Comparisons and connections: thirty years of democracy in South Africa and twenty-five years of <i>Safundi</i>

All journals have a history.Transition was established in 1961 in Kampala, a year before Uganda's independence and the Conference of African Writers of English Expression, also referred to as the first African Writers Conference, which Rajat Neogy, Transition's founder, helped organize.The Review of African Political Economy started in 1974 during a less auspicious moment, when the excitement of decolonization and independence had fallen away to be replaced by sentiments of pessimism in the face of new forms of neo-imperialism and the remaining structural vestiges of colonialism that empowered elites at the expense of worker and peasant livelihoods.The Journal of Southern African Studies, founded the same year, similarly sought to speak to the political moment unfolding in southern Africa.Liberation movements were fanned out across the region in Frontline States, and anti-apartheid activism internal to South Africa had been revived with the labor strikes of the Durban Moment and the Soweto Uprising shortly thereafter.In a different vein, African Studies began as Bantu Studies in 1921 in segregation-era South Africa, a history that underscores both the longevity of Black studies in southern Africa but equally the racial separatism and chauvinism that informed such scholarship.Academic knowledge never escapes politics.Safundi also has a history that speaks to its time and the politics informing it.Established in 1999, only five years after South Africa achieved nonracial democracy, Safundi in retrospect was part of the post-apartheid moment of transition and the widening of different horizons-social, cultural, political, and historical-that took place then.The journal's beginnings were modest, limited to a website and the efforts of its founding editor, Andrew Offenburger, who started Safundi a year after finishing his undergraduate studies.Indeed, Safundi's history is also tied to the emergence of the internet during the 1990s and how it quickly enabled new platforms for publication and transnational connection.Not least, Safundi was founded in the spirit of comparative history between the United States and South Africa.