Across the continent, the humanities and the interpretive social sciences might best be summarised as a compound of three conditions: benign neglect, active marginalisation and a few exceptions of flourishing. In many countries on the continent the humanities, in particular, have suffered a fate that reproduces broadly the general problems of higher education but in the humanities, these are more acutely intensified within the general set of challenges. In this chapter I place particular emphasis on the humanities as distinct from the social sciences for reasons that will become apparent later. My perspective is anchored in recent southern African debates and to a large extent is overdetermined by the South African debate. That there is a South African debate at all, at the official level of state, in the universities and in the media, remains encouraging. South Africa is a society grappling with many tectonic shifts, finding its way in the world and on the African continent, where its position remains ambiguous. Officially, South Africa embraces moving its capital across borders, but is not so keen on other Africans moving their labouring bodies into South Africa. Internally, it is going through vexing contestations in direct and displaced ways that have to do with the racialised hue of privilege and inequality and its largely unspoken condition of settler coloniality and the effects and consequences that might flow from this recognition.

In the post-independence period in Africa, nationalist movements valued unity above dissent and knowledge in the service of the nation was to be imagined and constructed. As hope gave way to criticism, the often single national university created at independence became increasingly viewed as the source of popular opposition and a target of hostility. If the government was the state, the university was cast as its critical civil society. Dissent, critique and opposition to official narratives were often seen as working against, rather than for the developmental objectives of states strained by the disjuncture between their sovereign hopes and their actual lack of sovereignty structured by neocolonial relations. Against this predicament, as the Malawian scholar Thandika Mkandawire put it, African governments held up a sign that said, ‘Silence, development in progress’.