Bernard Magubane: 'analysing the colonial situation'

Abstract

Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane was a prominent academic and political activist who challenged the Eurocentric biases of sociology and anthropology. According to Magubane, in order to develop a full understanding of various social processes one has to "grasp the objective socio-economic historical process to which man is subject in society". Magubane went further by arguing that not enough work had been done by anthropologists to analyse the colonial situation from the African perspective, which gives attention to Africans' point of view of the situation imposed on them. To this must be added a failure to incorporate an analysis of one of the most important features of colonial history, "as opposed to its economics, its politics, its sociology, and its psychology", and that is "a history of the variety of African responses" to the colonial situation.