Khwezi Mkhize on Reclaiming the Pan-African Narrative

How do we understand history and the stories that shape our world—and who gets to dictate them? This central premise can be found through the research and teaching of Khwezi Mkhize, Assistant Professor of African & African American Studies, whose focus on African literature, Black political thought, and postcolonial intellectual history wrestles with this question.

His talk, “A Pan-African(ist) Cape Town,” explores the intersections of narrative, history, and global crisis from the perspective of African and diasporic thought.

For Mkhize, the humanities are fundamentally about storytelling—not only the stories themselves, but the structures that govern who tells them and to what effect, as well as how they’re told.

“One of the fundamental aspects of the humanities, particularly the arts, is examining stories,” he said. “Where stories come from, who tells them, why, and how.” This work, he argues, includes examining histories of exclusion as well as the ways narratives shape identity and community.

Using Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as a lens, Mkhize illustrates how African life can be centered on a narrative while still subject to a colonial gaze. The novel ends with a British colonial officer preparing to write his own ethnographic account—offering a stark reminder that colonialism not only disrupted societies but also attempted to overwrite their memory. 

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For Mkhize, this tension between African self-representation and colonial interpretation is a key entry point into the work of the humanities: to uncover and challenge the frameworks that have historically defined whose voices are heard and remembered.

This concern with narrative extends beyond literature and into historical consciousness and intellectual history. In both his scholarship and teaching, Mkhize explores how African thinkers have turned to the past to imagine new futures.

In his African Studies course, he guided students through mid-20th-century debates about the Blackness of Ancient Egypt—a conversation propagated by scholars like Cheikh Anta Diop, who saw recovering this history as foundational to a postcolonial, Pan-African identity.

Alongside Diop, Mkhize introduced students to Sun Ra, the avant-garde jazz musician who imagined an alternate Black mythology rooted in music and African cosmology. Many students were unfamiliar with Ra’s work, revealing how cultural inheritances can be uneven. These gaps in knowledge, Mkhize explained, highlight the importance of critically engaging with the stories that shape our understanding of race and history.

His research reflects these same commitments. In “Black South Africa Intellectuals and the Question of Modernity,” Mkhize analyzes Black cultural production prior to the rise of apartheid, linking black modernity to print culture and, subsequently, to urbanization—a history which culminates in the Sophiatown Renaissances of the 1950s spearheaded by Drum magazine. 

His article “The Violence of Belonging” critiques the ways in which post-apartheid citizenship rubs up against postcolonial migration to South Africa, often with xenophobia as a response to these intersecting histories. 

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Mkhize works against the legacies of apartheid in which identities were fixed, ethnically and racially. For him, the black archive demonstrates how the humanities offer tools for thinking through both the legacies of colonialism and the demands of the present.

He also brings environmental and planetary questions into the conversation. Drawing on geographer Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, he interrogates the idea of “the human” in the Anthropocene, suggesting that the environmental crisis cannot be separated from histories of racial capitalism. 

As he puts it, geology as a discipline emerged alongside slavery and resource extraction—two processes deeply entwined in the making of modernity. 

These insights lead to real ethical questions. 

Mkhize asks his students to consider how their own consumption—such as upgrading to the latest smartphone—is embedded in global systems of labor, extraction, and inequality. 

“The stakes couldn’t be any higher,” he said, especially as climate impacts places like Durham, reminding us that we do in fact share the same planet.

In all of this, Mkhize returns to the humanities not just as a field of study, but as a necessary space for critical thought. Through literature, history, and theory, he challenges inherited narratives and opens up new ways of seeing the world—and of imagining what could come next.