Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Jonathan Oppenheimer.
The Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Awards were initiated by the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust in 2001 to commemorate the Trust’s founder, Harry Oppenheimer, and all he stood for, especially his efforts to support human and intellectual development, to advance scholarship, and encourage ideas. The Trust has a long tradition of investing in education and many beneficiaries have proceeded to make important contributions to South African public life. The Fellowship builds on and expands this tradition and is the Trust’s premier award with a monetary value of two million rand.
This is a very special investment to encourage and acknowledge excellence in scholarship in all its forms. Candidates from all disciplines compete annually for the Fellowship, which is granted to scholars of the highest calibre and who are engaged in cutting-edge and internationally significant work that has particular application to the advancement of knowledge, teaching, research and development in South Africa and beyond.
Twenty-two Fellowships have been awarded to date. Jan-Hendrik Hofmeyr, Professor of Biochemistry at Stellenbosch University, was the first academic from SU to receive the Fellowship, for his work in Systems Biology in 2002.
At the time of receiving the award, Professor Hofmeyr said South Africa is on par with the world in terms of scientific study and research, but he considered academic calibre to be strangely misunderstood, particularly at a time when the popularisation of science in the rest of the world was at its height.
He said, "This Award is unique and a very positive example for other philanthropic organisations in South Africa. It gave me, with my family, one year of freedom from financial concerns and the pressures of teaching, and so the time to ponder on these questions. It is undoubtedly the most prestigious award in the country, with its focus on ideas it is often referred to as South Africa’s Nobel Prize."
Hofmeyr is a co-founder of the Triple-J Group for Molecular Cell Physiology and has made numerous fundamental contributions to the development of metabolic control analysis and computational cell biology. He holds an A rating from the National Research Foundation and is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa and a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa. In 1999, he received Stellenbosch University's Vice-Chancellor’s Award for outstanding research and the Beckman Gold Medal of the South African Biochemical Society in 2003.
Together with Professor Paul Cilliers of the Department of Philosophy at Stellenbosch University, Hofmeyr was instrumental in establishing the Centre for Studies in Complexity in 2009.
In 2006, the same co-founding Dr Paul Cilliers, Professor of Deconstruction, Cultural Philosophy, Scientific Philosophy and Ethics in the Department of Philosophy at Stellenbosch University, was awarded the Fellowship, in recognition of his outstanding achievements in developing a general understanding of the characteristics and nature of complex systems. He became the sixth recipient of the award and the second from Stellenbosch.
On receiving the award, he said, "The opportunity to do research freely and unencumbered for a year is vital for the development of ideas, with time to reflect – rare in the current context. Without reflection, academia will become stale. The fact that the importance of philosophical reflection is recognised in this way is extremely encouraging for all of us working towards a more humane understanding of the world. It also recognises the importance of several moral values which cannot be reduced to instrumental thinking and mere calculation. Complexity thinking helps us to develop more inclusive strategies, using insights from both the natural and human sciences, without dissolving the difference between them.”
Cilliers, a remarkable Renaissance man and one of the most important academics and intellectuals this country has produced, passed away in July 2011.
In 2020, Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela became the third recipient of this prestigious Fellowship. She is the South African National Research Chair (SARChI) in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma and the Director of the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVRe-Quest) at Stellenbosch University.
She completed a BA Honours degree at Fort Hare University and a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology at Rhodes University. She was awarded a PhD at the University of Cape Town for a thesis on legacies of violence based on two case studies: collective violence (a necklace murder), and on the apartheid government’s death squad leader Eugene de Kock. She is internationally recognised for her work in the fields of trauma studies and research on the psychoanalytic interpretation of remorse and forgiveness. She has been one of the pioneers of research processes of remorse and forgiving in the context of gross human rights violations.
Among her awards are honorary Doctorates from Rhodes University and from the Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena, the Eleanor Roosevelt Medal, and Distinguished African Scholar at Cornell University’s Mario Einaudi Centre for International Studies. She is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa, a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, and an Honorary Member of the South African Psychoanalytic Institute. She serves as Research Advisor at Queen’s University, Belfast, a position affiliated with the Senator George Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice.
Professor Gobodo-Madikizela authored the award-winning work A Human Being Died That Night about Eugene de Kock, the head of a covert counterterrorism unit responsible for the killing and torture of dozens, who became one of the most notorious of the men brought to trial. He was given the nickname Prime Evil, and Professor Gobodo-Madikizela began a series of visits to De Kock when he was serving two life sentences plus 212 years for ‘political crimes’. The work is based on these interviews.
In its 2014, a review of Nicholas Wright’s play by the same name, an adaptation of the book, The Guardian noted, "De Kock's absent victims seem to fill the theatre like ghosts. It's hard to watch, not least because in our hearts we all know, as Gobodo-Madikizela knows, that there are no monsters in this world, only other human beings just like us.” Forgiveness, trauma, intergenerational inheritance and resistance, testimony, empathy, empathic repair, and the notion of reparative humanism are all important themes in Professor Gobodo-Madikizela’s work. At some point in the play, the character representing her says, "Eugene is no longer 'radically other' for me. He is, for better or worse, a human being with reasons and motives and causes that I need to explore."
Professor Gobodo-Madikizela said of her project that will be supported by the OMT Fellowship: "For this work I will return to the archive of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to think through the horrific violence in contemporary South Africa, and to ask why the vision of the future that was imagined at the beginning of our democracy has not succeeded to the degree we expected. The work has a larger commitment to understanding the role of art in envisioning new ways of relating to one another − the catalytic power of the arts to inspire us to inaugurate more just futures."