Professor Xolela Mangcu

Xolela Mangcu is Professor of Sociology and History at George Washington University,
and a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. He obtained his Ph.D. in City
and Regional Planning from Cornell University in 1997 and has held fellowships at Harvard
University, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), The Brookings Institution, The
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The
Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London. He is also the first African
scholar to be awarded the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship, the biggest and most prestigious
award in Africa.

Mangcu has authored and co-authored nine books including Biko: A Life, which won the
University of Cape Town’s Meritorious Award; The Meaning of Mandela (Essays by Henry
Louis Gates Jr., and Cornel West and Wole Soyinka); Becoming Worthy Ancestors (Essays by
Benedict Anderson, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martin Bernal) and To the Brink: The State of
Democracy in South Africa. His biography of Nelson Mandela, the first by an African, will be
published by Africa World Press in 2024. He is currently working on a new biography of
Desmond Tutu for Yale University Press. He is also turning into a book his Ph.D. dissertation on
Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington (Cornell University Press).

Mangcu has been one of South Africa’s most widely read columnists and political
analysts. Political scientist Peter Vale described him as ‘the most interesting, certainly the most
engaging voice amongst South Africa’s public intellectuals.” South Africa’s biggest newspaper,
the Sunday Times, has described him as the country’s “ most prolific public intellectual.”