Aristide Zolberg and African Studies

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In a 2010 interview, Aristide Zolberg—the pioneer Africanist political scientist who died on April 12 at the age of 81—described his early interest in the politics of a continent in the first throes of independence: “India was a beacon of the future, and of the triumph of the powerless over the powerful. Africa, and in […]

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Why does South African history continue to be written primarily by white scholars?

In an eloquent and insightful review of the new Cambridge History of South Africa, historian Andrew MacDonald broached this elephant in our collective bedroom. A work of enormous labour, this two volume, one thousand page summation of the radical or “revisionist” generation of scholarship includes a striking minority of black contributors—a troubling fact after over forty years of self-consciously progressive South African […]

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