WATCH: The Reparative Quest: Dr. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Winner of the 2024 Templeton Prize

The Templeton Prize Team is thrilled to announce that Dr. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, psychologist and researcher, is the winner of the 2024 Templeton Prize.

The 2024 Templeton Prize winner, Dr. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, has a remarkable grasp of the personal and social dynamics that allow for healing in societies wounded by violence. As a psychologist, scholar, and commentator, she has served as a guiding light within South Africa as it charts a course beyond apartheid, facilitating dialogue to help people overcome individual and collective trauma. Her work underscores the importance in contemporary life of cultivating the spiritual values of hope, compassion, and reconciliation.

Heather Templeton Dill, president of the John Templeton Foundation

“I never actually thought of Cape Town as my city.”

Gobodo-Madikizela was born in 1955 in Langa, one of the oldest townships designated for Black residents outside Cape Town, South Africa. She is the eldest daughter of Tukela and Nobantu Gobodo. Growing up under apartheid, she bore witness to the harm of segregation, discrimination, racism, and state brutality. She remembered hiding as tanks drove through her neighborhood. 

“The Reparative Quest”

She went to a boarding high school at Inanda Seminary in Durban, at the time the only private school for Black girls in South Africa, then pursued a bachelor’s degree in psychology at the University of Fort Hare. She later earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Rhodes University, focusing on the effects of apartheid on the psychological well-being of Black South Africans. Her early research laid the foundation for her lifelong commitment to exploring the emotional and psychological toll of apartheid on both victims and perpetrators, an interest that led to her doctoral research on violence. She graduated with a PhD degree in psychology from the University of Cape Town.

In the 1990s, with the end of apartheid, Gobodo-Madikizela joined the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and served as the Chair of the Human Rights Violations Committee in the Western Cape office of the TRC, based in Cape Town. In this role, she served alongside 2013 Templeton Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was appointed by Nelson Mandela to chair the TRC. Her interactions with apartheid-era perpetrators, including Eugene de Kock, a former police colonel who was nicknamed “Prime Evil,” led her to grapple with the profound question of whether forgiveness could be extended to those who had committed heinous crimes.

Her groundbreaking multiple award-winning book A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness, recently reprinted as a Mariner Classic, was a result of her interviews with Eugene de Kock. In the book, she explores the inner workings of forgiveness and the capacity of human beings to empathize with one another, even in the darkest of circumstances.

Gobodo-Madikizela’s academic career continued to flourish, and she held various prestigious positions at institutions such as the University of Cape Town, University of the Free State, and Stellenbosch University. Her research explored topics including empathy, and forgiveness, post-apartheid identity, post-Holocaust dialogue, transgenerational trauma, and memory. She has authored articles and edited and co-edited book volumes on these topics. Gobodo-Madikizela is a socially engaged scholar and has remained focused on research on the transgenerational legacies of historical trauma and the “reparative quest” that must follow to restore justice in society. 

Stay tuned for more about 2024 Templeton Prize Laureate Dr. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela over the coming months.