Published Work

This article discusses the contemporary history of South African social science in relation to the Azanian Philosophical Tradition. It is addressed directly to white scholars, urging introspection with regard to the ethical question of epistemic justice in relation to the evolution of the social sciences in conqueror South Africa. I consider the establishment of the professional social sciences at South African universities in the early twentieth century as a central part of the epistemic project of conqueror South Africa. In contrast, the Azanian Philosophical Tradition is rooted in African philosophy and articulated in resistance against the injustice of conquest and colonialism in southern Africa since the seventeenth century. It understands conquest as the fundamental historical antagonism shaping the philosophical, political, and material problem of ‘South Africa’. The tradition is silenced by and exceeds the political and epistemic strictures of the settler colonial nation state and social science.

In this paper I trace knowledge flows between South Africa and the United States in the early twentieth century. I analyse these flows as parts within a broader white supremacist political project and technology of power. Focusing on the early Union period from the 1910s to the 1930s, I explore links, networks and exchanges within and across imperial and colonial spaces that spanned the Atlantic. These include institutional, financial, intellectual and personal relationships and networks between philanthropic institutions, race relations ‘experts’ and social scientists. In particular, I focus on the South African Institute of Race Relations’ role in importing education models from the American South and shaping narratives around ‘native education’ in South Africa. In this case, positivist science functioned to instil and root a racial order. I argue that attending to the circulation and entanglement of ideas between these global spheres offers new insight into the genealogy of anthropological and social scientific knowledge during the historical conjuncture of the Union period.

Despite Archie Mafeje's insistence in 1998 that anthropology is incompatible with the intellectual and political project of independent Africans, anthropology remains a robust discipline in South Africa. Mafeje's critique did not simply examine the historical political and pragmatic complicity of anthropology in colonial administration, but identified and interrogated anthropology's epistemological collaboration in conquest and colonialism in Africa. In this paper, I take up Mafeje's critique of anthropology, reading it into a history of the discipline at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. I argue that despite apparent paradigm shifts in anthropological praxis over the last century, the underlying settler colonial schema and internal tropes of the discipline endure largely intact in the present. To support this contention, I trace continuities in anthropological praxis from the 'colonial past' into the 'constitutional present', delineating the silencing of conquest and settler colonialism by anthropology.