Africa ‘is a laboratory for the world’, says Holberg prizewinner

The first ever Africa-based winner of the prestigious Holberg Prize has described his victory as recognition of the development of the humanities across the continent.

Achille Mbembe, professor of history and politics at the University of the Witwatersrand, will be presented with the prize – one of the largest awarded annually to an outstanding researcher in the humanities, social sciences, law or theology – in June.

The award, worth Nkr6 million (£447,000), honours the Cameroonian’s role as one of the foremost thinkers of post-colonial Africa, with his research spanning topics including contemporary migration regimes, global citizenship, restitution and reparation, technology, climate change and planetary futures.

“I don’t live waiting for prizes – I didn’t expect it at all, I didn’t even know how they got hold of my name, or who nominated me,” Professor Mbembe told Times Higher Education.

“I knew the prize, some friends of mine had won it…but I never took myself to be at that level, so I was very, very surprised.”

Professor Mbembe, who has previously held positions at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, has had his work translated into 17 languages, including Critique of Black Reason (2013) and Necropolitics (2016).

He saw the award as recognising the broader value of academic work undertaken across Africa, often in challenging political or material circumstances.

“It’s a recognition of the importance of the African continent in the long history of modern formations of knowledge, and I hope that it will help to foster these and make us all realise the extent to which Africa is a laboratory for the world we live in and the world we might be entering into,” he said, describing the rapid growth in the continent’s population as driving an “African turn of the planetary predicament”.

Professor Mbembe said dozens of research-intensive universities across Africa were ready to rise to the challenge of studying this transformation.

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The priority, he said, was to ensure that they received sufficient funding and were open to the international flow of ideas.

“I can see signs of that here and there, but we have to invest more in this direction,” Professor Mbembe said.

Professor Mbembe, who has conducted research on developing African models of democracy, said some of the particular difficulties facing South Africa, where he works, were political.

“South Africa needs to invest more in higher education, [and] needs to open wider the doors of higher education, especially to the younger generations that are coming out, especially from former disenfranchised groups in our society,” he said.

Professor Mbembe said the relevance of the humanities and social sciences was as “contested” in Africa as it was in major Western sectors, but he insisted that they were more important than ever before, not least to ensure that the world was not “at the mercy” of technological development.

“As we speak, our world is besieged by a number of deep forces which are contesting the importance of reason as a universal faculty which might help us to address some of the key forces of our times,” he said.

“Reason is on trial, and the practice of reason as it has been elaborated in the humanities and social sciences remains a key actor in our attempt to keep the world sane in the face of the reserves of darkness.”

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com