What is occurring on an administrative level within the university is a questioning of the place of a distinct Centre for African Studies in a university which itself is considered by many to be ostensibly African. Indeed, UCT is situated in South Africa and as an institution is emplaced within the contextual landscape of politics, society and culture that is already African. In this regard, it is expected therefore that the study of Africa is already mainstreamed within the disciplines. What need then, one might ask, for a separate centre of study, when the immediate locus and profile of the university places it automatically within the discursive frame that occupies the Centre for African Studies in their research and teaching? For the editors at postamble, with the latest edition, the debate emerged in another guise: could we really say to some of the Masters and Doctoral students that we could not accept their work because they did not focus on Africa or African studies in their research? Surely, one could argue that the fact that these students are situated within Africa means that their research is automatically imbued with a particular African character and viewpoint, inscribed by a positionality that makes the work African by nature?

The battle that the Centre for African Studies faces partly an administrative one, concerned with the shape and size of academic departments and partly an epistemological one, concerned with the question of knowledge production on and around Africa. In postamble’s opinion, to claim that the Centre and its concerns (including this journal) are somehow redundant at UCT is an error of a most short-sighted nature. For, the inheritance and legacy of an institution such as ours are always entangled with its past and here, these are undeniably colonial ones. And, what is Humanities scholarship for if not a means of drawing necessary attention to knowledges that have been marginalised by the very script of the western model of academic theory and practice? Certainly, it can be regarded that, in a far away land where ‘Africa’ is a separate entity entirely, a discrete school (or journal) of African Studies might seem more ‘logical’. However, this assumes that the study of Africa is only a study of a place and its people, and not the very ideologies that emerge from within that place itself which, in their origins, are often contested. This would also be assuming that western languages, world views, ideas and aesthetics have not dominated most ways of studying the world (including Africa from within Africa) for a very long time. As history has shown this is very much not the case. And, as most of us know, it will still be some time before the world order shifts to share power and position with the subaltern. Therefore, the Centre for African studies at UCT exists as a means to counter the tendency within our own society to look west. It also exists as a space in which important African thinkers are seen to be part of the vital nexus of people mapping out an ever expanding and diversifying planet. Should the Centre be dissolved or assimilated unthinking into a different department, what will be lost is a place of study that actively demands of its students that they challenge the status quo of their understanding of ideas, of their own country, and even of their own university.

postamble, like the Centre for African Studies, is dedicated to contributing to the production of knowledge from within Africa, based on the understanding that studying the ways knowledges are studied matters–just as much as the knowledges studied. In other words, until the world order ceases to cast Africa as ‘other,’ there will be a need for an African Studies Centre, even in Africa.