Kwame Nimako (MA, Sociology; PhD Economics, University of Amsterdam) is the founder and director of the Summer School on Black Europe (BESS) based in Amsterdam since 2007. BESS is a two-week intensive annual program on Citizenship, Race and Ethnic Relations that has welcomed more than 350 participants working on these issues in Europe. He taught International Relations in the Department of Political Sciences at the Universiteit van Amsterdam (1991-2013). He held visiting professor positions in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley (Spring 2018 and 2012-2015) and at the University of Suriname (2011). He was also a fellow in the Faculty of Economics at the Tinbergen Institute (1989-1991), and he taught Race and Ethnic Relations in the Department of Education (1986- 1991). He has also given lectures at universities, conferences and organizations in the UK, Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, South Africa and Sweden.
Dr. Nimako is President of OBEE Consultancy, which he founded in 1992, and which has consulted with several private and public institutions including the National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy (NiNsee) in Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Municipal Council and the Dutch Ministry of Home Affairs. In 1995 and 1996 he was a rapporteur on the evaluation of Social Renewal Projects in five cities in the Netherlands. In 1996-1997, he was the Principal Research Consultant for Focus Consultancy Ltd (UK) on the ACP and ODT* Migrants in Europe Project commissioned by the General-Secretariat of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States (in Brussels).
Dr. Nimako is the author or co-author of more than thirty books, reports and guidebooks - and a larger number of book chapters and articles – on economic development, ethnic relations, social policy, urban renewal, and migration. His most recent book is The Dutch Atlantic: Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (with Glenn Willemsen) (London, Pluto Press, 2011). He recently completed a report (in Dutch, with Mano Delea and Mitchell Esajas) for NiNsee Why Freedom could not wait: Dutch Parliamentary Debates on the Abolition of Dutch Slavery (1862) (NiNsee 2020).
His most recent book chapters include: Power, (Mis)representation, and Black European Studies, In: Black Studies in Europe: Questioning the Politics of Knowledge, editors, Nicole Gregoire, Sarah Fila-Bakabadio and Jacinthe Mazzoccheti (Forthcoming: Northwestern University Press 2021); Lost and Found: sovereignties and state formations in Africa and Asia, In: Routledge Handbook of Africa-Asia Relations, edited by Pedro Miguel Amakasu Raposo de Medeiros Carvalho, David Arase and Scarlett Cornelissen (Routledge: London 2018); Reorienting the world: with or without Africa? (MnM Working Paper No.5; University of South Australia, 2011); African regional groupings and emerging Chinese conglomerates‟ in Barbara Hogenboom and Alex E Fernandez Jilberto (eds) Big business and economic development: conglomerates and economic groups in developing countries and transition economies under globalization (Routledge, London, 2007); ‘Location and Social Thought in the Black: A Testimony of Africana Intellectual Tradition’ In: Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker, Postcoloniality,-Decoloniality-Black Critique: Joints and Fissures (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014); ‘Let Citizenship Blossom’ In: B.S. Santos (Ed) Letters to the Europeans (Coimbra: ALICE ERC Project, 218-233; 2014); and ‘Conceptual Clarity, Please! On the uses and abuses of the concepts of ‘slave’ and ‘trade’ in the study of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery’ In: Marta Araujo and Silvia Rodriguez Maeso, ‘Race’, racism and knowledge production: debate on history, political struggles and the academia in Europe and the Americas (Palgrave, New York, 2015).
He co-wrote “Theorizing Black Europe and African Diaspora: Implications for Citizenship, Nativism and Xenophobia”, (with Stephen Small) in Black Europe and the African Diaspora, Darlene Clark Hine and Trica Danielle Keaton, (editors) University of Illinois Press, Urbana Champaign, 2009; and “Collective Memory of Slavery in Great Britain and The Netherlands”, (with Stephen Small) in Marten Schalkwijk and Stephen Small (editors) New Perspectives on Slavery and Colonialism in the Caribbean, Amrit Publishers, The Hague, 2012, pp. 92-115. He is currently writing a book with Stephen Small entitled Public History, Museums and Collective Memory of slavery and its legacies in England and The Netherlands.
Dr. Nimako is a specialist on citizenship and migration in Europe, with a primary focus on the African diaspora in nations across Europe, and its distinctive experiences vis a vis other racialized minorities. He has knowledge and expertise on key dimensions of politics, policy and practice across Europe, past and present; and the ways in which European and nation-specific laws shape Black people’s lives. He also has knowledge of, and contacts with, the most important Black and multi-cultural organizations and community groups across Europe working for social justice, inclusion and citizenship. Dr. Nimako is unique in bringing key insights on the economics of Black people’s experiences in Europe – and the relations between Europe and a range of African nations - to debates in sociology and cultural studies.
