African Observatory

Professor Ogude obtained his B.Ed (Hons) and MA from Nairobi University and his PhD in African Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand. Professor Ogude holds a NRF “B3” rating for the quality and impact of his research outputs.

He is the author of Ngugi’s Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation, London: Pluto Press, 1999. He has also co-edited, Urban Legends, Colonial Myths: Popular Culture and Literature in East Africa, Trenton: Africa World Press, 2007, Rethinking Eastern African Literary and Intellectual Landscapes, published in 2012 by Africa World Press, New Jersey and more recently edited ‘Chinua Achebe’s Legacy: Illuminations from Africa, published in 2015 by the Africa Institute of South Africa, Pretoria. Professor Ogude has published numerous articles in peer reviewed journals in the area of African Literature and Popular Culture in East Africa

Currently, he is Deputy Director and Research Fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria – a position he took up at the beginning of May, 2013.

Rory du Plessis has been a full-time lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Pretoria since 2011. He is pursuing a PhD with the Division of Philosophy and Ethics of Mental Health (UP). In 2014 he was awarded a pre-doc fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany. His research interests include digital and medical humanities with a strong focus on visual methodologies.

Melanie Jean Murcott is an Associate Professor based at the University of Cape Town’s Institute of Marine and Environmental Law. She holds an LLB from the University of Cape Town and an LLM (Constitutional and Administrative Law) from the University of Pretoria (both with distinction). She obtained her LLD (Constitutional Law) from North-West University in 2020. Before joining academia in 2012, Melanie practised as an attorney, including at Hogan Lovells (South Africa) where she was a partner. From 2012 to 2023, Melanie taught and engaged in research at the University of Pretoria. She is the author of Transformative Environmental Constitutionalism (Brill, 2022), a significant monograph which develops a novel approach to the adjudication of disputes concerning environmental protection, given that we face a planetary crisis with myriad justice implications. Melanie believes, as Maya Angelou says: “no one of us can be free until everybody is free”. Importantly for Melanie, a flourishing environment creates the necessary conditions for freedom since humans and the environment are fundamentally connected.

Tafadzwa Mushonga is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (CAS), University of Pretoria in South Africa. Her interests broadly fall within the field of political ecology, wherein she traces the relationships between political, economic and social factors with environmental issues. Her PhD work, completed under the auspices of the Environmental Humanities South Programme at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, contributes to the body of work critiquing the militarisation of conservation. Related to this work, Tafadzwa is currently working on publications that engage with the corollaries of conservation violence. Before her PhD, Tafadzwa has worked in the Zimbabwe environment sector for over eight years as a public officer responsible for social forestry related issues. At CAS, Tafadzwa is leading the extractivism and the environment project—the Centre’s Environmental Humanities signature project, which seeks to address environmental impacts associated with exploitation of resources in Africa. Due to her involvement in this project, and broad interest in Environmental Humanities, Tafadzwa has been recently nominated to the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institute/Mellon Global Humanities Institute on “Climate Justice and Problems of Scale.”