The contribution of radical Western Cape intellectuals to an indigenous knowledge project in South Africa

This paper examines the writings of Cape Town intellectuals Ben Kies and Neville Alexander to pose the question about the possibility of an emergence of an indigenous, or to use a term which Australian social theorist Raewyn Connell has recently used, a ‘Southern Theory’ for the social sciences in South Africa. The paper is an early exploration into what the essential and constituent parts of such a theory would consist of and against this attempts to explicate the views of Kies and Alexander in theoretical terms, and it draws on recent biographical work on Alexander. For the purposes of the study within which the paper is located, delineating these views and representing them in a closer theoretical exposition is an important first step.