Hall of Fame · Scholars
Thinkers who returned Africa to the centre of its own knowledge.
6 inductees honoured under Scholars.
Kenya
Political Science & History
Ali Mazrui
1933 – 2014
Political scientist and public intellectual. Delivered the BBC Reith Lectures in 1979 as The African Condition and wrote and presented the nine-part PBS/BBC television series The Africans: A Triple Heritage (1986), interpreting Africa to a global audience through its indigenous, Islamic and Western inheritances.
Senegal
History & Science
Cheikh Anta Diop
1923 – 1986
Historian, physicist and Egyptologist. Demonstrated the African origins of ancient Egyptian civilisation in Nations nègres et culture (1954), established West Africa's first radiocarbon-dating laboratory at IFAN in Dakar, and shaped UNESCO's General History of Africa.
Nigeria
Letters & Ideas
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
b. 1977
Novelist and essayist. Author of Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun (Orange Prize, 2007) and Americanah; her TED talks The Danger of a Single Story and We Should All Be Feminists have together been heard by tens of millions worldwide.
Nigeria
Letters
Chinua Achebe
1930 – 2013
Novelist. Wrote Things Fall Apart (1958) — the most widely read African novel in history, translated into more than 50 languages — and won the Man Booker International Prize in 2007 for his lifelong achievement in literature.
Kenya
Letters & Linguistics
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
b. 1938
Novelist, playwright and essayist. Author of Weep Not, Child, A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood; abandoned English as his literary language and began writing in Gikuyu to demonstrate that African languages can bear the full weight of modern thought.
NigeriaLetters & Drama
Wole Soyinka
b. 1934
Playwright, poet and essayist. First African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1986). Wrote Death and the King's Horseman, A Dance of the Forests and The Man Died, and has been an unyielding voice for human rights and democratic governance across five decades.