University of Pretoria academic Vukosi Marivate has been awarded one of South Africa’s highest national honours for his contributions to artificial intelligence, as the country recognized its most influential thinkers, artists and innovators at the 2026 National Orders this week.
National Orders are the highest awards the country, through the president, bestows on citizens and eminent foreign nationals who have contributed to the advancement of democracy and made a significant impact on the lives of South Africans. President Cyril Ramaphosa bestowed the Order of Ikhamanga, the Order of the Baobab, the Order of Mapungubwe and the Order of the Companions of OR Tambo.
Marivate received the Order of Mapungubwe in silver — one of South Africa’s highest honours, awarded for excellence in science, medicine, technology and innovation — for his contributions to AI, computer science and natural language processing, which have advanced both national and continental technological capabilities.
Reflecting on the recognition, Marivate framed it as a collective achievement rather than an individual one. “When I look at this milestone, I don’t see an individual achievement. I see a mirror reflecting a vast, beautiful village of researchers, students and community-builders who chose to build a shared vision with me,” he said.
The computer science professor has become one of Africa’s leading voices in AI, particularly through his work advancing African language technologies and inclusive AI systems. His research has contributed to broader conversations around digital sovereignty, ethical AI and the role Africa should play in shaping emerging technologies rather than simply consuming them.
Marivate said the defining moment in his career came when researchers began recognizing that African languages, histories and contexts were largely absent from global technological systems. “Seeing the rapid rise of movements like Masakhane and the Deep Learning Indaba proved that building localised AI tools was not just a niche academic exercise, but a societal necessity,” he said.
He argues that Africa cannot afford to remain on the margins of technological development. “AI in Africa should not be something that just happens to us from the outside. It must empower our youth, protect our digital sovereignty and solve local socio-economic challenges using our own data,” he said.
Marivate is a professor of computer science and holds the Absa data science chair at the University of Pretoria. His work focuses on using data science to address social challenges, spanning projects in science, energy, public safety and utilities, with a particular specialization in the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing. He is also credited as a co-founder of Lelapa AI, the South African AI research and product lab developing speech recognition tools for African languages.
His national recognition adds to a series of recent appointments. In February, Marivate was selected as one of 40 leading experts to serve on the United Nations’ Independent International Scientific Panel on AI. Earlier this month, he was appointed to the independent expert panel reviewing South Africa’s AI policy development process, announced by Communications Minister Solly Malatsi during his department’s budget vote.
