By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Archie Mafeje had managed to reconcile his Marxist political convictions with his academic work. He had moved on from his liberal functionalist work of the 1960s to write from a Marxist perspective and also to advance a programmatic critique of the social sciences. Yet those who are enthusiastic about polemic tend to reduce his evaluation of the social sciences to a polemic on anthropology. Theirs is the standard or conventional view, which holds that he single-handedly demolished anthropology as a discipline, or that he single-handedly destroyed the science of anthropology. This conception of Mafeje's work is misleading in at least three respects. First, while it is true that the discipline of anthropology underwent a crisis for at least two decades, its system of thought shaken, it is not true that it was demolished – for all its problems, anthropology is still a thriving academic discipline. Mafeje, Bernard Magubane and Francis Nyamnjoh would not, as late as the twenty-first century, have felt the need to analyse a discipline dead and buried. Second, the idea that Mafeje ‘single-handedly’ demolished anthropology is factually and historically incorrect – there were a number of other radical social scientists who dissected anthropology from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Third, the suggestion that Mafeje only criticised anthropology made him seem a reformist scholar. However, a careful reading of his analysis of the social sciences more broadly suggests that he was in fact a revolutionary scholar. Mafeje understood what other radical social scientists did not: that all the social sciences are Eurocentric and imperialist and the focus on anthropology to the exclusion of other disciplines is founded on reformism. He called for the adoption of a thoroughgoing commentary of the social sciences, which would lead to the emergence of what he called ‘non-disciplinarity’.