is hugely supportive of the idea of the setting up of a SIETAR Africa – or maybe individual African Country SIETARs but the creation of such is not the objective or purpose of the SIG. But we will offer our support to any individuals who wish to do so.

Artwork

We spent some time trying to find suitable artwork for our website. It is an enormous challenge to find an image that can represent the incredibly complex continent that is Africa. And avoiding stereotypes is also important.

We settled, for now, on this precolonial map of Africa but we will seek input from our members once we established. While we may never find something that suits everyone we will try.