Search

Sociology as a scholarly vocation within the university in South Africa is bedevilled with the claims of its demise. Both the discipline and a cross-section of its practitioners seem beset with 'status anxiety' and what I call 'status ambiguity.' In this presidential address, delivered to the 2005 Congress of the South African Sociological Association (SASA). I examine these claims. The paper examines the sources of the anxiety. It argues that the claims of sociology's death are grossly exaggerated, as Mark Twain might have put it. I argue that if we were to operate on a wider canvas we might have persuaded ourselves to the position that the ebbs and flows in a discipline like sociology are not evidence of 'death', 'fall' or whatever else we might want to call it: it is not even an evidence of a discipline that is yet to attain maturity. The key to doing 'sociology beyond despair' and the recovery of disciplinary nerve requires a commitment to endogeneity, with a distinct commitment to epistemic intervention in global sociology: it requires us to take our locales seriously: it requires us to take ourselves seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Africanisation remains a popular idiom for intellectual decolonisation, it raises difficult issues around citizenship, identity and belonging, alongside their constitutive dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Using the "politics of belonging" as a conceptual frame, I unpack the tensions involved in grounding decolonisation in a substantive insistence on Africanness. This lens centres important questions like who can successfully claim Africanity and what it means to be intellectually African. Reflecting on the former, both historically and in the aftermath of student calls for a decolonised African university in South African higher education, I show that Africanness is rarely settled by first principles. There are often competing claims regarding the African for whom representation is sought. I therefore contend that the intuitiveness of framing decolonisation as Africanisation elides the politics of belonging that characterises talk of making universities more African, which is sometimes shaped by exclusionary configurations of race, class, nation and indigeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archie Mafeje believes that intellectual liberation is a struggle worth fighting and that it is as legitimate as any other. Accordingly, African intellectuals have to make their mark and cease to be dominated by their Euro-American counterparts. Mafeje believes, too, that knowledge production is not only ideological, but also political. In his early work on epistemological and methodological issues in the social sciences, he allows his scholarship to lead his politics. Yet, in his later work on knowledge decolonisation as Africa's "second independence," he allows his politics to lead his scholarship. Focusing on Mafeje's notion of Africanity, I discuss these issues in greater detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1960s, during the years in which apartheid was to become fully entrenched in South Africa and black Africans relegated to second-class citizen status, there was an apparently paradoxical growth of interest in art circles in the art of black Africans. Two major players in the Johannesburg art market who acquired large collections of historical African art and promoted contemporary forms said to be African in quality are identified as having fuelled this interest. This article traces the founding of both the Günther Gallery and the Totem Meneghelli Gallery and the influence they exerted on the artists they exhibited and on other emerging galleries in Johannesburg—such as Gallery 101 (later the Pelmama Gallery)—in their constructions of particular African themes and aesthetics in the 1960s and early 1970s. The fact that many of the gallerists involved in this Africa-philia were immigrants from Europe is examined in relation to the apparent paradox noted at the outset and to the politics of race in the South African context and of "primitivism" in the wider art world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ali A Mazrui’s academic and intellectual fame provoked both deep admiration and severe criticism, causing his intellectual legacy to be caught up between what the South Sudanese scholar Dustan M Wai depicted as ‘Mazruiphilia’ (hagiographical celebration) and ‘Mazruiphobia’ (critical bashing). Mazrui died on 12 October 2014, leaving behind a ‘supermarket of ideas’ and a rich archive that easily immortalises him. This article aims to transcend both Mazruiphilia and Mazruiphobia through the adoption of an approach which avoids a sententious orientation while critically engaging with Mazrui’s contributions to the topical questions of the invention of Africa, Africanity and the African condition. From Mazrui’s ‘supermarket of ideas’ the article takes one of the debates in his expansive work – that of Africanity – as its departure point to engage with his contribution to African Studies and pay tribute to this African intellectual giant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]