Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela  Expert Spotlight
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela was involved in several social issues in South Africa, and was a founding member of a children's rights organization in the Eastern Cape region in 1991, a position that led to her appointment as chair of the first UNICEF project on the situation analysis on the state of children in South Africa. In the 1980s, she was an expert witness to the Supreme Court of South Africa, working with human rights lawyers who were defending young black anti-apartheid activists. In 1996, she joined the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a committee member on the commission's Human Rights Violations Committee. She was based in Cape Town, where she initiated and developed the Commission's first outreach program. During her term on the TRC, she coordinated and chaired victims' public hearings of the TRC in the Western Cape region.
While serving on the TRC, Pumla interviewed perpetrators of atrocities from both sides of the past political conflict, a project that was the subject of her doctoral thesis. She has been the recipient of many awards that have taken her to the University of California, University of Michigan, UCLA, and Harvard University. In the fall of 1998, she was awarded a Peace Fellowship by the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. She has been a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government, and spent her fellowship year examining forgiveness in the context of the TRC. In 2000/2001 she was a fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at the Harvard Divinity School, and spent the year working on her first book, which is based on her interviews with Eugene de Kock, the former apartheid government's chief assassin. Recently Pumla received the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award at Tufts University for the insights she has brought to discussions on transitional justice. She was recently featured in the award-winning documentary Long Night's Journey into Day.
The most profound experience of Pumla's career with the TRC was witnessing the incredible phenomenon of forgiveness between victims and perpetrators. The desire by the many victims to meet their perpetrators was something she had never imagined would happen. But when she witnessed victims reaching out to perpetrators who had shattered their worlds, and offering them forgiveness, she was filled with hope. It became clear that the TRC process had far-reaching consequences, not only for individual victims and perpetrators encountering each other, often for the first time, but also as a model for uniting groups of people struggling with a history of conflict.
Pumla is a graduate of Fort Hare University, where she obtained her social work degree and honors degree in psychology; Rhodes University, where she received her masters degree and University of Cape Town, which awarded her a doctoral degree in psychology. She worked as a community social worker and a clinical psychologist, and then taught for several years in the psychology department of the University of Transkei in South Africa.  |