Introducing: Matthias Lukkes
Matthias Lukkes recently joined the Institute for History as a PhD candidate within the NWO-funded project ‘Revisiting the Invention of Africa, 1590-1720’ led by Michiel van Groesen. Below he introduces himself.
On 1 February, I experienced an interesting change of scenery: from rowdy classrooms packed with secondary school students wrestling puberty to the more orderly, serene, if somewhat sterile, halls of the Huizinga building. Quite the shift! And while I sometimes miss hearing about the daily trials and tribulations of adolescents, it is a transition that I have grown accustomed to quite well by now.
Dutch sources on the history of West Africa
Adapting to the academic environment at Huizinga has surely been eased by the fact that both Leiden and my research topic are familiar territory. In 2023, I completed a Research Master’s degree in Colonial and Global History at the Rapenburg, writing a thesis on the lives and labors of bombas: enslaved and free African slave overseers in the Dutch transatlantic slave trade. Before taking up teaching in 2025, I worked for six months as a fellow at the Scheepvaartmuseum. There, I studied Dutch visual sources of coastal Ghana dating to the early eighteenth-century. I am grateful to now have been afforded four additional years to continue research on the early modern Dutch presence in West Africa, and to make this history more accessible to international scholars as well as a broader (and perhaps adolescent) Dutch audience.
Revisiting the Invention of Africa
In the project Revisiting the Invention of Africa I will revisit a central idea in African Studies: that “Africa” as marker of identity was initially a European invention shaped by increasingly negative stereotypes over the course of the seventeenth century. Over the next years, I aim to understand and explain why this process, coined by Valentin Mudimbe as "the invention of Africa", unfolded in this particular period. How did knowledge of “Africa” come into being, and who had the power to shape this process of identity formation? I believe that part of the answer lies in Dutch products of culture. During this period, the Dutch Republic dominated the European book market, producing texts, images, and maps that would impact European audiences. Examining where ideas in these materials came from, and how they contributed to a shared European understanding of “Africa” will be the core of my research in Leiden.
Ideas matter
Ideas matter. They inform the way we as humans act and interact with one another – that has become especially clear to me during my brief time working in the vibrant environment of a secondary school. Understanding how early modern cultural ideas about Africa became embedded in our collective understandings – ideas that promoted and justified practices of slavery, dispossession and overall colonial domination – is what drives my research.
Feel free to reach out if you have ideas about my research, or if you’d simply like to grab a coffee. I look forward to meeting colleagues within and beyond the Institute for History.