Panashe Chigumadzi

Dr Panashe Chigumadzi is an award-winning writer and historian. Chigumadzi is the author of These Bones Will Rise Again (2018), a historical memoir reflecting on Zimbabwe's 2017 coup and shortlisted for the 2019 Alan Paton Prize for Non-fiction. Her 2015 debut novel Sweet Medicine (Blackbird Books) won the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award. Chigumadzi was the founding editor of Vanguard Magazine, a platform for black women coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa.  A columnist for The New York Times and contributing editor of the Johannesburg Review of Books, her work has featured in publications including The Guardian, The Washington Post, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Die Zieit, Chimurenga, The Sunday Times, City Press, Africa is A Country, and Transition.

Chigumadzi holds a doctorate from Harvard University’s Department of African and African American Studies and a master's in African Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand. Chigumadzi's dissertation "Nineteenth Century Ubuntu: Black Philosophy Under the Nine Wars of Dispossession, 1779-1878," examines the 19th-century discourse of the African philosophy of Ubuntu and has uncovered over 500 newspaper texts by black writers, poets, and political figures discussing Ubuntu for black readerships in isiXhosa, isiZulu, seTswana and seSotho newspapers. This vastly expands the current archive of 13 texts on Ubuntu currently referenced in Southern African Intellectual History. Expanding research on Ubuntu from 13 to 500 texts in African languages shifts the widespread misperception that the philosophy of Ubuntu has no longstanding historical significance and "only" became of interest and importance during the late 20th-century democratic transition from white minority to black majority rule in Zimbabwe and South Africa. 

Her doctoral research focuses on the written and lived traditions of Ubuntu amongst isiXhosa speakers under the Nine Wars of Dispossession (1779-1878). The Wars of Dispossession, in which British and Boer settlers waged war for the land, labour and cattle of isiXhosa and Khoe–San-speaking peoples in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. These wars were the longest period of military action in the history of European presence in black Africa since modernity’s inception in 1492 and would ultimately lead to the end of black sovereignity in Southern Africa. In this dissertation, Chigumadzi argues that amongst indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, Ubuntu provided an ethical grounding for war conduct and conquest— what she call an indigenous ethics of “conquest and incorporation”. Against Ubuntu ethics of “conquest and incorporation,” she examines isiXhosa speakers’ responses to the metaphysical crisis precipitated by settler colonial conquest’s “logic of elimination of the native” and the British introduction of the ideology of total war to the Cape during these Wars of Dispossession. Drawing from Black Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, and Indigenous Studies, she extends the analysis of the settler colonial logic of elimination to consider the specific predicament of the “native” who is black.