Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies

This essay examines the activism and scholarship of two South African sociologists and African Studies professors, Bernard Magubane and Anthony Ngubo during their time as graduate students at UCLA in the 1960s. Focusing on Magubane and Ngubo, I argue that migrant students from Southern Africa used research and protest politics to contest the postwar racial liberal ideology that dominated African studies and sectors of the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements from Southern California to Southern Africa. Ngubo, Magubane, and their colleagues united with the struggles of the Black working class in Los Angeles. They used their research and activism to challenge Cold War liberal ideas of life in California and the United States by likening the struggles of African Americans to the plight of Blacks in Southern Africa.