Issue

Vol. 17 No. 1 (2013): African Sociological Review

1 - Negation and Affirmation: a critique of sociology in South Africa

https://doi.org/10.57054/asr.v17i1.3797
Bongani Nyoka
Education & Skills Development Unit Human Sciences Research Council Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8478-8725

Corresponding Author(s) : Bongani Nyoka

bnyoka@hsrc.ac.za

African Sociological Review, Vol. 17 No. 1 (2013): African Sociological Review

Abstract

This paper critically evaluates the epistemological basis of the academic discipline of sociology in South Africa. In particular, it contextualises, and therefore subjects to critical scrutiny, the assumptions made (and not made) by South African sociologists in their writings about the discipline of sociology in South Africa. Secondly, it seeks to make an epistemic intervention on the current debates on epistemological decolonisation of the social sciences in the South African academy. The issues raised in the paper no doubt go beyond the South African academy and speak to issues raised by sociologists in other parts of the African continent and in the Third World generally.

Keywords

academic dependency endogeneity sociology South Africa
Bongani Nyoka. (2014). 1 - Negation and Affirmation: a critique of sociology in South Africa. African Sociological Review, 17(1), 2–24. https://doi.org/10.57054/asr.v17i1.3797
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Author Biography

Bongani Nyoka, Education & Skills Development Unit Human Sciences Research Council Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000

Dr Bongani Nyoka is a Lecturer in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of South Africa and an MA from the University of the Western Cape. A Rhodes University alumnus, he graduated from Rhodes in the 2000s with a BSocSc in Political Studies, Philosophy and Industrial Sociology and, subsequently, an honours in Political Studies. He has worked as a Researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council and the Archie Mafeje Research Institute, respectively. He was recently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Johannesburg. Dr Nyoka was a 2013 laureate of CODESRIA. He is the author of two books, Archie Mafeje: Voices of Liberation (HSRC Press, 2019) and The Social and Political Thought of Archie Mafeje (Wits University Press, 2020).

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