Professor Charles van Onselen
Professor Charles van Onselen’s career has cut across a wide swathe of social science, from his early research into repressive labour structures in the Southern African mining industry to his more recent work on the nature of social banditry in the region, which examines crime as politics.
He obtained a BSc degree and a University Education Diploma from Rhodes University, and an honours degree in political science from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) before completing his PhD in social science at Oxford. He worked for AECI as a personnel officer and taught geography in a secondary school in London’s East End, before moving to academia, working successively as a junior lecturer at Wits, a research officer for the International Labour Office in Switzerland, and then as Research Fellow at the Centre for International and Area Studies at the University of London. Based in Johannesburg for the last two decades, he is now a research professor and fellow at the Institute for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria.
His primary objective has been to undermine the master narratives and scholarly agendas of ethnic nationalists who have built their interpretations on an uncritical acceptance of the primacy of race as the sole foundation of a longed-for nation-state, that shows little sign of materialising. He has sought to do this by pointing to the importance of using class as a concept when attempting to understand the complexities of historical processes and structures in the making of modern South Africa.
He is a former editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies and was a member of the editorial board of the Marcus Garvey (Africa Series), published by the African Studies Centre of the University of California, and has also served on the board of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History published by Johns Hopkins University.
Van Onselen’s work has been widely recognised and he has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Trevor Reese Memorial Prize, the PV Tobias Essay Prize, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize for non-fiction, the Bill Venter Literary Award, and the Herskovits Prize of the American African Studies Association. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa, was selected as the Inaugural Oppenheimer Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Studies at Harvard University in 2012, and has been awarded an honorary doctorate in literature by Rhodes University.