Silencing Africa? – Anthropological Knowledge at the University of the Witwatersrand1

Abstract

In this research report I construct an intellectual history of anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. Adopting a conjunctural approach, the report thinks through four moments in the genealogy of anthropology at Wits, from the establishment of the Bantu Studies Department in the 1920s, the neo-Marxist turn in the 1970s, the cultural turn in the 1990s, to the contemporary Department of Social Anthropology. At each moment, I trace the ways in which African thought and critique has been and is silenced to reproduce colonial unknowing in and the intellectual enclaving of anthropology in South Africa.