POLIR 125 Public Lecture - Dr Ayesha Omar

This year the Department of Politics and International Relations celebrates its 125th anniversary.

It was established in the Autumn of 1899, the year that the Anglo Boer War began, and when there were 240 pennies to a £. This makes it one of the first to be created at a chartered university in the uk, and was the result of an initiative by the humanists and social reformers J S and Millicent Mackenzie. From the beginning the Department of Political Science, as it was then named, had a close relationship with law and international relations. The syllabus included the legislative process; law and morality; international law; and, political thought, all of which are still central, in addition to much more, to the curriculum. During the course of the academic year 2024-2025, the School of Law and Politics will be celebrating the 125th anniversary with a series of activities, including public lectures, exhibitions and a a staff student sports day.

Speaker: Dr Ayesha Omar – School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London

Title: The Liberal Engagements of Black Intellectual History in South Africa

Abstract: This lecture centres on challenging the popular narrative that black intellectual history in South Africa was ubiquitous in its treatment of liberal ideas. While liberalism in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa has a vexing and complicated place and its utility for a black, economically disenfranchised majority is frequently contested, the 1996 adoption of South Africa’s democratic constitution outlining a very clear framework for a liberal democracy came as a surprise to many who equated black African nationalism with socialist and Marxist strands. The triumph for liberalism was evidenced in the path chosen by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress which relinquished its attachment to socialist principles in favour of a liberal-democratic polity. While liberalism’s institutional reach was broad, and its history long, it often represented a thin universalist creed that was fragile and limited. South Africa also had a weak liberal intellectual tradition without ever producing a radical variant. Its weaknesses were clear to many black intellectuals concerned with its proximity to whiteness and its lack of potential for radical, social, and egalitarian change. Yet despite liberalism’s lack of radical appeal some of the most interesting and fascinating interlocutors of liberal ideas and critics are within the tradition of black intellectual history itself. This dimension of liberalism in South Africa has been largely underwritten, neglected, or ignored.

Biography: Dr Ayesha Omar is a British Academy International Fellow (2023) at the Department of Politics and International Studies (SOAS) and a Senior Lecturer in political theory in the Department of Political Studies (Wits). Whilst at SOAS she will be undertaking a 3-year research project on the Liberal Engagements of Black Intellectual History in South Africa. Ayesha’s research will be used in the development of an extensive book project for Cambridge University Press.

Ayesha has published various articles and book chapters in comparative political theory and intellectual history of South Africa. She has recently completed a monograph for the Cambridge University Press element series in Comparative Political Theory: The Pluralistic Frameworks of Ibn Rushd and Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im (forthcoming, October 2024), is co-editor on the two-volume series, the Cambridge History of African Political Thought, and the recently published volume Decolonisation: Revolution and Evolution with David Boucher (Wits University Press, 2023). Ayesha is an editor of Theoria: a Journal of Social and Political Theory and the secretary of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) political philosophy research committee. She is on the editorial board for the journal Global Intellectual History (T&F) and Politics (SAGE). In 2017, she received the Mail and Guardian 200 Young South African Award for her contributions to university teaching.

Public Lecture Convenor: Professor David Boucher, School of Law and Politics

Events in this series

Black History Month

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