I often think of my grandmother when I think about knowledge. Not because she wrote books or lectured in a university, but because she knew things. She knew when it would rain by just looking at the sky, not by checking a weather app. She knew which herbs to boil when I coughed in the night. She knew which words to say to calm our family after an argument. She had wisdom that required no citation, no footnote, no Western validation.
And yet, when I sit in my sociology lectures in university, surrounded by heavy textbooks and strange theories from Germany and France, I feel a quiet dissonance. The grandmothers who had shaped our lives are absent. Their names are not in the curriculum. Their knowledge is invisible. We study “society” though the eyes of white men who never set foot in a township, who never spoke our languages, who never had uMakhulu.
Reading Babalwa Magoqwana and Jimi Adesina’s Reconnecting African Sociology to the Mother felt like hearing my grandmother’s voice again – firm, patient and unapologetically African. The authors argue that we must re-center uMakhulu, the grandmother, as the foundation of African sociology. In their words, she is not just a figure of affection; she is an institution of knowledge. She holds the keys to our collective memory, to our ways of seeing the world.
The story of sociology in South Africa is a story of forgetting. The discipline arrived here carrying the baggage of colonial arrogance. It looks at Africans as problems to be studied, not as people to be understood. The “fathers” of sociology – Marx, Weber and Durkheim – have become sacred names, while our own thinkers are sidelined, our oral histories dismissed as folklore.
Even after apartheid, the classroom remains haunted by the voice of Europe. Our sociological imagination is trained to look outward – toward Paris, London or Chicago – as if truth resides elsewhere. African students are told to be critical, but only within the boundaries of Western thought. We are asked to “decolonise” our minds, yet the language of our learning is still English, the metaphors foreign, the examples imported.
Our grandmothers taught us sociology in ways that required no degree. They taught us about community – uluntu – long before we encountered the word “society”. They showed us ubuntu, the idea that “a person is a person through others”, long before we learned about “social cohesion”. Their classrooms were kitchens, their blackboards were conversations, their textbooks were stories.
And yet, they have been written out of the intellectual history of our continent.
To reconnect African sociology to the mother is to perform an act of intellectual homecoming. It is to say: we have wandered long enough in borrowed languages and theories. It is time to return home to our own tongues, our own logic, our own histories.
When Magoqwana and Adesina speak of endogeneity, they mean that knowledge must grow from the soil in which it is planted. Western sociology grew out of Europe’s industrial revolutions and class struggles. African sociology must grow from our own histories – from colonial wounds, from rural solidarities, from the wisdom of uMakhulu who keeps families alive through social grants and love.
It is not enough to sprinkle African names into Western theories, or to quote Fanon and call it decolonisation. We must change the very language of our thinking. As the authors remind us, language is not just communication; it is worldview. In IsiXhosa, umntu means a person, but it also carries an ethic – to be truly human is to belong, to care, to recognise the humanity of others. In our indigenous languages, there is no “other”. There is only abantu – the people.
Imagine if we taught sociology from this starting point. Imagine if we explained the family not as a “nuclear unit”, but as an interconnected web of relationships – uMakhulu, uMalume, uMakazi – each with moral obligations and social roles. Imagine if we replaced sterile academic phrases with the living idioms of our languages, words that breathe with the rhythm of our people.
UMakhulu, in Magoqwana and Adesina’s work, is not merely a symbol of femininity. She is the embodiment of African epistemology – matrifocal, nurturing, resilient and wise. She is the living archive of a community’s history. Her stories, songs, and proverbs are not entertainment; they are sociological theories in oral form.
When she tells a child, “Ungumntu ngabanye abantu” (you are a person because of other people), she is teaching the ethics of social responsibility. When she gathers children around the fire for iintsomi (folktales), she is transmitting collective memory – explaining power, morality and survival through metaphor. When she insists that we remember iziduko zethu (our clan names), she is teaching identity politics: who we are, where we come from, and what we owe to one another.
Yet, because this knowledge is transmitted by women and often in indigenous languages, it has been dismissed as “non-scientific”. Western sociology, with its obsession for objectivity and “hard data”, fails to see the sociological imagination in storytelling. It fails to recognise that oral traditions are not primitive – they are simply another method of theorising. In a world obsessed with the written word, uMakhulu reminds us that knowledge also lives in the spoken, the sung and the remembered.
To centre uMakhulu is to challenge patriarchy – both Western and African. It is to dismantle the myth that knowledge must come from men in suits with titles. It is to say that women, especially older women. Have always been the backbone of our intellectual traditions. Before colonialism, many African societies were matriarchal or matrilineal. Women were political leaders, traders, healers and philosophers. Colonialism did not just exploit Africa; it gendered it, turning the continent into a passive “motherland” that needed to be conquered and saved by men.
Reclaiming uMakhulu is therefore an act of resistance. It is a way of saying: the mother is not passive, she is powerful. Her knowledge is not inferior, it is foundational. Her voice does not whisper from the margins; it echoes from the centre of our being.
Magoqwana and Adesina call this a matrifocal sociology – a way of thinking that values interconnectedness, care, and community over competition and hierarchy. It’s not about replacing men with women but about rebalancing our intellectual world. It is a sociology that does not divide reason from emotion, science from spirit or theory from life.
In IsiXhosa, there is a word – ukubuyisa – meaning “to bring back”. Traditionally, it refers to the ritual of calling back the spirit of an ancestor to rejoin the family. In the context of African sociology, ukubuyisa means bringing back our intellectual ancestors – the mothers, the storytellers, the herbalists and the philosophers who have been erased from history.
We must bring them back into our classrooms, our syllabuses, our consciousness. We must read Fatima Meer and Ellen Khuzwayo alongside Marx and Weber. We must remember that bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela are not only political figures; they are theorists of life and liberation.
To perform ukubuyisa is to heal. It is to cleanse our education of arrogance and return humility to knowledge. It is to admit that the grandmother in a rural village, who never went to school, might still understand community better than any sociologist with a PhD.
Nelson Mandela University (NMU) stands at a crossroads – between the memory of colonial education and the promise of African intellectual rebirth. The university carries the name of a man who believed in dignity, humanity, and justice. But a name is not enough; it must live as a practice.
If there is any place that should lead this return to the mother, it is NMU. As I wrote recently for MediaHouse150, reclaiming African narratives is not only the work of creatives or journalists – it is the responsibility of our entire education system. Our classrooms must echo with African languages, our syllabuses must honour African mothers of knowledge, and our institutions must embody the spirit of ubuntu that Mandela himself stood for.
Let NMU be the university that does not only bear his name but embodies it.
African sociology will remain incomplete until it learns to listen again to the voices it silenced. Reconnecting to the mother is not sentimental nostalgia – it is survival. In a time where our institutions struggle with moral decay and our societies with alienation, we need the ethics of care, empathy, and accountability that uMakhulu teaches.
If sociology is the study of society, then let us begin where society begins – in the home, by the fireside, with the voice of the grandmother. Knowledge is not something we discover in books alone; it is something we inherit, nurture and pass on.
Perhaps, then, the future of African sociology lies not in the new theories but in old wisdom. Perhaps the revolution we need is not one of protest but of remembrance.
Because when we listen to uMakhulu, we are not just learning about the past, but we are reclaiming power to imagine a different future.
–MediaHouse150
