Engaging Mafeje's Ghost: Fort Hare and the Virtues of 'Homeland' Anthropology

Abstract

In 2015, in the year preceding the centenary of South Africa's oldest historically black university, the University of Fort Hare, the vice chancellor of the university, Dr. Mvuyo Tom, asked academics who were presenting inaugural lectures in that year to specifically reflect on their work and their disciplines in the light of the history of Fort Hare. In this article, which was first delivered as a lecture in May 2015, I take up the vice chancellor's request by reflecting on the role and significance of Fort Hare in the history and practice of social anthropology in southern Africa and in the Eastern Cape in particular. I ground my analysis in the critiques of the discipline that were initiated in southern Africa through the work of Archie Mafeje, an intellectual son of the Eastern Cape in the late 1960s and have recently been reproduced in various forms. To address this critique, I turn to the history of the discipline and its two main South African variants, social anthropology...