The Centre for Civil Society recently hosted Professor Siphamandla Zondi head of Department of Political Sciences and acting head of the Institute for Strategic and Political Affairs at the University of Pretoria. Professor Zondi’s work is focused on African Political thought and agency, radical global south agency and international relations.

The seminar, a collaboration with  International Relations, School of Social Sciences focused on Amilcar Cabral’s Seven Theses on the African Predicament and was entitled ‘Hearing Africa Speak Again’.

Professor Zondi argued that as the vast amount of work on the state of Africa borrows from Eurocentric assumptions about the state, power, development, and being, the African predicament is misdiagnosed and mistreated. This seminar urged a step back in order to listen again to ignored African voices for analyses that are closer to the reality of our times.

Seminar participants discussed the idea of theory as a weapon, decolonisation and seeking to ask questions aimed at understanding fundamental rather than superficial causes of social ills.