Information
Membership Number: FCA3605
Membership Type: Fellowship
Division: Social Sciences
Corresponding Email: *****is.nyamnjoh@uct.ac.za
Homepage(s): https://humanities.uct.ac.za/department-anthropology/people-academic-staff-academic-staff-overview/professor-francis-b-nyamnjoh
Present and Previous Positions
Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town
Fields of Scholarship and Research Interests
Professor Francis Nyamnjoh is a leading scholar of African studies and social anthropology whose work has made a distinctive mark on the study of media, mobility, identity, citizenship, and the politics of belonging in Africa. His scholarship moves across anthropology, sociology, communication, political thought, and public intellectual life, and is especially notable for the originality with which it rethinks African social worlds through such ideas as incompleteness, conviviality, frontier existence, and flexible humanity.
He is currently Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. Over several decades, Professor Nyamnjoh has written extensively on Africa not as a fixed object of explanation, but as a living field of creativity, negotiation, mobility, and contested belonging. His work has addressed the media and democracy, citizenship and xenophobia, postcolonial knowledge, decolonization, popular culture, and the everyday social imagination of Africans across different regional and historical contexts. He has also written beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries, combining scholarly analysis with essays, fiction, and broader public reflection.
He belongs to that important group of contemporary African scholars whose contribution is at once intellectual, institutional, and civilizational. In addition to his academic writing, he has played significant roles in African scholarly publishing, research dissemination, editorial leadership, and the cultivation of wider conversations on knowledge production in and about Africa.
Honors, Awards and Other Membership
International Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), elected 2024.
Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, since 2014.
Fellow of the Academy of Science of South Africa, since 2016.
Fellow of the Cameroon Academy of Science, since 2011.
B1-rated Professor and Researcher, South African National Research Foundation.
University of Cape Town Excellence Award for “Exceptional Contribution as a Professor in the Faculty of Humanities” (2012).
ASU African Hero Award, African Students Union, Ohio University, USA (2013).
Eko Prize for African Literature (2014).
ASAUK Fage & Oliver Prize for the best monograph, awarded to #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa (2018).
Senior Arts Researcher of the Year Prize, Botswana (2003).
Selected Publications
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Ohr8cwUAAAAJ&hl=en
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. Africa’s Media: Democracy and the Politics of Belonging. London: Zed Books, 2005.
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa. London: Zed Books, 2006.
de Bruijn, Mirjam, Francis B. Nyamnjoh, and Inge Brinkman, eds. Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa. Bamenda: Langaa RPCIG; Leiden: African Studies Centre, 2009.
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. C’est l’homme qui fait l’homme: Cul-de-Sac Ubuntu-ism in Côte d’Ivoire. Bamenda: Langaa RPCIG, 2015.
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa. Bamenda: Langaa RPCIG, 2016.
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd: How Amos Tutuola Can Change Our Minds. Bamenda: Langaa RPCIG, 2017.
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. Incompleteness: Frontier Africa and the Currency of Conviviality. Bamenda: Langaa RPCIG, 2017.
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. Incompleteness, Mobility, and Conviviality: African Lives and Beyond. Bamenda: Langaa RPCIG, 2024.
Other Information
Professor Nyamnjoh’s work is significant not only for the subjects it addresses, but also for the intellectual style it embodies. Rather than treating African societies through rigid binaries such as tradition and modernity, insider and outsider, citizen and stranger, or African and Western, he has persistently shown how life is lived through movement, negotiation, relationality, and incompleteness. This has given his scholarship a distinctive philosophical dimension, while keeping it closely tied to lived realities and ordinary social experience. He has also contributed materially to African intellectual life through publishing and editorial work. His years at CODESRIA, his association with African scholarly publishing initiatives, and his broader commitment to knowledge production on the continent mark him as more than a university-based anthropologist. He is also an important builder of intellectual institutions and conversations.