Congratulations to Mitchell Institute Honorary Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela for winning the 2024 Templeton Prize.

The Templeton Prize honours individuals whose exemplary achievements advance Sir John Templeton’s philanthropic vision: harnessing the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it.

Pumla’s insights into the mechanisms of trauma and forgiveness in post-apartheid South Africa have created a globally-recognized model for social healing in the aftermath of conflict, a model she calls “the reparative quest.”

Pumla is Professor and South African National Research Foundation’s Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma and the Director of the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest at Stellenbosch University.  She was also an influential member of the Human Rights Violations Committee of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Her career as a researcher and a public figure is distinguished by her effort to repair ruptures created by past violence and to build a path toward healing and restoration in an ongoing process she calls “the reparative quest.”  In international lectures and books, she displays keen powers of sympathy and a deep feeling of humanity toward victims as well perpetrators of traumatic experiences.

“Through the many encounters I had in my work when I served on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I learned that ordinary people, under certain circumstances, are capable of far greater evil than we could have imagined.  But so are we capable of far greater virtue than we might have thought," said Gobodo-Madikizela.  "My research is based on this possibility of human transformation, on probing deeper to understand the conditions necessary to restore the values of what it means to be human—to want to preserve the dignity and life of the other."

Read more here.

Watch the video here.