27 May 2026

Dr. Panashe Chigumadzi, PhD from Harvard University, is a historian, writer, and Assistant Professor at Brandeis University. As rapporteur for the African Union’s Committee of Experts on Reparations for Racialized Chattel Enslavement, Colonialism and Apartheid, she conceptualized and drafted the AU Framework for Reparations, A Crime Does Not Rot, 1441–Present, which provided the structural rationale for the landmark March 2026 UN General Assembly Resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement “the gravest crime against humanity.” An award-winning writer, her forthcoming academic book Conquer and Incorporate: Ubuntu as an Ethics of War and Conquest under the Nine Wars of Dispossession, 1779–1878, examines 19th-century discourses of Ubuntu through her recovery of over 500 newspaper texts by Black intellectuals in isiXhosa, isiZulu, seTswana, and seSotho.

The title of her lecture ”Zinyane Lemvubu (The Hippo’s Calf): “Crimes Against Humanity” and Reclaiming Radical Ubuntu in the Afterlife of Racialised Chattel Enslavement,” will generate conversations that will continue long after the lecture.