Marxian Political Economy

Abstract

Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane was born on 26 August 1930 close to Colenso, in Natal, South Africa. His life story, as a black South African and one of the country's leading scholar activists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including during his years of exile, is an instructive and inspiring example. Magubane wrote some of the most powerful works of scholarship analysing the relationship between imperialism, white-settler colonialism, and race and class in South Africa and the global system. This included overseeing a massive ten-volume work on the history of the black liberation struggle upon his return to South Africa under the country's majority rule and multiracial democracy inaugurated in the 1990s with the election of President Nelson Mandela, the head of the African National Congress (ANC), after his release from prison. This essay provides an overview of Magubane's life and work.Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane was born on 26 August 1930 close to Colenso, in Natal, South Africa. His life story, as a black South African and one of the country's leading scholar activists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including during his years of exile, is an instructive and inspiring example. Magubane wrote some of the most powerful works of scholarship analysing the relationship between imperialism, white-settler colonialism, and race and class in South Africa and the global system. This included overseeing a massive ten-volume work on the history of the black liberation struggle upon his return to South Africa under the country's majority rule and multiracial democracy inaugurated in the 1990s with the election of President Nelson Mandela, the head of the African National Congress (ANC), after his release from prison.While a child, as recounted in My Life and Times (2010), Magubane's grandparents related stories to him of the Zulu War of 1879 and the Bambatha Rebellion of 1906, named after the Zulu minority ruler, and these made an indelible impression. Magubane's grandparents had seen the defeat of the Zulu Kingdom and its incorporation into Natal and the British Empire in 1897, soon followed by the Anglo-Boer War, which helped bring the word 'imperialism' into the English language, the formation of the Union of South Africa, which became a dominion of the