Dr. Mnqobi Ngubane
Senior Lecturer, Anthropology and Sociology, Nelson Mandela University.
Mnqobi Ngubane grew up on a former German mission station, Muden, Kwazulu-Natal, where he was raised by maternal grandparents. His maternal grandmother was born into a family of labour tenants on white owned farmland in the early 1930s, and later found refuge on a mission station, escaping oppressive social relations on white owned land. His maternal grandfather was a migrant worker, in Durban, and mainly Johannesburg. Social relations on labour tenant farms formed part of the stories that his grandmother told in his upbringing, which were to go a very long way in Mnqobi’s scholarship in rural sociology.
Mnqobi currently studies the land and agrarian question in South Africa, in comparison to wider dynamics of the Global South. His current research projects include “Counter agrarian reform in the Global South”, “Illuminating labour tenants’ struggles in obtaining farmland in South Africa today” (a documentary and exhibition), “Political economy and law” (specialising in land reform law), as well as “The Lesotho land question, and southern African borders question”.