From Accra to Tokyo, Harare to Washington, the continent’s pool of research experts, lecturers and other scholars have been making life-changing decisions that help change the world every day. Through their various fields of study/research, they deal with some of the world’s most pressing problems and help shape public debates.
Here are 10 African scholars to watch in 2024.
Maame A.S. Mensa-Bonsu – Ghana
Maame A.S. Mensa-Bonsu is the head of humanities and social sciences at Ashesi University Ghana where she is setting up the country’s first LLB programme in law with public policy.
Her scholarly work focuses on judicial review, judicial power, executive power, constitutional amendment and review, separation of powers in African contexts, elections in Africa etc.
Mensa-Bonsu holds a DPhil degree from the University of Oxford. She has taught Criminal Law and Public Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science and constitutional law at Lancaster University in Ghana. She has also been a visiting researcher at the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and at the Ghana Institute of Management Studies.
Simukai Chigudu – Zimbabwe
![Simukai_Chigudu © Simukai_Chigudu](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=944,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/19/headshot-odid-2023_simukai_chigudu.jpg)
Simukai Chigudu is an associate professor of African politics at the Oxford Department of International Development and fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford University.
He’s a scholar with special interest in the politics of global health and epidemics, race and identity, citizenship and activist movements.
Chigudu is the author of The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe. The academic monograph, based on his doctoral research at Oxford University, won the 2021 Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award from the American and International Political Science Associations. It also won the biennial Audrey Richards Prize from UK African Studies Association for the best Ph.D. thesis examined at a UK university.
Naminata Diabate – Côte d’Ivoire
![IMG_7873 © Naminata Diabate](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=944,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/20/img_7873.jpg)
Naminata Diabate is an associate professor of comparative literature at Cornell University, a private Ivy League university in New York. She’s also a member of the advisory board of the Africa Institute in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. She is a scholar of gender, sexuality, race, biopolitics, and neoliberalism with linguistic expertise in Malinké, French, English, Nouchi, Spanish, and Latin.
Diabate is the author of the highly praised book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa, which tells the story of women who expose their naked bodies and genitalia in Africa and elsewhere – in protest – to cause misfortune such as impotence in their targets; insurrectional nakedness. The book won the African Studies Association (ASA) 2021 Best Book Prize and the African Literature Association (ALA) 2022 First Book Award.
Diabate received Ph.D. and M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Texas at Austin in the US and BA from the University of Cocody in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.
Divine Fuh – Cameroon
![HUMA © Dr Divine Fuh. Photo credit Lerato Maduna](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=944,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/19/dr-divine-fuh-photo-credit-lerato-maduna.jpg)
Divine Fuh is a social anthropology lecturer and the director of the Institute for Humanities Africa (HUMA) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He initially worked at the Dakar-based social science research council CODESRIA as head of the publications and dissemination programme.
Fuh taught briefly at the universities of Basel in Switzerland and Western Cape and Stellenbosch in South Africa, and has been visiting lecturer at the universities of Brasilia in Brazil, Tokyo in Japan, and Gaston Berger in Senegal. His research interests, which include masculinities, aspirations and precarity, focus on the politics of suffering and smiling.
Fuh holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Basel.
Marame Gueye – Senegal
![Marame Gueye © Marame Gueye](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=944,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/19/marame-gueye-2.jpg)
Marame Gueye is a Senegalese-born associate professor of African and African diaspora literatures at East Carolina University (ECU) in Greenville in the US state of North Carolina. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the Multicultural and Transnational Literatures concentration.
Gueye earned a doctorate degree in comparative literature from State University of New York at Binghamton in the US in 2005. Gueye was also the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Africana Studies at Vassar College in New York from 2004 to 2007, and 2019 recipient of the ECU Achievement in International Research and Creative Activity Award.
Gueye’s research interests include African oral literatures, women and gender studies, and immigration.
George Nyabuga – Kenya
![George Nyabuga © George Nyabuga](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=944,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/19/george-nyabuga.jpeg)
George Nyabuga is an associate professor and coordinator of the Executive Masters in Media Leadership and Innovation programme at the Graduate School of Media and Communications at the Aga Khan University (AKU) in Kenya. He was initially an associate professor of media and journalism at the University of Nairobi. He is also a lecturer at the University of Worcester and Coventry University in the United Kingdom.
Before academia, Nyabuga worked in the newsroom as a journalist, his last position being managing editor of weekend editions, as well as media convergence at Kenya’s Standard Group. His academic research focuses on issues such as sociology of journalism, journalism and media theories and politics and democracy. He holds a PhD in politics and history from Coventry University.
Toyin Ajao – Nigeria
![Toyin Ajao © Toyin Ajao](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=675,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/19/toyin-ajao.jpeg)
Toyin Ajao is a restorative healing researcher and practitioner who founded Ìmọ́lẹ̀ of Afrika Centre (ìAfrika) to advance restorative healing and Ubuntu Culture in Africa through multidisciplinary empirical findings and praxes.
A research associate of the African Leadership Centre at King’s College London where she received a master’s degree in conflict, security and development, Ajao holds a PhD in political science from the University of Pretoria — where she worked as a lecturer in International Relations.
Ajao has over a decade of work experience across academia, civil and political societies, LGBTQIA+ and feminist organisations, focusing on issues such as post-human security, peace processes, gender and sexual rights and conflict transformation.
Satang Nabaneh – The Gambia
![Satang Nabaneh © Satang Nabaneh](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=944,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/19/satang-nabaneh.jpg)
Satang Nabaneh is research professor of law at the University of Dayton School of Law in the US state of Ohio, where she also serves as the director of programmes for the Human Rights Center.
Nabaneh is a member of the Panel of Experts of the Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa (ISLA), a feminist-led organisation that uses the rule of law and African domestic and regional courts to advance women’s rights; human and sexual.
Nabaneh received her Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Pretoria, Master of Laws in human rights and democratisation in Africa from the University of Pretoria and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of The Gambia.
She was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pretoria in South Africa where she also coordinated doctoral and master’s programmes in Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Africa (SRRA).
Nabaneh’s teaching and research focus on a wide range of areas, including international human rights law and monitoring mechanisms.
Mia Swart – South Africa
![Mia Swart © Mia Swart](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=400,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/19/mia-swart.jpeg)
Mia Swart, an expert in international criminal law, transitional justice and human rights law, is a former senior lecturer at Edge Hill University and visiting professor in the School of Law of the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
She previously worked as professor of international law at the University of Johannesburg, a research fellow at the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law in London and as assistant professor of public international law and global justice at Leiden University, where she earned her Ph.D.
An Alexander von Humboldt foundation fellow, Swart is also an admitted attorney in the High Court of South Africa.
Toussaint Kafarhire Murhula – DRC
![Toussaint Kafarhire Murhula © Toussaint Kafarhire Murhula](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=751,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/19/toussaint-kafarhire-murhula.png)
Toussaint Kafarhire Murhula political analyst, social scientist and the director of Centre Arrupe, a centre for research and formation in Lubumbashi, DRC. He’s currently the president of the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA), an organisation of African scholars, practitioners and activists in Africa and in the diaspora.
Murhula’s research interests include social justice, democracy and peace, political violence and conflicts, religion, and global public health politics. He has taught at Loyola University Chicago in the US, Episcopal Theological College of Pecs in Hungary, Hekima University College in Kenya, and Loyola University of Congo in Kinshasa, DRC.
Understand Africa’s tomorrow… today
We believe that Africa is poorly represented, and badly under-estimated. Beyond the vast opportunity manifest in African markets, we highlight people who make a difference; leaders turning the tide, youth driving change, and an indefatigable business community. That is what we believe will change the continent, and that is what we report on. With hard-hitting investigations, innovative analysis and deep dives into countries and sectors, The Africa Report delivers the insight you need.