Luvuyo Ntombana

Prof. Luvuyo Ntombana is an acting Director for the Raymond Mhlaba Centre for Governance and

Leadership at the Nelson Mandela University.

 

As an academic, he is an anthropologist based in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities. He has supervised several PhD’s and Master’s thesis in various disciplines which include Anthropology, Sociology, History and Religion Studies.

 

His research focus areas are cultural anthropology, African Indigenous Knowledge Systems, masculinities, African Spirituality and Religion. He is known for his ethnographic study on the role and meaning of Xhosa male initiation and its relationship to medical male circumcision.

 

One of his main arguments is that before male initiation can be recommended as an HIV/AIDS prevention method, more data is needed from social scientists so as to avoid reducing this practice to just circumcision.