27th June, 2012
An Africa expert and emeritus professor of anthropology, Prof. Sandra Barnes, would in Lagos on June 29, deliver a public lecture, organised by the Obafemi Awolowo Institute of Government and Public Policy (OAIGPP), Lekki Town, in concert with the Lagos State University.
The lecture entitled: “Mushin in Lagos: The Past and the Present” will hold at the Malaria Research Auditorium, at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), Ikeja, Lagos.
It would be the first OAIGPP-organised lecture under the leadership of its new and first director-general, Prof. Adigun Agbaje, formerly a deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Ibadan.
Leading the pack of dignitaries to the lecture is Chief Adebisi Akande, chairman of the OAIGPP Board of Trustees, serving and former state governors, traditional rulers, local government officials, academics, students and Lagosians at large.
The guest lecturer, Emeritus Prof. Barnes, of the University of Pennsylvania, United States’ Department of Anthropology, has wide Nigerian experience, with his 1986 book, Patrons and Power: Creating a Political Community in Metropolitan Lagos, receiving the Amaury Talbot Prize for best book on Africa. The book was jointly published by the Indiana University Press, the International African Institute and Manchester University Press.
She also authored Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New (1989, with an expanded second edition released in 1997), aside from being the former president of the African Studies Association of the United States. She has also served on the board of directors of the American Council of Learned Societies, the African Studies Association, the Stanford University Humanities Centre, and the Foundation for the Advancement of International Medical Education and Research.
OAIGPP is a non-profit, independent think-tank and research institute. It is envisioned as an independent but progressive organization capable of assessing a government against its declared objectives and evaluating its standards against civilized and humane practice for the benefit of society.
To this end, the driving objective of the institute shall be to encourage innovative thinking and visionary intellectual pursuits capable of solving the problems of governance in a novel and humane manner.