Sociology in South Africa and the wider Sub-Saharan region: Institutional trajectories, intellectual traditions and public engagement

Abstract

Abstract

Sociology in sub-Saharan Africa has developed within contexts shaped by colonialism, racial segregation and apartheid, post-colonial state formation and global inequality. This article traces the discipline’s institutional trajectory from its colonial foundations and early institutionalisation in South Africa, through the post-independence expansion of departments, associations and journals, to the crises of structural adjustment and the academic boycott. Drawing on Keim’s centre–periphery framework, it argues that sub-Saharan African sociology remains peripheral within global publishing, evaluation and ranking infrastructures, while South African sociology occupies a distinctive semi-peripheral position: dominant within the continental field yet dependent on Northern recognition. The field is further divided along linguistic lines inherited from colonial partition, with Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone sociologies unevenly indexed and largely unread by one another, so that peripherality operates within African sociology and not only between it and the centre. The article examines the intellectual traditions through which African sociologists have contested this marginality, including indigenisation and decolonial debates, as well as public, critical and clinical sociology, and their engagement with policy and communities. This African sociology emerges not as a passive recipient of Western frameworks but as a contested, generative intellectual project.