Lungisile Ntsebeza

Lungisile Ntsebeza (born 1954) is a South African sociologist. He is professor emeritus of sociology and African studies at the University of Cape Town, where he has worked since 2004. He was the university's A. C. Jordan Professor of African Studies from 2012 until his retirement in 2022. He also held the South African Research Chair in Land Reform and Democracy in South Africa. Since 2023 he has been the Chair of Council at the University of Fort Hare.

Early life and activism Ntsebeza was born in 1954 in Cala, a small town in the Eastern Cape. Both of his parents were teachers and neither was overtly political, though his father a devout reader of the Daily Dispatch. Released in 1981, he was banished to his hometown of Cala,

Academic career After receiving his PhD in 2002, Ntsebeza was the acting director of the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape. and he was also seconded part-time to the Human Sciences Research Council as a senior research specialist. The chair's research programme centred on land ownership in South Africa, with themes including post-apartheid land reform and redistribution; the former bantustans, traditional leadership, and rural democratisation; and women's rights and poverty reduction.

While retaining the South African Research Chair, in June 2012 Ntsebeza was additionally appointed to the A. C. Jordan Chair in African Studies, a chair in Archibald Campbell Jordan's honour which had not been held since Mahmood Mamdani left it acrimoniously in 1999. The chair entailed Ntsebeza's appointment as the director of the university's Centre for African Studies.

Scholarship Ntsebeza's best-known book, published in 2005, is Democracy Compromised: Chiefs and the Politics of Land in South Africa. He also co-edited a 2007 book on land reform with Ruth Hall and co-edited a 2012 book on the Mpondo revolts with Thembela Kepe.

Ntsebeza argued that contemporary traditional leadership institutions, as recognised by the post-apartheid South African government, were modelled on apartheid-era tribal authorities and were largely anti-democratic.

Retirement Ntsebeza retired in 2022, though he continued to serve as an emeritus professor and as a senior research scholar in the Centre for African Studies. He had joined the council of the University of Fort Hare in 2021, and on 28 June 2023 he was announced as that university's new Chair of Council.

Honours In September 2017, at that year's National Research Foundation Awards, Ntsebeza received the Hamilton Naki Award. On 7 February 2020, Leiden University conferred upon him an honorary doctorate.