Biography
Sikose Mjali is a PhD Candidate in Language and Rhetoric. Her transdisciplinary research is grounded in Applied Linguistics, African Studies, Black Studies, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, oral history, and decolonial thought. She studies the language of resistance, with particular attention to apartheid South Africa, liberation movements, archives, and the ways oppressed people use language to name ourselves and organize against domination as we imagine freedom.
Mjali’s dissertation, Sechaba, Our Nation, Unsilenced: A Corpus-Assisted and Oral History Study of Liberation Discourse (2027), examines Sechaba, the official journal of the African National Congress, published in exile from 1967 to 1990. Sikose proposes a methodological and archival intervention (see Mjali, 2026) and offers CACDA-OH: corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis and oral histories, to examine how clandestine communication sustained political education, (g)local and Pan African solidarity, morale, and resistance during apartheid. Through this project, she asks what underground archives can teach us about language, memory, power, and the ongoing work of liberation.
As a teacher, learner, unlearner and storyteller, Sikose’s work is shaped by Nguni epistemologies and African ways of knowing. She uses these epistemologies as decolonial methods for reading archives and listening to elders, theorizing language, and honoring knowledge systems that have often been dismissed, silenced, or extracted by colonial institutions.
Sikose’s scholarship is committed to self-definition, historical recovery, and the intellectual traditions of African peoples across the continent and diaspora. Having taught in the UK, Saudi Arabia, Oman and the US, Sikose is committed to globalising the curriculum and her teaching centers multilingual learners, anti-racist pedagogy, translingual practice, the matriarchive and writing as a site of agency. Across her research and pedagogy, Sikose is interested in how language can become a tool for critique, yes- but more excitingly, a tool for restoration, relation, and liberation.
Research
Selected Research
- Mjali, S. (2026). We are still fighting white domination: Intergenerational dialogue with Ambassador Sikose Mji and Sikose Mjali on African women’s writing as a continuation of revolutionary resistance. Siyabonana: The Journal of Africana Studies, 4(2), 201–236.
- Mjali, S. (2024). Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies in Teacher Education: Principles, Policies and Practices: Bale, J., Rajendram, S., Brubacher, K., Nii Owoo, MA, Burton, J., Wong, W., Zhang, Y., Larson, EJ, Gagné, A., & Kerekes, J. Multilingual Matters, 2023. TESL Canada Journal, 41(1), 147-149.