About

Hailing from California, I have been engaging with African history, literature, culture and politics for two decades. My relationship to the continent began in 1994 when I studied for a year at the University of Zimbabwe. Then I taught for six months at a boys’ high school in Harare, after which I backpacked around eastern and southern Africa and the Indian Ocean islands for two-and-a-half years. During those 4 years, I traveled extensively in 17 African countries. The experience inspired me to pursue a career in African history.

During graduate school, I spent a year in Cape Town living in the townships and researching the impact of the Group Areas forced removals on the “Coloured” community resulting in my MA thesis, “Removals and Remembrance: Commemorating Community in Coloured Cape Town.”

I then turned my scholarly attention towards understanding modern South African port culture, focusing on the lives of sailors, passengers, immigrants, exiles, pilgrims, stowaways, dockworkers, prostitutes, cab drivers, evangelists, and other port officials at the Cape Town ship/port nexus since World War II. To learn more about the seafaring side of this world, I sailed for two months on two cargo ships from Los Angeles to Cape Town (via fourteen ports in the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans) and spent another year in the Mother City, getting a better grasp of contemporary maritime culture.

In 2005, I moved to Cape Town and have lived here ever since. I have spent my time conducting dissertation research which has led to a number of published articles and chapters, including the book, Sugar Girls & Seamen: A Journey into the World of Dockside Prostitution in South Africa. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research at Cape Town and Durban dockside nightclubs, the book dives into the murky waters of South Africa’s dockside sex trade and considers the meanings and consequences of maritime sexual and cultural exchange.

In addition, I have worked as a researcher for one of the political parties in South Africa’s parliament, learning about African politics from within. I have also been a higher education researcher at the University of Cape Town, participating in major trans-national research projects, including the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) and the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project. With these and other projects, I have co-authored numerous articles and chapters about open education and social justice in the Global South. I was also the lead-author for the book Seeking Impact and Visibility: Scholarly Communication in Southern Africa.

I currently live in Cape Town with my lovely wife Marjorie Bingham (who I met on my very first day in Cape Town as a young backpacker in 1997) and our delightful daughter Sonoya.