The MISR Review No. 3

This issue appears more than a year after its scheduled publication. We have no alibis to offer, just an admission and a request that this be taken as an illustration of the continuing steep learn- ing curve at MISR.

Key to research, we argued in Our Mission in 2016, is formulating the problem of research. Acknowledging that this would require a long journey, we dedicated The MISR Review to a double endeavour: one, to broadcast the intellectual work undertaken at MISR, particularly by advanced doctoral students, to the wider scholarly community; and two, to energize and promote debate in that community.

This issue introduces a mode of debate that we hope will take us a step further in the journey we began in 2012. The core of this issue are three articles by Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni: “Revisiting Nguni Formations: The Mfecane and Migrations in South-Eastern Africa”; “The Ndebele Kingdom of Mzilikazi Khumalo”; and “Decolonization/Decoloniality: Converging African/Latin American Thinking”. Given as a set of lectures at Makerere Institute of Social Research, they have been revised for publication. We have invited three different scholars to contribute a critical discussion, one on each lecture.

The issue also contains two stand-alone articles. Netsanet Ge- bremichael, at the time a doctoral student at MISR, explores travel writing as an empirical mode of knowing. Saleem Badat joins a critical discussion on decolonizing the curriculum in universities, a subject to which we hope to devote more space in future.

We invite readers so inclined to send short responses (maximum 1,000 words) to the above contributions.

Mahmood Mamdani | Lyn Ossome | Suren Pillay | Samson Bezabeh March, 2020

Contributors to this Issue

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is a research professor and Director of Scholarship in the Department of Leadership and Transformation (DLT) in the office of the Principal and Vice-Chancellor at the University of South Africa (Unisa).

Haydée Bangerezako is a postdoctoral fellow at Makerere Institute of Social Research, specializing in historical, cultural and political Studies. Her interest is in a decolonizing study of the Great Lakes region from a feminist perspective.

Yahya Sseremba is a research fellow at Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) in Kampala.

Suren Pillay is Associate Professor and Senior Researcher at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He is interested in the intellectual and political legacies of colonialism in the present.

Saleem Badat is Research Professor in the College of Humanities at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and former vice-chancellor of Rhodes University, South Africa.

Netsanet Gebremichael Weldesenbet holds a PhD in Social Studies from Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. She is currently a researcher at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University.