Hlonipha Mokoena (Columbia University, New York, New York)

Submitted:  Mon, February 22, 2010


Hlonipha Mokoena
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
Columbia University
867 Schermerhorn Extension, MC 5523
New York, New York  10027  USA

phone:  212-854-2386
fax:	212-854-7347
e-mail: ham2101@columbia.edu


As a teaching professor my main area of interest is South African 
intellectual history. 

My research is currently on Magema M. Fuze, author of the Abantu Abamnyama 
Lapa Bavela Ngakona (1922) / The Black People and Whence They Came (1979). 
As an author and an aspirant historian, Magema Fuze represents a set of 
questions about the emergence and arrested development of a black 
intelligentsia and literati in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century 
South Africa. His life and writings reveal both his singular attempt to 
create, under adverse cultural, political and social conditions, a 
literary career and a body of knowledge while also participating in the 
constitution of a discourse community or a public sphere of Zulu-speaking 
intellectuals.


Selected publications:

2009  "An assembly of readers: Magema Fuze and his Ilanga lase Natal 
readers," Journal of southern African studies. 35, 2 (September): 595-607.

2008  "The Queen's Bishop: a convert's memoir of John W. Colenso," 
Journal of religion in Africa, vol. 38, no. 3, p. 312-342.

2006  "The making of a kholwa intellectual: introducing Magema 
Magwaza Fuze." Sephis e-magazine.

2005  "Christian converts and the production of 'kholwa' histories in 
nineteenth-century colonial Natal: the case of Magema Magwaza Fuze and his 
writings." Journal of Natal and Zulu history, vol. 23, p. 1-37.