Achille Mbembe

In this chapter, we describe the journey of Achille Mbembe from Cameroon, across the Western world, and back through the African continent to settle in South Africa. Achille is one of Africa’s foremost intellectuals on the post-colony. Here we share his intertwined stories of family, history, politics, and geography in ways that make visible the unsettling effects of academic displacement in a country that was supposed to be at the forefront of an African Renaissance. Straddling between the personal and public Achille’s story presents a thought-provoking critique of the South African academy and migration processes in contemporary Africa. Ultimately, Mbembe calls for a collective effort within the South African academic community to uphold principles of openness and radical hospitality, emphasizing the moral and practical imperatives of creating an inclusive intellectual environment that benefits both South Africa and the broader African continent. In this case study, as in all others in this book, we use first-person stylistic writing to re-present the narrative in a way that highlights the personal experience over our analytical process, even though the former emerges out of the latter.