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The international roundtable on Asian Studies in Africa that took place between 9-11 November, 2012 at Chisamba, Lusaka, Zambia, was premised on the realisation that though contact between Africa and Asia stretches centuries back and has intensified and diversified in the last few decades through capital investment, commerce, political alliances and cultural transfers of knowledge, there has been no corresponding or systematic academic engagements with past and present African and Asian realities.

This lack is more glaring on the African continent where the study of Asia is still largely absent. A search for African universities offering Asian still draws a blank. This is despite the existence of some such programmes in isolated places such as at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, the recently established Centre for Asian studies at the University of Ghana and attempts to do so at the University of Dar-es-Salaam. Since the roundtable of 2012, and two major international conferences, one in Ghana and the other in Dar-es-Salaam in 2015 and 2018 respectively, discussions on how to build capacity in Asian studies in Africa have continued.

In the proposed presentation I hope to provide an overview of the current state of Asian Studies in South Central Africa as well as attempt an appreciation of challenges one encounters in trying to promote Asian studies in Africa. Even though the number of Africans with PhD’s on Asia has continued to increase, this has not resulted in the establishments of academic programmes specific on Asia. Why has this been the case? I hope to address this question.

Drawing on my own research experience in Vietnam and the conference I attended in Ho Chi Minh City and Phan Thiet in 2018, I will also attempt a discussion of why studying Asia can be of more relevance to Africa. This is particularly important at a time when a number of Asian and African countries are working together to develop academic and research agenda’s that could offer possible solutions to Africa’s current social and economic problems.