Entangled Ecologies: Reflecting on ASnA 2025 in Makhanda

There are conferences that simply happen, and then there are conferences that leave something behind them, a shift in how a discipline sees itself and where it belongs. ASnA 2025, hosted by Rhodes University in Makhanda from 20 to 22 August 2025, was firmly the latter. A full decade after the city last welcomed the Anthropology Southern Africa community in 2015, Makhanda opened its streets, its residences and its lecture halls once again, and the discipline answered that welcome in full.

Behind every successful gathering of this scale stands the quiet, painstaking work of an organising committee, and ASnA 2025 was no exception. Under the leadership of Dr Melusi Dlamini, Chair of the ASnA 2025 Organising Committee, the Department of Anthropology at Rhodes University carried the weight of both the academic programme and the broader logistical and community dimensions of the event, and did so with a level of care that delegates felt from the moment they arrived. It is this leadership, together with the tireless work of the committee members who supported it, that turned a theme on paper into three days of lived intellectual and communal experience.

That theme, Entangled Ecologies: Memory, Place, and Anthropological Futures in (Southern) Africa, asked something of everyone who took part. It asked scholars to sit with the idea that memory, place and ecology are not separate concerns to be studied in turn, but threads that pull on one another constantly. The programme honoured that ask, holding more than 100 papers across sessions on water and healing, heritage and memory, waste ecologies, policing, masculinities, neurodivergence and digital imaginaries, each one a different angle on the same entangled world.

The academic programme found its centre in two keynote lectures. Professor Francis Nyamnjoh of the University of Cape Town offered incompleteness and conviviality as starting points for ecological imagination, a reminder that unfinished thinking can be generative rather than lacking. Distinguished Professor Lenore Manderson of the University of the Witwatersrand pressed further still, naming inequality as a lethal ecological reality and challenging the discipline to treat fracture and repair as sites of possibility rather than failure. Delegates left both lectures with more questions than they arrived with, which is, in anthropology, the surest sign of a keynote well delivered.

The conference opened formally under the guidance of Dr Gabriel Darong, ASnA President, Dr Pascall Taruvinga, Head of the Department of Anthropology, Professor Enocent Msindo, Dean of Humanities, and Dr Khwezi Mzilikazi, Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research, Innovation and Strategic Partnerships, whose words of welcome set the tone of seriousness and warmth that carried through the following days.

If ASnA 2025 had a quiet triumph, it was the platform it gave the Eastern Cape. All four universities of the province, Rhodes University, the University of Fort Hare, Walter Sisulu University and Nelson Mandela University, were present, with the Head of Department from Walter Sisulu University and senior colleagues from Fort Hare and Nelson Mandela University attending in person to affirm that presence. Papers rooted in the region, on healing cosmologies in rural areas, on urban livelihoods, on the social and ecological pressures facing Gqeberha and East London, carried Eastern Cape scholarship into national and international view, proving the province to be not simply a place anthropology studies but a place anthropology thinks from.

The numbers behind the conference tell their own story of reach. 126 delegates attended, 5 representing international institutions and 121 representing South African ones. The United Kingdom sent 2 delegates, from the University of Oxford and the University of Bristol, while single delegates travelled from Harvard University in the United States, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in Japan and Makerere University in Uganda. Within South Africa, 16 universities and 3 national research institutes sent delegates from 8 provinces. The Eastern Cape led with 73 delegates from Rhodes University, Nelson Mandela University, the University of Fort Hare and Walter Sisulu University, followed by the Western Cape with 23 delegates from the University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University and the University of the Western Cape, and Gauteng with 17 delegates from the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Johannesburg, the University of Pretoria, the HSRC, the CSIR and the Ditsong Museums of South Africa. KwaZulu Natal contributed 3 delegates, the North West 2, and the Free State, Mpumalanga and Northern Cape 1 delegate each.

Numbers alone, though, do not capture what made this conference distinct. Postgraduate students were not simply present at ASnA 2025, they were central to it, presenting their own work alongside senior academics and stepping into roles as session chairs, discussants and co presenters. This is, at heart, what the organising committee set out to protect, a conference where the discipline's future scholars are trusted with real intellectual responsibility rather than kept at the margins of the programme.

The committee's vision reached well beyond the university gates. More than 120 delegates spent three days in Makhanda, filling residences, hotels and guesthouses across the city, with at least 60 delegates requiring local accommodation and around 30 of these housed within Rhodes University residences. More than 20 delegates arranged airport shuttles from Chief Dawid Stuurman International Airport, while others organised car hire, each choice translating directly into support for local transport and hospitality businesses. Through a partnership arranged by the organising committee with Food4Futures, a local non profit organisation working against food insecurity in Makhanda, every delegate received a voucher booklet worth R50, a contribution totalling R6000 that delegates were encouraged to share with households and individuals across the city facing hardship. Local craftspeople and artists were also given a place within the programme itself, invited to display and sell their work, so that the conference's benefit to Makhanda extended well past its final session.

None of this generosity would have been possible without the institutional support secured for the conference, support that the organising committee worked hard to bring together. The Dean of Humanities' Office contributed R40000, support that allowed the conference to be delivered at the highest level across its academic, logistical and community facing dimensions. This was strengthened further by R260000 in funding from the South African National Convention Bureau, without which the scale and quality of the programme delivered would not have been possible.

It is in the words of the delegates themselves that the success of ASnA 2025, and by extension the work of its organisers, is most clearly felt. Participants described the conference as brilliant, heart warming and fabulous, and spoke of keynote lectures that were outstanding, offering rich insights and thought provoking discussions that elevated the entire experience. One delegate noted that meeting in person was invaluable, observing that hybrid and online conferences take away all that is valuable about such gatherings. Another was moved by the intergenerational spirit of the event, remarking on how amazing it was to see young people own the discipline and to watch what they are doing with their training. One anonymous participant called it a truly wonderful conference, thanking the organisers for a generous and generative time and congratulating Rhodes University for hosting such a fabulous gathering. Professor Fiona Ross of the University of Cape Town wrote that she left filled with energy and excitement about the collective work of the discipline and its directions, thanking the organisers for excellent organisation and a really smooth programme, and describing ASnA 2025 as, quite simply, the most energising and enlivening Anthropology conference she had yet attended.

ASnA 2025 will be remembered as a conference that placed the Eastern Cape, and Rhodes University in particular, at the very centre of anthropological thought in Southern Africa rather than at its edges. That achievement belongs to Dr Melusi Dlamini and the ASnA 2025 Organising Committee, whose vision and dedication shaped every part of the experience, from the opening addresses to the final farewell. The Department of Anthropology and the ASnA Executive Council extend their deepest gratitude to the organising committee for the extraordinary work behind this conference, and to the Dean's Office, whose support has left a lasting imprint on the standing of Rhodes University, the Eastern Cape and anthropology across Southern Africa. Article by :Jabulile Ngalo (Communications Subcommittee)