Xolela Mangcu was born in 1966 and raised in Ginsberg Township in King William's Town, the home of his childhood anti-apartheid hero and political inspiration, Steven Bantu Biko. Mangcu obtained his primary and high school education from local schools. After completing his BA in legal theory and industrial sociology in 1986, he enrolled for a master's degree in science and development planning, also at the University of the Witwatersrand, which he completed in 1988. In 1997, Mangcu obtained his PhD in city and regional planning from Cornell University in the Unites States of America. Between 2000 and 2004, he was the director of the Steve Biko Foundation, which he founded and launched in union with the Biko family and the youth of King William's Town. He was a distinguished fellow and executive director at the Human Sciences Research Council between 2004 and 2005. After that Mangcu worked at the universities of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and Cape Town. At the time of writing, he was based at the George Washington Columbian College of Arts and Sciences as a professor of sociology. Mangcu won one of South Africa's most prestigious academic awards, the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship award, in 2016, which was made in acknowledgment of his important work in the advancement of knowledge for education and development in the South African context.
Human Sciences Research Council (2026) studied this question.