The Humanities to Come

Abstract

This article offers a few vignettes on the humanities in contemporary Africa. It suggests that the different fates of the humanities and social sciences have corresponded to changes in political conjunctures, particularly in relation to nationalism in the wake of independence and conceptions of development and neoliberalism after the Cold War. It further takes up the debates in South Africa, the last African country to confront the dilemmas of decolonization in the sphere of knowledge production, most acutely expressed through the Rhodes Must Fall movement and other student movements that emerged in 2015.