tgiFHI | Khwezi Mkhize, "Pan-African(ist) Cape Town"

tgiFHI is a weekly series that gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretive social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to their departmental and interdepartmental colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields.

On Friday, September 26, 2025 we will be hosting Khwezi Mkhize, Assistant Professor of African & African American Studies.

Pan-African(ist) Cape Town

At the turn of the twentieth century the South African city of Cape Town was, in turn, a node in the vast network of the British empire and an urban center fostering the desires and politics of Pan-Africanism. Aside from the older historical diasporas gathered by the Dutch imperialism and slavery fin de siè·cle Pan-Africanism gathered the African diaspora - in London in 1900 - and then dispersed it to various sites of origin and new. This presentation traces how the Pan-African Conference directed some of its attendees to Cape Town and the various articulations of Pan-Africanism that arose from "the practice of diaspora" in an entrepôt of the British empire.

Khwezi Mkhize is Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University and co-Director of the Franklin Humanities Institute's Black Archival Imagination Lab. Prior to joining Duke he taught at the University of Cape Town and the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. He is co-editor of Foundational African Writers: Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi and Es'kia Mphahlele, published in 2022, and Black Archival Imagination, to be published by Duke University Press.

tgiFHI events take place from 9:30-11:00 a.m. on Friday mornings in the Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall (C105, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse) with breakfast at 9 am. RSVP for the date here!