Original essays on political economy, historical memory, governance reform, and the social contract. Published here first. Extracts distributed on LinkedIn, Facebook, and X.
Marking Gibson Kente’s 23 July birthday — why the apartheid state, and after freedom the post-colonial state that jailed Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, feared the stage, and what that fear still asks of every government that follows.
Written alongside the doctorate-anniversary reflection — on the colonial design of “Native Higher Education,” the intellectuals who refused it, and why, for Black people, academic achievement is never a neutral act.
On the first anniversary of his doctorate, a reading of the official record — who earns South Africa's doctorates, in what fields, and what the numbers say about a continent learning to own its own knowledge.
On what would have been his 105th birthday, a tribute to Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa — the custodian who spent a century recording a nation's memory, and the question of who keeps that memory now.
Fikile Bam shared President Mandela's birthday, his prison, and a decade of his section on Robben Island — the jurist of land restitution, and the freedom the nation still owes.
On African Integration Day, Wole Soyinka's life shows the integration no trade treaty can sign — the shared imagination that must precede a common market.
South Africa's immigration crisis requires policy, not populism — a practical, constitutional and economically sustainable framework for migration governance, beyond deportation and beyond denial.