
Dr Khwezi Mkhize
African Fellow, December 2022 - January 2023
Home Institution: University of the Witwatersrand
Khwezi is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of African Literature at Wits University. He is co-editor of the journal African Studies, also based at Wits. Aside from researching and teaching on various topics in African literary and cultural studies he is involved in a number of edited book projects. The first, Foundational African Writers: Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi and Es’kia Mphahlele, co-edited with Bhekizizwe Peterson and Makhosazana Xaba, was published in June of 2022 by Wits Press. The second, Black Archives and Intellectual Histories: Cultures of Thought in South Africa and the Black Diaspora, co-edited with Christopher Ouma and Mandisa Haarhoff, is in its advanced stages. The third, Humanities and Pedagogies in the Global South, co-edited with Dan Ojwang, is also in its advanced states. He will be at IASH to complete the manuscript of his first book, A Home-Made Empire: South Africa’s Imperium.
Project Title: A Home-Made Empire: South Africa’s Imperium
A Home Made Empire: South Africa’s Imperium is the first book length study that engages with South Africa as an imperial nation-state. It emphasizes the role of British imperialism and liberalism in the development of segregationist ideology and racial rule in South Africa. It argues that while the era of high imperialism came to an end with the First World War, this history roughly coincided with South Africa’s coming into existence as a nation-state in 1910 and that empire was not quite dismantled as much as reconfigured into the Union of South Africa’s structure of state racism. In this context, racist state-craft was unthinkable without the itineraries of imperial rule that informed the making and sustenance of white dominance in the British colonies during the nineteenth century. A Home-Made Empire brings a different focus on the movement and work of black intellectuals working against colonialism, racial rule and imperialism in South Africa. Reading the work of these intellectuals through the prisms of anti-racism, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism adds a needed global and diasporic dimension to South African intellectual history, a history that has often remained in the shadow of the singular national history of apartheid. At the heart of my exploration of black anti-colonial and trans-imperial cultures is black print culture, particularly the periodical. Whether in the form of John Tengo Jabavu’s Imvo Zabantsundu, The Industrial and Commercial Worker’s Union’s The Worker’s Herald, the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s The Negro World or the Chamber of Commerce funded Umteteli Wa Bantu, periodicals provided the most sustained evidence of engagement with black audiences in South Africa and across the Black Atlantic. Aside from arguing for the privileging of periodicals in the study of black intellectual cultures in South Africa, my research interests place me within broader conversations among Africanists and scholars working on the Black Atlantic about the material forms through which transnationalisms of various kinds were projected across space in the colonial world.