Winner Africa Thesis Award 2025: Yonwaba Matshobotiyana
The jury of the Africa Thesis Award is delighted to announce that the 2025 prize has been awarded to Yonwaba Matshobotiyana of the University of the Free State, South Africa, with a thesis on Black women's poetry in South Africa.
Black1) women’s voices in South Africa, particularly in poetry, have long lingered on the periphery. Their current resurgence marks a pivotal juncture that speaks to the conditions of Black social life, particularly of Black women and Black queer women. Yonwaba Matshobotiyana's thesis 'Of Speaking and Visibility: The Intersectional Resistance and Resilience of Black Women in Koleka Putuma’s Collective Amnesia, vangile gantsho’s red cotton and danai mupotsa’s feeling and ugly examines the intersectional resistance and resilience strategies employed by the three poets to disrupt systems of power such as racism, the white gaze, white heteropatriarchy, patriarchy and the hegemony of heteronormativity.
Resistance and resilience
Moreover, the study recognises a symbiotic relationship between acts of resistance and resilience depicted in the selected collections: resistance and resilience emerge as co-constitutive forces, each inflecting and sustaining the other in the ongoing struggle against structures of domination. The argument of this study hinges on the assertion that the re-emergence of Black women’s poetry in South Africa is not just corrective but constitutive: it reimagines the conditions of Black being, inaugurates alternative forms of sociability and gestures toward uncharted terrains of Black futurity.
The jury was blown away by this exceptionally strong scholarly contribution to Black feminist thought and the field of decolonial literature studies. Yonwaba's thesis was supervised by Professor Helene Strauss, Department of English, University of the Free State.
The award ceremony will be organised at a later date this year.
Read the abstract (pdf).
Read the thesis (pdf).
Submissions
This year, the jury of the Africa Thesis Award received an impressive number of 46 submissions, representing a diverse range of disciplinary fields and all examples of excellent theses based on independent research related to Africa.
Runner-up
The 2025 runner-up is Maryame Ceesay (Research Master African Studies, Leiden University), with the thesis 'Youth Civic and Political (Dis)engagement in the "New Gambia"'. The jury was impressed with the thesis' timely and analytical reflections on the fragility of democracy and the processual nature of political transitions in everyday life. The jury would like to especially mention the thesis by Emaediong Akpan from the ISS at Erasmus University Rotterdam, with the thesis 'Digital Spaces as Contested Sites for Activism'. The jury would like to commend Ms Akpan for taking on the difficult and sensitive topic of gender in relation to digital spaces in very nuanced and reflexive ways.
The jury would like to thank all the students who submitted their work, as well as to the supervisors who supported them throughout the research and writing process.
Acknowledgements
The ASCL warmly thanks the members of the jury for their thoughtful and dedicated review of all submissions:
- Dr Tanja Hendriks (Chair, Leiden University)
- Dr Agnieszka Kazimierczuk (independent researcher and thinker)
- Mandipa Ndlovu (PhD candidate, African Studies Centre Leiden)
- Dr Jody Metcalfe (researcher, Utrecht University)
- Joost Bastmeijer (journalist and photographer)
1) Yonwaba Matshobotiyana uses the term ‘Black’ to refer to those who were historically classified as non-European under the apartheid regime, and capitalises this term to emphasise the identity and dignity of Black people.