Obituary Announcement - Professor Maxi Schoeman Visiting Professor at King’s

Dear African Leadership Centre colleagues, friends and partners,  

We are deeply saddened to announce the passing of a core member of our ALC family, Professor Maxi Schoeman, of the University of Pretoria, where she served from 2000-2019 including as Head of the Department of Political Sciences and then as Deputy-Dean in charge of Postgraduate Studies in the Faculty of Humanities. She died peacefully on 14 September 2025 at the age of 70.

She has left a tremendous legacy of research around her core interests on South African Foreign Policy, African Peace and Security, and Gender and Security; as well as impacting the lives of a great many students whom she has taught and mentored in South Africa, across the continent, and throughout the world.

She will be sorely missed by all at the ALC, at both ALC-Nairobi and ALC-King’s College London. She was a pivotal figure in the establishment of our Joint Award PhD programme between King’s and the University of Pretoria – the PhD Leadership and Security studies - working tirelessly with our own Professor ‘Funmi Olonisakin to create that programme in 2018. This was the first Joint PhD programme established between King’s and an African university.

As Visiting Professor at King’s, she was also a joint supervisor, mentor on the ALC Fellowship Programmes, regular guest lecturer in our MSc classrooms, and external examiner to King’s students. She held true to the ALC core values and contributed immeasurably to the vision of transformative change for the African continent.

For those that engaged her personally, they will always remember her warm smiles, genuine interest in your family and working life as well as progression, and the positive and sincere energy she always carried with her into any room she entered.

Professionally, along with her work at the University of Pretoria and engagements with ALC, she was: a member of the University Council and an adjunct professor in the School for Public Policy at George Mason University in the United States; held research fellowships with Cambridge University (1995/96), the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute (2001), the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation (2009) and the Nordic Africa Institute (2009); was awarded the 2014 Claude Ake Visiting Chair at the University of Uppsala; and presented guest lectures and seminars at the universities of Copenhagen, Aalborg, Konstanz, Indiana and Beijing, amongst others.

But from the ALC, we have truly lost a great mentor, friend, colleague and collaborator. Our thoughts, love and prayers are with her family and all who knew her. She will be greatly missed by the whole ALC community, colleagues in Nairobi, London at KCL, alumni, fellows, students and mentors.