Divine Fuh

Director of the Institute for Humanities Africa

Divine Fuh is Director of the Institute for Humanities Africa (HUMA) at the University of Cape Town, where he is also a lecturer in social anthropology. Before that, he was Head of the Publications and Dissemination Programme at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa CODESRIA from 2017-2019. He joined UCT in 2012, from the University of Basel where he was a Researcher in the Chair for Research and Methodology at the Institute for Sociology. He taught briefly at the universities of Basel, Cape Town, Western Cape and Stellenbosch, and has been visiting lecturer at the Universities of Brasilia, Tokyo, and Gaston Berger. His research focuses on the politics of suffering and smiling, particularly on how urban youth seek ways of smiling in the midst of their suffering. He has researched Botswana, Cameroon, South Africa and Senegal, and his current work focuses on the political economy of Pan-African knowledge production. He was educated at the universities of Buea, Botswana and Basel. He has been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin (ZMO), and guest at the African Studies Centre Leiden. Divine is Founding Managing Editor of Langaa Research and Publishing, and has been Chair of the Council of Management of the Africa Book Collective. He is also current Co-Chair of the Global Africa Group (GAG) of the World Universities Council (WUN)