is a psychologist from South Africa, where she was a community and clinical social worker before she became a
clinical psychologist in 1984. In 1991, after teaching for 7 years in the department of psychology at the University of Transkei, Gobodo-Madikizela started the first Children’s Rights movement in the former Transkei, where she was appointed chair of the first UNICEF-sponsored situation analysis on the state of children in South Africa. In 1996, South African President Nelson Mandela appointed Gobodo-Madikizela to the Human Rights Violations Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), on which she served until the Commission completed its inquiry in 1998. In 1999, Gobodo-Madikizela received the South African Women for Women Social Justice Award from the Toronto-based organization. In 1998-1999, she was the Jean and Joseph Sullivan Peace Fellow at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. Currently, Gobodo-Madikizela holds a joint fellowship at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and the Women in Public Policy Program at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In addition, she is a visiting faculty associate at Brandeis University’s International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life. Gobodo-Madikizela is also a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and is working on her book, The Cry of Apartheid’s Crusader, about Eugene de Kock, South Africa’s most notorious perpetrator of atrocities during the apartheid era.