Mayaki Kimba

Mayaki Kimba is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Columbia University. His dissertation, Activism and the Administrative State after Empire, examines competing views of how activists should engage with the agencies and officials that constitute the administrative state. Drawing on archival research on Caribbean and Réunionnais activists and public servants in 1970s Britain, France, and the Netherlands, the project traces how these actors negotiated their relationship to the state amid legacies of slavery and colonialism, during the waning years of the welfare state and the rise of neoliberalism.

Through this research, Mr. Kimba contributes to broader debates on the archival turn in political theory, liberalism and empire, migration and multiculturalism, democratic participation, the state and the intimate sphere, and renewed attention to public administration within political theory. He also has strong research interests in Black and anticolonial political thought, particularly in Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean. In this context, he has published an essay on the Black radicalism of Otto Huiswoud (1893–1961) and Hermina Huiswoud (1905–1998), and is currently developing a standalone article on the Afro-Surinamese activist and writer Anton de Kom (1898–1945), focusing on his theories of solidarity and his use of revisionist history as a form of anticolonial politics.

Mr. Kimba was born and raised in the Netherlands and earned his B.A. in political science from Reed College in 2020.

Research and Publications

“An Archive in Memories: Remembering Joyce Moore Turner,” sx blog, September 13, 2024, https://smallaxe.net/content/1304. 

“Anticolonial Radicals in Different Registers: On Otto and Hermina Huiswoud’s Black Communism,” Small Axe, no. 75 (November 2024): 87–109, https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-11592648.