Joost Fontein
Countries of Expertise
Specialties
- Citizenship/Statelessness/Nationality
- Corruption/Impunity
- Deportees/Criminal Deportees
- Document Authentication
- Ethnic Discrimination/Persecution
- Government/State Actor Persecution
- Inter-Communal Conflicts
- Land Tenure Dispute
- Likelihood Of Destitution/Homelessness
- Nationality Assessment
- Police Persecution
- Political Persecution
- Risk Of Retaliation
- Risk Of Return
- Safe Internal Relocation
- Torture
- Tribal Discrimination/Persecution
- Witchcraft Accusations/Ritual Violence
About Joost Fontein
Joost Fontein is an independent scholar based in South Africa and Kenya, a research associate with the University of the Free State, and recently (February -June 2026), visiting professor at the University of Pretoria. He previously held a chair at the University of Johannesburg (2018–2025), and before that was director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa in Nairobi (2014–2018). He received his PhD in Social anthropology from the University of Edinburgh in 2003, where subsequently held a postdoctoral research position and then a lectureship, from 2004 to 2014. He has carried out long periods of ethnographic research in Zimbabwe and Kenya, as well as shorter periods in Tanzania, South Africa and elsewhere across the region. He is a former editor (2023-2026) of AFRICA (International Africa Institute) and is now an editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies (since 2026, was previously editor of JSAS in 2008-2014). He also cofounded Critical African Studies and serves on the editorial advisory boards of Anthropology Southern Africa and Human Remains and Violence. Among numerous special issues and articles, he has published three monographs on Zimbabwe, the most recent being The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000–2020: Bones Rumours and Spirits (James Currey, 2022), as well as a collaborative, multimodal, and experimental ethnography of Nairobi (Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty and Contingency, Punctum Press, 2024).
He has written expert reports for Zimbabwean asylum cases in the UK as well as for several criminal cases involving witchcraft and spirit possession (see Fontein J. 2014 ‘“She appeared to be in some kind of trance” Anthropology and the question of unknowability in a criminal trial’ in HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4 (1): 75–103). He has also written reports for the UK foreign Office (see 2025 Fontein, J. and Van Doninck, N. ‘Politics in Niger after the 2023 Coup.’ K4DD Rapid Evidence Review 299. Brighton, UK: Institute of Development Studies. DOI: 10.19088/K4DD.2025.086) and co-curated a series of innovative collaborative exhibitions with artists, writers and scholars at the National Museum of Kenya. He currently moves between the UK, Kenya and South Africa. In his spare time he runs a sound system, paints and travels.
