Dr Mbongiseni Buthelezi

“Mbongiseni Buthelezi began with language and literature.

He completed an MA in English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal before earning a PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. But the questions underneath that work were already larger than literature alone: how societies construct identities, how versions of the past acquire authority and how language shapes who gets to make claims about land, history and belonging.

Back in South Africa, those questions increasingly took him beyond the conventional boundaries of an English department.

At the University of Cape Town, he worked across English, the Centre for Law and Society and the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative. His research examined land governance, traditional authority, archives and the ways pre-colonial histories are used to make claims in the present.

The focus gradually widened from how institutions narrate the past to how they function in the present.
Buthelezi went on to lead the Public Affairs Research Institute, where his work centred on state capability, governance and state capture in South Africa. He also served as an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg. In 2023, with Peter Vale, he co-edited State Capture in South Africa: How and Why It Happened, bringing together multiple disciplines to examine how state capture had been enabled, exposed and challenged.

In October 2024, he became Chief Executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

It is a role that brings many of those threads together. The Foundation appointed him citing his combination of scholarly, activist and managerial experience, as well as his work on justice, transformation, reparation, memory and archive. Since taking the role, Buthelezi has written about translating Mandela’s legacy into practical engagement with the institutional and social challenges facing contemporary South Africa. Nelson Mandela Foundation
He began by asking how societies tell stories about the past.

Now he leads an institution built around what those stories can make possible in the future.”