He was educated at the universities of the Western Cape, Cape Town and Princeton. A recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, he also held a Chevening Scholarship while at Oxford University and has been a fellow of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research.He is author of Language, Identity, Modernity (2007) and also has numerous publications to his name, and is editor of the journal History in Africa, The Struggle for District Six (1990), Towards New Histories for South Africa (2004) and The Meanings of Timbuktu (2008).