| Sumario: | A regular response to scholarly submissions by Africa-based scholars to academic publications, research fellowships and funders, is that these submissions tend to be out of tune with current debates in their fields, or seemingly preoccupied with questions deemed dated in other scholarly contexts. This charge of belatedness is often framed in the diction of lack – lack of originality, lack of theoretical rigour, out of step with contemporary debates in the field of study, redundant, in a word, belated. This paper argues that this charge of belatedness is often misdiagnosed as resulting from lack of access to cutting edge scholarship from elsewhere, and therefore, addressed through temporary attempts to make these resources available. This diagnosis misrepresents deeper systemic problems in the African academy and the knowledge landscape, where academic vernaculars from the global north masquerade as normative frameworks of what quality scholarship should look like. The article proposes that rather than playing catch-up to these vernaculars-masquerading-as-norms, there is value in lingering on the specificities of African research contexts and the questions these contexts pose, as this creates scope for Africa-based scholars to produce work that turns the presumed belatedness of the questions provoked by our contexts into a generative catalyst for original scholarly interventions. I propose what I term a halafu ethic of hospitality to multiple lines of thought to demonstrate this promise of belatedness through three examples of scholarly work produced by Africa-based African scholars: Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele's There was this Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile (2009), my book, A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder (2015) and Hugo Canham's Riotous Deathscapes (2023). A halafu ethic, paired with intentionality about the double-addressivity of Africa-based scholars' research, offers a modest, yet potentially ground-shifting strategy to counter the charge of belatedness and its co-optive power.
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