A powerful and intellectually provocative lecture by historian, writer and public intellectual Dr Panashe Chigumadzi headlined Stellenbosch University’s 8th Annual Africa Day Lecture on 27 May 2026. Hosted at the Stellenbosch University Museum, the event drew a large audience of students, academics, diplomats, activists and members of the public for an evening of reflection on history, justice and Africa’s future.

Confronting difficult truths

Opening the event, Stellenbosch University Rector and Vice-Chancellor Prof Deresh Ramjugernath emphasised the importance of universities as spaces where difficult conversations can be held openly and honestly. He noted that meaningful transformation requires institutions to confront uncomfortable truths and engage critically with questions of justice, memory and responsibility.

“These are not easy conversations,” he said. “They require a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. But if universities are serious about their role in society, these are exactly the conversations we must be willing to host and engage in.”

A world-breaking crime

Delivering a lecture titled “Zinyane Lemvubu (The Hippo’s Calf): Reclaiming Radical Ubuntu, Pan-African Reparations Jurisprudence, and the Struggle for Black Sovereignty,” Chigumadzi challenged her audience to rethink dominant understandings of slavery, colonialism and apartheid.

Drawing on novelist and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s observation that slavery “broke the world in half”, Chigumadzi argued that the trafficking and enslavement of Africans should not be understood as a distant historical event, but as a world-shaping crime whose consequences continue to structure contemporary political, economic and social life.

For Chigumadzi, slavery, colonialism and apartheid are not separate chapters in history but interconnected systems that created and continue to sustain global inequalities. The modern world, she argued, cannot be understood apart from these histories of conquest, dispossession and racial domination.

“A crime does not rot”

Central to the lecture was Chigumadzi’s insistence that crimes against humanity do not expire with time.

Repeatedly invoking the phrase “A crime does not rot,” she argued that the harms produced through centuries of racialised chattel enslavement remain unresolved and continue to shape the lives of African people across the globe.

As rapporteur for the African Union Committee of Experts on Reparations for Slavery, Colonialism and Apartheid, Chigumadzi reflected on the significance of the landmark United Nations resolution adopted earlier this year, which recognised the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement as “the gravest crime against humanity.”

For Chigumadzi, this recognition is not merely symbolic. It creates a moral and political imperative for reparatory justice, including restitution, compensation, institutional reform, public acknowledgment and guarantees of non-repetition.

Reparations and historical debt

One of the lecture’s most striking interventions centred on the question of reparations.

Chigumadzi reminded the audience that when slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1834, compensation was paid not to formerly enslaved people but to slave owners. She highlighted the substantial payments made to slaveholders in the Cape Colony and argued that this wealth contributed to enduring patterns of economic concentration that continue to shape South African society.

The history of slavery, she argued, is therefore not only a story of dispossession but also one of accumulation. The benefits derived from enslavement were preserved and transmitted across generations, while the harms experienced by enslaved Africans and their descendants remain largely unaddressed.

For this reason, she called for reparations to be understood as a necessary response to centuries of structural injustice rather than as an act of charity or goodwill.

Reclaiming radical ubuntu

A major focus of Chigumadzi’s lecture was a challenge to popular interpretations of ubuntu.

She argued that ubuntu has often been reduced to a language of interpersonal kindness, reconciliation and forgiveness, detached from the historical realities of conquest, dispossession and political struggle.

Drawing on extensive research into nineteenth-century African intellectual traditions and writings in isiXhosa, isiZulu, seTswana and seSotho, Chigumadzi proposed a different understanding of ubuntu, one rooted in collective responsibility, accountability, sovereignty and ethical obligation.

Rather than a philosophy of passive harmony, she suggested, ubuntu historically functioned as a framework for confronting injustice and organising social and political life.

“This,” she argued, “is the radical ubuntu we seek to reclaim.”

Africa and Black sovereignty

Throughout the lecture, Chigumadzi situated South Africa’s history within broader Pan-African struggles for liberation and self-determination.

She reflected on the ways colonialism and apartheid sought to sever South Africa from the rest of the continent, both politically and psychologically. Reclaiming African belonging, she suggested, requires confronting these legacies and imagining new forms of solidarity grounded in justice rather than exclusion.

Her reflections on Black sovereignty extended beyond questions of state power to encompass cultural, intellectual and ethical forms of self-determination. The struggle for liberation, she argued, remains unfinished as long as the structures that emerged through slavery and colonial conquest continue to shape the present.

Opportunity to remake the world

Facilitating a dialogue with the audience after the lecture, Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Director of AVReQ, praised Chigumadzi’s historical insight and the depth of her engagement with questions of justice, memory and repair.

While the lecture confronted painful histories and enduring inequalities, Chigumadzi ultimately offered a vision oriented toward possibility rather than despair.

If slavery was a “world-breaking crime,” she argued, reparations must become a “world-making project” capable of transforming relationships, institutions and social structures.

“And so this is the opportunity before us,” she concluded. “To rethink fundamentally what kind of world is possible.”

Her lecture challenged those present not only to remember the past, but to recognise their responsibility in shaping a more just future—one grounded in accountability, repair and a renewed commitment to human dignity.