Chabani Manganyi is a writer of great prominence and, within particular academic circles, highly considered and revered as an elder statesman of academic psychology in South Africa. In his quiet and unassuming way, he has produced an impressive body of work since his first publications in the early 1970s. His early work tended to focus on the experience of being black in apartheid South Africa, and his highly influential 1973 publication Being-Black-in-the-World caught the attention of a nascent anti-apartheid and critical psychology readership. However, it seems that his style of writing is too discursive, literary, and urbane for it easily to have found a place in the rather restrictive discourses of much academic psychology.

During the early years of his work as a practising psychologist Manganyi knew what it meant to put psychology to work in the service of ordinary black South Africans who were oppressed and exploited by a racist and unyielding government. His quest in these early writings to liberate black subjectivity could well be taken up by the proponents of the de-colonisation project in contemporary South African affairs and institutions of higher learning.

Manganyi's thinking and research has always kept up with the times, and in the 1990s and early 2000s he published important work on political violence and the vicissitudes of the transition to democracy. Besides his contribution to the life of ideas he has also unselfishly given his expertise and wisdom to public institutions in South Africa. Since 1994 he has held highly prestigious appointments in educational and academic spheres: as director general of the national Department of Education (under Minister Sibusiso Bhengu), as vice chancellor of the University of the North, as vice chancellor (1999–2003) and then as vice principal (2003–2006) of the University of Pretoria, and as chairperson of the Council on Higher Education (CHE).

Manganyi's intellectual pursuits have not been limited to the narrow confines of psychology. He has written three biographies, the first published in 1983 was on Es'kia Mphahlele, the novelist and literary theorist, which was followed in 1994 with a biography of the painter Gerard Sekoto who spent most of his adult years in exile in Paris, and most recently (2012) on artist Dumile Feni (1939–1991).