Dr. Panashe Chigumadzi to deliver the 8^th Africa Day Lecture

This year’s lecture marks the 8th Stellenbosch University Annual Africa Day Lecture. The series has been hosted every May since 2018 by the Vice-Chancellor. This year the lecture is coordinated jointly by the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ), the Centre for the Advancement of Social Impact and Transformation (CASiT), and the Centre for Collaboration in Africa (CCA). The title of this year’s lecture “Zinyane Lemvubu (The Hippo’s Calf): Reclaiming Radical Ubuntu, Pan-African Reparations Jurisprudence, and the Struggle for Black Sovereignty“ will be delivered by Dr. Panashe Chigumadzi, 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.

Dr. Panashe Chigumadzi

Panashe Chigumadzi is a historian and rapporteur for the AU’s Committee of Experts on Reparations for Slavery, Colonialism, and Apartheid, and earned her doctoral degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She drafted the framework for the landmark resolution recently passed by the UN declaring racialized chattel enslavement as “the gravest crime against humanity.” An Assistant Professor of African History at Brandeis University, she is the founding editor of Vanguard Magazine, a platform for black women coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa, and author of award-winning publications. Among these are her book ‘These Bones Will Rise Again’ (2020, Indigo Press), which was shortlisted for the Alan Paton Prize, ‘Sweet Medicine’ (2015, University of New Mexico Press), which won the K. Sello Duiker Literary Award, and an essay “What don’t you see when you look at me?” which was awarded the 2019 Gordon Parks Foundation Prize. Her first play, ‘Song Unburied’, will debut at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2026. She is a former columnist for The New York Times and a contributing editor of the Johannesburg Review of Books. Her opinion pieces have been featured in The Guardian, The Washington Post, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Die Zeit, Chimurenga, and Africa is A Country.

Event Details

Title: “Zinyane Lemvubu (The Hippo’s Calf): Reclaiming Radical Ubuntu, Pan-African Reparations Jurisprudence, and the Struggle for Black Sovereignty“

Speaker: Dr. Panashe Chigumadzi, Brandeis University

Click HERE to register for in person attendance

Click HERE to register for online livestream

For more information, you can contact: Conita (chenry@sun.ac.za), Gontse (gontse@sun.ac.za) or Shanté Neff (shante@sun.ac.za)