About me
Dr. Panashe Chigumadzi is an award-winning writer and historian, and an Assistant Professor of African History at Brandeis University. As Rapporteur for the African Union’s Committee of Experts on Reparations for Racialised Chattel Enslavement, Colonialism and Apartheid, she conceptualised and drafted the AU Framework for Reparations, A Crime Does Not Rot, 1441–Present, which provided the structural rationale for the March 2026 UN General Assembly resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement the gravest crime against humanity. She is the author of the historical memoir These Bones Will Rise Again (shortlisted for the 2019 Alan Paton Prize) and the novel Sweet Medicine (winner of the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award). Her forthcoming academic book is Conquer and Incorporate: Ubuntu as an Ethics of War and Conquest Under the Nine Wars of Dispossession, 1779–1878. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and a Master’s from the University of the Witwatersrand.
