On conquest and anthropology in South Africa

Abstract

Despite Archie Mafeje’s insistence in 1998 that anthropology is incompatible with the intellectual and political project of independent Africans,1 anthropology remains a robust discipline in South Africa. Mafeje’s critique did not simply examine the historical political and pragmatic complicity of anthropology in colonial administration, but identified and interrogated anthropology’s epistemological collaboration in conquest and colonialism in Africa. In this paper, I take up Mafeje’s critique of anthropology, reading it into a history of the discipline at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. I argue that despite apparent paradigm shifts in anthropological praxis over the last century, the underlying settler colonial schema and internal tropes of the discipline endure largely intact in the present. To support this contention, I trace continuities in anthropological praxis from the ‘colonial past’ into the ‘constitutional present’, delineating the silencing of conquest and settler colonialism by anthropology.