Professor Gobodo-Madikizela honoured
MAKHANDA: As Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela was awarded a Doctor of Laws from Rhodes University, she told students that it was possible to build a new post-colonial vision informed by home-grown ethics.
Gobodo-Madikizela is an author and research chair for historical trauma and transformation in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Stellenbosch University.
Her research has focused on exploring ways in which the impact of the dehumanising experiences of oppression and violent abuse continue to play out in the next generation in the aftermath of historical trauma.
It also highlighted remorse and forgiveness in the context of the interconnected relationship between empathy, ubuntu and the embodied African phenomenon of inimba (pain).
“I receive it (the honorary title of Doctor of Laws) with deep gratitude, fully aware at once of the honour and challenge that the title represents, coming from this great university whose motto calls on its alumni to lead, and to be the light that shines.”
She did her Master’s for her clinical psychology degree at the university and described it as the place “I learned to question, to embrace contradictions, to think”.
“The undergraduate years are a time of learning how great scholars have defined the world of knowledge production. Now it is your turn to go beyond these canons, to venture into new intellectual frontiers and to establish a new legacy of knowledge production.
“Some of my own work has been about challenging accepted wisdoms about transformative possibilities in the aftermath of massive traumas.
“I have done so by returning time and again, not to the writings of great philosophers and religious or political theorists, but rather to the unique stories of people who themselves have gone through a season of darkness and despair – from irreparable historical moments that have been illuminating.
“I think of what (feminist author) Bell Hooks implies when she writes that the struggle for social changes in the aftermath of historical violence should not simply be about condemning dehumanisation.
“Rather, it should also involve finding new ways of reclaiming our sense of being human: black subjectivity, she argues, should be ‘an oppositional world view, a consciousness, an identity, a standpoint that exists not only as that struggle which also opposes dehumanisation but as that movement which enables creative, expansive self-actualisation’.
“This is a challenging time to have graduated.”