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About the Project

Overview:

The Black Archive is a research initiative that excavates, curates, and theorises African intellectual, political, and cultural traditions鈥攑articularly those articulated in Indigenous languages and rhetorical forms鈥攁s epistemic resources for transforming higher education.

Positioned at the intersection of political theory, decolonial critique, and African Studies, the project draws on orature, protest aesthetics, archival texts, and vernacular philosophies to reconstruct African knowledges that challenge the dominance of Euro-modern paradigms within university curricula, governance, and research.

By mobilising materials from thinkers such as William Wellington Gqoba, S.E.K. Mqhayi, and Mazisi Kunene鈥攁longside the aesthetic and intellectual expressions of student resistance movements like #RhodesMustFall鈥攖he project advances an alternative grammar for knowledge-making grounded in Black thought traditions.

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Funding and Institutional Affiliation

Funding Source:

The Black Archive is generously supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) Thuthuka Grant, under its Early Career Researcher programme. This support enables sustained archival research, translation work, and scholarly dissemination that foregrounds Indigenous languages and African intellectual histories.

Institutional Home:

Hosted by the Ali Mazrui Centre for Higher Education Studies at the 欧美福利100000 of Johannesburg, the project contributes directly to the Centre鈥檚 mission of advancing transformative and contextually relevant scholarship on higher education in Africa.

Related Outputs

Black Archive Workshop | 2鈥�3 May 2025

Reclaiming Epistemic Grounds: Methodological Reflections Across the Human Sciences

The Black Archive Workshop, held from 2鈥�3 May 2025, was convened as a generative space for interdisciplinary engagement on the question of what constitutes the Black Archive鈥攁nd how it might serve as a source of knowledge within and beyond the human sciences. Hosted at the Ali Mazrui Centre for Higher Education Studies, the workshop brought together scholars working across a range of disciplines, including jurisprudence, copyright law, dramatology, philosophy, history and historiography, as well as researchers embedded in grassroots community-based knowledge practices.

The objective was not only to reflect on the archive as a repository of the past, but to collectively theorise the Black Archive as a living, conceptual, and methodological resource鈥攃apable of reshaping dominant paradigms of knowledge. Each disciplinary perspective offered insights into how the Black Archive disrupts colonial epistemic hierarchies and opens up new horizons for thinking law, memory, performance, identity, and power.

In centring African languages, oral traditions, and Black aesthetic forms, the workshop laid the foundation for a transdisciplinary methodological framework that affirms the archive as both an intellectual inheritance and a site of ongoing world-making. These conversations contribute to the broader goals of the Black Archive project: to foreground Indigenous epistemologies in reconstituting the future of the human sciences in Africa.