Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Sally K Ledwaba, Academic Excellence Coordinator, Tshwane University of Technology

Universities have a role in challenging the status quo on issues such as gender, race, nationality and sexuality. But all too often, they replicate societal inequalities.

For example, a recent study notes that globally, only one-third of senior academics are women. In the US, universities have twice as many male professors as female.

Culture is one driver of these intersecting inequalities in higher education.

In South Africa, a report noted that in 2017, Black women made up 16% of university academics and 40% of the population, making them the most underrepresented group. There’s an imbalance by seniority as well as gender and “race”: most Black senior academics are male, and most female senior academics are White or Indian.

Trends like these raise an important question: how do the few African women who become professors navigate institutions where they are a small minority?

This was the research question at the centre of my PhD in social work, supervised by professors Adrian van Breda and Thobeka Nkomo. My research explored African female academics’ career motivations, challenges in that career and personal resilience strategies, as well as what their institutions had done to support their journey towards leadership.

The findings echoed my own experience, but also challenged some common assumptions.

I found that academic advancement is often shaped not only by individual effort, but also by those who are willing to create opportunities for others. Many participants credited White male professors for enabling their academic advancement by encouraging doctoral studies, nominating them for leadership roles, supporting their promotions, and increasing their visibility in influential networks. Few participants identified Black female mentors as enabling their rise, and references to Black male academics were largely absent.

The relative absence of Black mentorship in these accounts raises difficult but important questions about how support networks form within universities and who sponsors the next generation of scholars.

The challenge for universities is to go beyond depending on personal goodwill and to systematically embed sponsorship into their cultures and practices.

Experiences of African female professors

For my PhD research, I conducted in-depth narrative interviews with 21 African female professors in three universities in South Africa’s Gauteng province. The aim was to understand how they had advanced to senior positions.

I was struck by the similarities in their stories.

There was a complex interplay between motivation, resilience and community in the academic journey of these individuals.

Intelligence, intellectual curiosity and the quest for knowledge were the main motivations for entering the academy. As one participant put it:

I was performing well.

Another said:

I was always attracted to understanding.

Staying motivated depended on both personal strengths and supportive environments.

All participants demonstrated strong resilience. They were determined not to be excluded, navigated complex institutional environments, pursued qualifications despite obstacles, and created opportunities for themselves. Their career success was the result of years of personal sacrifice, persistence and a pursuit of excellence, often extending back into childhood.

Participants recalled barriers they faced when entering the academy:

So, everything that you do, you must do twice, because you’re being doubted and there are questions about whether you know what you’re doing.

I wasn’t promoted … and I felt it was because I was female, because my male counterparts were promoted, who I felt had the same profile as me, or even lower, and they got promoted.

Unexpected sources of social capital

However, personal resilience was not enough. Social capital was also vital: progress often occurred when people decided to open doors for others.

This participant said a senior White male in her department advised her:

… think about the project that is going to set you apart from your supervisor … if you want to succeed in this career.

Another participant spoke of a White male professor who was willing to help her get established as a researcher.

Participants’ stories showed that advancement often occurred when influential colleagues broke long-standing patterns of exclusion in academia.

Although public discourse often portrays White males as obstacles to Black advancement, this research reveals a more complex reality. The unexpected allyship of White men suggests that institutional change often progresses through relationships that bridge divides of race, gender and historical privilege.

As this participant said:

I also had a great [White, male] supervisor, who was committed to transformation, in the sense that he went overseas and used his networks to amass these resources. And he wanted to grow from the grassroots.

The role of White male academics in these stories was not uniformly positive. Some participants recalled instances in which White male colleagues impeded progress, limiting access to opportunities and upholding institutional hierarchies.

One described the difficulty she faced:

There were challenges … and [the department] had old people at the time and White males. I was replacing a male colleague … I didn’t have an environment. The office that I had was not a conducive office at all.

These findings highlight an aspect of how power operates in universities. Although merit, expertise and consistent effort are vital for academic growth, it matters for senior academics to identify potential in junior colleagues, support them and connect them to networks.

There are many possible explanations for why White male professors featured so prominently in participants’ accounts. Historically, White male professors have occupied a greater proportion of senior academic and leadership positions. They have had better access to networks, resources and influence that affect academic careers. By contrast, many Black academics have had to navigate institutions that were not designed for their success.

The study findings, therefore, tell us as much about the distribution of institutional power as about individual acts of mentorship.

Embedding the culture

As a new PhD (Ledwaba) and as a senior academic (van Breda), we both argue that transformation in higher education cannot rely solely on demographic change, such as increasing the number of African female academics. While representation is essential, it does not shape women’s academic careers or transform the academy. Rather, transformation requires a personal and institutional commitment to a culture of enabling talented scholars from historically marginalised groups to thrive.

– Black women academics in my study said their main allies were White men – what this reveals
– https://theconversation.com/black-women-academics-in-my-study-said-their-main-allies-were-white-men-what-this-reveals-285167

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Matthew Benson-Strohmayer, Research Fellow & Sudans Research Director, London School of Economics and Political Science

South Sudan’s independence from Sudan in 2011 was meant to close the chapter on one of Africa’s longest civil wars: the north-south war that preceded it. Formally, it did. But independence did not end the deeper struggles over power, revenue and coercion inside the newly independent state.

South Sudan returned to war in 2013, watched a 2015 settlement collapse, and now lives under a 2018 Revitalised Agreement whose promised transition has been postponed repeatedly.

This is usually told as a story of failed peacemaking, with too many spoilers and too little political will. But what if these deals are not failing so much as working? What if they stabilise order precisely by preserving the systems that make violence profitable?

Political settlements theory helps explain why peace agreements often focus on dividing power, offices and resources among elites. The hope is that if rival leaders receive a share of power, offices and resources, they will have less reason to fight. But negotiated transitions can also carry wartime systems into peace. The question, then, is not only who gets a share of the state, but what kinds of war economies, revenue systems and coercive practices are being preserved.

As an economic historian of war and peace, I have spent more than a decade tracing how rulers in South Sudan and Sudan raise money, goods, labour and other resources, and how payment is enforced through soldiers, officials, checkpoints and offices. My recent research paper examined how South Sudan’s peace agreements reshaped the country’s systems of revenue, spending and coercion: who could extract resources, who could allocate them, and who could enforce payment.

My analysis drew on 2020-2024 fieldwork and archival, secondary and peace agreement data. I sought to answer three questions: who collected revenue from monetary and non-monetary sources, such as cash, cattle, grain and labour; who paid; and who benefited.

What emerges is that peace settlements have redistributed access to money, offices and external finance among elites, while leaving intact the coercive revenue system and war economies that preceded them. In some cases, peace has formalised those systems by turning wartime access to extraction into recognised office, revenue authority or security control. Violence changes form rather than ending; it recedes from the battlefield and lodges in the revenue systems, security forces and war economies that continue to extract from civilians – now in the name of order.

This is a pattern I call predatory peace.

The same machinery makes the state itself a prize: controlling it is so lucrative that capture remains worth fighting for, and when the power-sharing breaks down, as it did in 2013, the fighting returns. Peace and war become two settings of one extractive machine rather than true opposites.

Similar dynamics have emerged in other resource-rich, conflict-affected states, such as in oil-rich Angola and the mineral endowed Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). South Sudan is resource-rich too, above all because of oil. But the wider issue is not only natural resources. It is the political control of revenue streams such as oil, customs, aid, loans, contracts, checkpoints, timber, charcoal and other forms of extraction.

It’s all part of a wider pattern in peacemaking that has repeatedly paired political deals with economic reforms that entrenched elite control over revenue and other resources.

None of this is inevitable. A different approach would start by treating the whole revenue complex as the heart of peacemaking itself, not as a technical issue to be postponed until after a peace agreement is signed. It would ask who controls money and other resources, including humanitarian and development assistance; who is allowed to extract resources, payments and labour from civilians; and whether people can see anything in return for what they pay.

Peace as ‘organised robbery’ in South Sudan

South Sudan’s national revenue system includes taxes, customs, fees, oil revenues, international loans, aid and off-budget income. It also includes non-monetary extraction, such as cattle, grain, labour and goods taken from civilians. These flows are enforced through soldiers, security forces, government offices and checkpoints. Together, they form what I call a revenue complex: the machinery through which rulers extract the resources that allow them to govern, reward allies and sustain coercive power.

In much of South Sudan, “peace” has reshuffled who profits from the revenue system, not what it does to those who pay. A businessman in Malakal, a city in Upper Nile State, described the tax system as “organised robbery” in which soldiers were overcharging and pocketing the proceeds. He was told that the system had to be endured to “maintain peace”.

Predation was not a breakdown of order; it was a condition of order.

None of this began with the peace process. My peace agreement analysis starts in the early 1970s, but in separate archival research and an earlier round of just over 200 interviews, I traced the territory’s revenue complex back to at least 1899. Across colonial, rebel and independent rule, I found a similar logic: revenue sources were used to secure rulers’ control more than to fund public goods.

Across more than 120 years, changes in government did not dismantle the underlying machinery of extraction and control. Each major political settlement since the 1970s has been laid over that inheritance, reshuffling who profits from it.

Confusion is integral to the system. Traders described being shuttled from office to office to meet fresh demands; collectors themselves spoke of decrees “passed from nowhere” that shifted revenue to other units. A businesswoman in Wau described fierce competition for tax collection posts because of what could be skimmed from them. This is not administrative failure, but a system that works for those who run it. When revenue authority is spread across overlapping offices, no one can be held to account and everyone can be rewarded for their loyalty.

This performance of state finance runs all the way up. In 2012, the president conceded that some US$4 billion in oil money had simply been “stolen”. In 2026, a UN panel of experts found that South Sudan continued to sell oil months in advance of delivery, and that disputes over undelivered oil cargoes and oil-backed debts had reached UK commercial courts.

State budgets perform reform while the money moves elsewhere.

What people get in return

South Sudanese nevertheless do not reject the idea of contributing to public authority. They contrasted community-level payments and contributions, which they could see returning as boreholes, roads or clinics, with state taxation, which they experienced as extraction without return.

Many insisted that paying tax is good, so long as it is reciprocal, transparent and tied to public goods.

The problem is that peace agreements often leave that link severed, even as they formalise new bargains among elites.

What non-predatory peace would require

A different kind of peacemaking would mean taking the following steps.

• rebuilding of a transparent, civilian-controlled revenue complex

• linking what people pay to what they receive

• making external support conditional on genuine revenue reform.

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Read more: Checkpoint ‘taxes’ make South Sudan one of the most expensive places to move goods

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Lastly, South Sudanese civic actors should be supported to monitor the cross-border flows – oil, arms, timber, charcoal, looted goods and finance – that fund fighting.

This work does not fall solely to donors and mediators. People are already documenting where the money goes.

A serious settlement would treat them as central to any peace worth the name.

– South Sudan at 15: how the political elite have found a way to profit from peace as well as war
– https://theconversation.com/south-sudan-at-15-how-the-political-elite-have-found-a-way-to-profit-from-peace-as-well-as-war-285846