In 1979, he joined the University of the Witwatersrand as a senior research fellow at the African Studies Institute. He founded the Council for Black Education and Research, an independent project for alternative education involving young adults. He founded the department of African literature at Wits University in 1983, a significant event in the evolution of literature teaching in South Africa at the time. He became the institution's first black professor. He was permitted to honour an invitation from the then Institute for Study of English in Africa at Rhodes University. It was a two-month research fellowship where his proposal of finishing his memoir "Afrika My Music", which he had begun in Philadelphia, was accepted.