I am a historian of twentieth and twenty-first century Africa in global perspective, with a particular interest in moments of social change and political transition, and the interplay between structures and subjectivities in shaping historical agency and experience in such settings. This means I favour a combination of political economy, social history, and global history approaches. My published scholarship to date focuses mainly on colonial and post-colonial Southern and East Africa, with particular attention to issues of race and class, labour, identity, state formation, knowledge production, and health – my latest project adds global resources politics to this repertoire. This work is anchored in archival research with an interdisciplinary approach, including employing oral, visual, and ethnographic methodologies. Overall, my research is fundamentally shaped by my understanding of the study of history as a form of critical politics for understanding and addressing the present, particularly as it relates to the asymmetrical global power relations in which African societies are historically embedded.  

My first book, Privileged Precariat: White Workers and South Africa’s Long Transition to Majority Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2021) investigated white working-class experiences of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to majority rule from the 1970s to the present. Arguing against established understandings of South African ‘exceptionalism’, it shows how the shifts occurring locally in relations between labour, capital, and the state from the 1970s, and hence the shifts occurring in white labour strategies and politics, were as much a product of late apartheid’s economic and ideological contradictions as of the shifting global political economy amid the rise of neoliberalism and identity politics.  

My second book project shifts the focus to different a transitional setting: late-colonial and early post-colonial Kenya. Here, I examine the role of state and non-state actors, local and international, in efforts at tuberculosis control. I am particularly interested in uncovering African experiences of and contributions to health-related knowledge production – whether in the village or the laboratory – and what the reception and circulation of such knowledge in imperial and international networks reveals about power and agency in a period characterised by Western biomedical hubris, anticolonial struggle, and development politics. 

These research foci have led to various international conferences and collaborative publications on, for instance, articulations of white power, privilege and subjectivities in contemporary South Africa, Zimbabwe, the DRC and Kenya ‘The politics of whiteness in Africa’ (Africa, 2017); on the historical co-constitution of race and class in Southern African white societies during the era of white minority rule, Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa, 1930s to 1990s (Routledge, 2020); and on visual methodologies in writing histories of health and healing in Africa (‘Photographs as sources’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, forthcoming 2025). I have also published on national populism, land expropriation, rumour and nostalgia, and contributed invited chapters to edited volumes on post-apartheid history-writing, national identity and state formation in Africa, and histories of African development. In recent years, I have addressed some of these topics in broader public forums such as the digital publications Africa is a country and African Arguments, and in interviews for Radio SRF and SWI/swissinfo. Please see ‘Publications’ below for full details.   

At the EIB, I am developing a new research project which uses specific African raw materials as lens to investigate the global political economy of African resources in the years immediately following World War II. This intellectually ambitious and wide-ranging project brings together the history of late-colonial African development, European postwar reconstruction, and the making of the postwar international order to offer a reinterpretation of the postwar from Africa. Such a project is both timely and necessary in the context of current scholarly and public concern with the historical and contemporary entanglement of Africa and the West, from academic efforts to decentre Europe to popular debates surrounding provenance, restitution and decoloniality.  

Please see ‘Research Projects’ below for further information on my ongoing projects.  

African resources, the reconstruction of Europe, and the making of the postwar order 

After 1945, faced with devastated cities, infrastructures, industries and economies in the wake of the Second World War, European imperial powers like Britain, France and Belgium homed in on their African colonies as sources of raw materials and revenue to support metropolitan reconstruction. This project uses specific African commodities as lens to investigate the political economy of African resources in relation to European reconstruction and the making of the postwar international order. It focuses on West African timber, Southern African asbestos, and Central African copper – three commodities crucial to physical and economic reconstruction, strategic industries, and foreign exchange earnings. The analytical focus is on tracing the debates, strategies and contestations which animated access to and distribution of these key resources between and across colonial, metropolitan, continental and international forums, involving state actors, commercial interests, and international organisations. This project is the first to centre Africa in an integrative, multiscale analysis of the postwar moment. Seed funding for the development of this project was won from the University of Basel Research Fund for Junior Researchers. 

Tuberculosis control and the politics of public health in Kenya, 1950s-60s  

This book project investigates the politics of knowledge production in late-colonial and early post-colonial Kenya through a focus on tuberculosis-related research and health interventions taking place in the context of Mau Mau and the transition to majority rule. It enquires into the local conditions, racialised power relations, and imperial/global networks shaping health-related knowledge production and practices, with particular attention to uncovering African experiences and contributions. This project was developed as part of the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded research consortium ‘African Contributions to Global Health’. This interdisciplinary consortium comprised three Swiss institutions – African history/University of Basel; public health/Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute; urban planning/École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne – and partner institutions in Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Burkina Faso and Nigeria.  

Photographs as sources for writing histories of medicine, health and healing in post/colonial Africa 

Historians researching health-related themes in Africa are regularly confronted with photographic depictions of everything from momentous events and prominent people to apparently mundane clinical work, offices, buildings, equipment, nameless patients and staff – often ‘in the field’ – as well as specimens and anatomy. Yet historians of health and healing in Africa have not systematically utilized photographs as historical sources. To be sure, photographs abound in medical histories of Africa, but typically as provocative yet unexplored cover photos and illustrations intended to complement rather than augment or challenge analyses based on written sources. This project, with funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, brings together early career and established scholars based at institutions in Africa, Europe and North America who work at the intersection of visual, medical and African history to explore the opportunities and challenges of using photographs to write histories of health and healing in colonial and postcolonial Africa. In a special issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine (forthcoming 2025), we discuss issues such as the fiction of photographic transparency, affective viewing, and the ethical questions of reproduction and interpretation, and offer a set of analytical tools for addressing these. This publication is the first to establish the intersection of visual-medical-African history as a productive analytic which moves the field of African history forward. 

Academic positions

2025 – present Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Institute for European Global Studies, University of Basel 

2018 – 2025 Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer in African History, Department of History, University of Basel 

2014 – 2018 Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Studies Group, University  

of the Free State 
 

Academic Qualifications  

2014 PhD in History, University of Cambridge  

2009 MPhil in History (European Expansion and Globalisation), cum laude, Leiden University  

2007 BA Honours in History, cum laude, Stellenbosch University  

2006 BA International Studies, cum laude, Stellenbosch University  
 

Awards and Funding (selected) 

2024 University of Basel Research Fund for Excellent Junior Researchers Grant  

2024 Gerda Henkel Foundation General Research Grant 

2020 Swiss National Science Foundation Scientific Exchanges Grant 

2020 Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft Basel Grant 

2018 Swiss Government Excellence Fellowship for Foreign Scholars (ESKAS) 

2018 South African National Research Foundation Innovation Postdoctoral Fellowship 

Most recent publications – A full list of publications is available on ORCID 

Van Zyl-Hermann, D. and Williams, R. ‘Photographs as sources for writing histories of medicine, health and healing in colonial and postcolonial Africa’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, (forthcoming 2025). 

Van Zyl-Hermann, D. ‘New histories of race and class in South Africa’, in T. Simpson (ed), History beyond Apartheid: New Approaches in South African Historiography. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023. 

Van Zyl-Hermann, D., Hammel, T., Burri, C., Chenal, J., Fink, G., Konou, A.A., Nébié, E., Osei Afriyie, D., Pessoa Colombo, V., Utzinger, J. and Tischler, J., ‘African Contribution to Global Health: Circulating Knowledge and Innovation’, Global Public Health, 2022.  

Van Zyl-Hermann, D. and Verbuyst, R. ‘“The real history of the country”? Expropriation without compensation and competing master narratives about land (dis)possession in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 48(5), 2022, 825-842. 

Van Zyl-Hermann, D. Privileged precariat: White workers and South Africa’s long transition to majority rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021 and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2023 (Southern Africa edition). 

Van Zyl-Hermann, D. ‘A new “state” for the “nation”: Extra-parliamentary mobilisation and white minority politics in post-apartheid South Africa’, in M. Castells and B. Lategan (eds.), National Identities and State Formation. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021. 

Money D. and Van Zyl-Hermann, D., Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa, 1930s-1990s. Oxon: Routledge, 2020.  

I have designed, delivered, and assessed a range of courses in African history since 1800 – variously thematic, national, regional or global in scope – at Stellenbosch University, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Basel, including co-teaching with colleagues in anthropology and sociology. Topics have included race as historical concept; public health debates in African Studies; citizenship struggles in South Africa; and entangled histories of Europe and Africa after WWII. A full list of my previous and current courses at the University of Basel is available via the Vorlesungsverzeichnis. 

In addition, I have co-supervised a number of graduate MA and PhD dissertations during my postdoc at the University of the Free State, on topics in twentieth century southern African social, economic, and cultural history.