Professor Mehmood Shahid Essop Vawda, University of Cape Town, South Africa, ‘Entanglements and engagements: Researching modernity and coloniality in Southern Africa’.

Professor Vawda, University of Cape Town, will deliver the inaugural Annual Africa Lecture on Thursday 7 April 2022, in Queen's University Belfast.

Abstract

In this presentation I trace my various entanglements and scholarly engagements with the expectations of modernity in Africa, shaped, configured and expressed in instances such trade unionism, chieftaincy, land reform, political ethnic and religious mobilization, migration and xenophobia, the dissonant public culture of post-colonialism, among other issues that plague post-colonial societies in Africa. These are further amplified through ideas of progress, equality, oppression, exploitation, the overlapping use and abuse of cultural difference, racism, terror and bureaucracy, and its resolutions through various institutional forms such as democracy. I will show the various theoretical and field research interventions and shifts that I made that tries to grasp the specificity of the local, state centric initiatives and the larger historical trends and forces that are profoundly implicated, without necessarily determining it. I adopt an autobiographical lens on the understanding, as WEB Du Bois points out, my life has its significance because it is part of the problem in the historical present, and the future of Africa and the world alongside it. And it all starts with my studies at Queens University on the eve of the Thatcherite revolution.

Bio

Shahid Vawda graduated from the universities of Durban-Westville (BA), Queen's University Belfast (MA) and KwaZulu-Natal (PhD). Before taking up academic positions he worked in the trade union movement and at the educational NGO, the SACHED Trust in the 1980s, and as consultant researcher for the post-1994 local, provincial and national governments (land reform, housing, informal settlements, forestry re-structuring and heritage). His academic teaching and research has been at various universities in South Africa, some African countries and abroad, including participation in some UNESCO and International Council of Museums (ICOM) research workshops related to culture, heritage and diversity. He held positions as head of the departments of Anthropology at the Universities of Durban-Westville and Witwatersrand, and was the Head of the School of Social Science at the University of Witwatersrand.  He has been active on the boards of the International Council of Museums committee for history and archaeology (ICMAH), and the local South Africa ICOM committee, the Public Affairs Research Institute, Centre for Critical Diversity Studies, African Centre for Migration and Society and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research and was part of the Department of Science and Technology team that inaugurates from 2018 the MA in e-Science Research for Humanities. Currently he holds the Archie Mafeje Chair in Critical Humanities and the directorship of the School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics.

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