In October, a South African political scientist published a book on how scholars in Africa can improve their standing in the larger academic world. Three months later, after heated emails from several sources alleging ethics breaches, the publisher retracted the book.
The retraction notice, posted Jan. 12, 2024, states that UJ Press retracted and removed the book from its catalog “due to concerns arising from the publication.” Publisher Wilkus van Zyl told us the press had asked the peer reviewers of the manuscript to re-examine the volume with an additional set of questions after they received emails questioning the work’s legitimacy. The reviewers determined the book lacked scholarly rigor and contained “inappropriate criticisms that appear to be based on personal grievances rather than legitimate scholarly discourse.”
The retraction is the latest bout in a years-long quarrel between two feuding academics. Kgothatso Shai is a professor at the University of Limpopo, who writes about African politics and international relations. Several chapters of his book, “An Afrocentric Idea on Contested Knowledge: Selected Cases,” critiqued Facebook posts from Shepherd Mpofu, a media studies professor at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. Over the last few years, Mpofu has routinely criticized Shai’s works as “pathetic scholarship” in Facebook posts seen by Retraction Watch.
Shai, who felt Mpofu’s attacks necessitated a response, told us:
Professor Mpofu’s Facebook posts were clearly demeaning to my character and because the posts were misrepresenting my persona and my scholarship, the best that I could do as a scholar was to redirect the discourse from social media to where it rightfully belongs, which is an academic publication.
The disagreement over Shai’s book is the latest spat between the two academics, who were colleagues at the University of Limpopo for several years prior to Mpofu moving to the University of South Africa in 2023. While the feud’s origins are unclear, it has become public during the last year.
Shai published several articles in 2023 that took Mpofu to task over his comments on social media, including, “Shepherd Mpofu’s Facebook Rants: A Case Of Social Media As A Threat For Knowledge Development In South Africa” and “Grappling with the “Ndebelification” of Gukurahundi Studies: A Case of Mpofu’s Facebook Rants.”
When asked whether this was just a personal feud, Shai said:
I do not intellectually disagree with Mpofu because he is a Zimbabwean or [because] he appears to have personal issues against me. I am intellectually battling him because he represents a clear case of a charlatan if his Social Media posts about my academic work is [sic] anything to go by.
Conversely, Mpofu told us he thinks of Shai as a “toxic scholar” and does not see him as a peer. Mpofu says his comments about Shai and his work on Facebook are his private thoughts and not an attempt to engage with him, that Shai had no right to use his social media posts as fodder for his own scholarship. When asked for a South African law or statute to back this claim, he could not provide one.
Referring to Shai, Mpofu told Retraction Watch:
He can’t see my posts. Somebody was giving him that. What is the ethical procedure for somebody to use social media posts that don’t belong to their friend or social media posts for accounts to which they don’t have access?
Soon after the book’s publication, Mpofu and another South African academic emailed UJ Press and alleged the book contained libel, “xenophobic statements” and self-plagiarism. Mpofu called for a retraction and said he was considering suing the publisher. When asked for examples of the libel, Mpofu alleged there were sections in the book “linking me to a mafia” and “to benefitting and corrupting an imaginary system.”
When asked for examples of xenophobic statements, Mpofu pointed to the book’s last chapter:
Emerging from the above discussion and analysis, it is clear that the South Africa-based advocates of Zimbabwean scholarship are desperate to outshine black South African scholarship in order to legitimise their over-population in the employment ranks of South African universities in the midst of the increasing unemployment of the qualified locals.
While Shai did re-purpose several articles that appeared in other publications for his book, UJ Press found no problems with the professor’s use of these articles. Van Zyl said five people provided feedback and comments on the manuscript prior to publication. None of them raised any flags regarding plagiarism, xenophobia or libel, he said. Their subsequent recommendation for retraction stems from the lack of evidence in the book for its “sweeping generalisations about systemic bias or discrimination.”
Mpofu’s legal threats did not trigger the retraction, according to van Zyl, who added the incident has spurred the press to ask future reviewers to examine “ethical issues” more closely. But he said the publisher doesn’t belong in the middle of the feud:
Scholarship has always been about lifting the conversation and in this case, it’s one of the first instances [in my career] where it was, on both sides, kind of malicious. There’s an attack on each other’s characters and that is not what scholarship should be about. The discussion should be higher than that.
Update, 3/1/24, 2000 UTC: This post has been updated because it mistakenly included an excerpt from the book that was unrelated to Mpofu’s libel charge against the book’s author.
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