The Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) presents the 2024 Archie Mafeje Memorial Lecture focusing on migration and democracy, with specific attention to the issue of new types of academic migrants and the implication for universality in knowledge generation and dissemination. The event will be hosted by the HSRC’s Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA). This institute leads and coordinates engagements in Africa, acting as a catalyst for research and policy implementation across the continent. The annual Archie Mafeje Memorial Lecture is a critical flagship of AISA’s work toward expanding the depth and breadth of African agency in producing knowledge that informs policy and practice in Africa.

As we reflect on the legacy of Professor Archie Monwabisi Mafeje as a Pan-Africanist intellectual, activist and cosmopolitan scholar, the 2024 Archie Mafeje Memorial Lecture seeks to think about and engage his teachings, arguing beyond his ideological and philosophical orientation. In recent years, Africans have and continue to face challenges of underdevelopment and stagnant socio-political conditions. Therefore, in an attempt to imagine where Africa and Africans should be insofar as prosperous and knowledge ecology is concerned, it is critical to channel the thought leadership in Africa through radically transformative policies. Mafeje posited that Africanity was the basis of the ontological reality of African people, as people cannot exist outside their historicity, which necessarily informs their lived experience. So, we have to contend with questions that bear transformative influence in the institutions of knowledge and policy implementation. This means we must ask questions that persuades the value of theory-research praxis, knowledge-informed interrelations, and, in our mandate as HSRC, consider the meaning of research for policymaking.

Date: 25 March 2024

Time: 10:00 – 14:00

VENUE: Javett Art Centre, University of Pretoria,
23 Lynnwood Road, Hatfield, Pretoria

Contact: Tshiamo Gaetsewe TGaetsewe@hsrc.ac.za

Concept note can be downloaded here.