Scholar | Human Rights Commissioner | Public Intellectual
Where It Began
Tshepo Madlingozi was born in Mangaung (Bloemfontein), South Africa, in the former Oranje-Vrystaat. His family later moved to Odendaalsrus to join his father, who worked in a gold mine. Growing up in a mining-affected community shaped his political awareness.
After completing school, he was admitted to the University of Pretoria to study law. He enjoyed his student days tutoring first-year law students, playing football, participating in moot court competitions, and being appointed to the inaugural Constitutional Tribunal (Student Court), the judicial arm of student governance. He obtained an LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa, spending half of his studies at the Université Catholique d’Afrique Centrale in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and the other half at the University of Pretoria.
He was subsequently appointed as a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Pretoria. Committed to understanding power relations in society and developing a ‘sociological imagination’, he enrolled in Sociology, eventually earning a master’s degree in political sociology. He spent more than ten years at the University of Pretoria, teaching Introduction to Law, Human Rights, Street Law, and several master’s modules in human rights and jurisprudence. The Faculty of Law awarded him several teaching awards at this university. He was granted a Commonwealth Scholarship to study towards a PhD degree at Birkbeck, University of London. His PhD thesis is titled “Mayibuye iAfrika? Disjunctive Inclusions and Black Strivings for Constitution and Belonging in ‘South Africa’.
Struggle, Solidarity, & Social Repair
2005 marked the beginning of his journey into scholar-activism when, while still a full-time law lecturer, he was appointed the part-time National Advocacy Coordinator for Khulumani Support Group, then an 80,000-strong social movement of victims and survivors of gross human rights violations committed during colonial-apartheid, focusing on reparations, redress, and genuine social reconciliation. The movement, organised under the slogan ‘the past is in the present’, employed tools such as litigation, counter-archiving, storytelling, art-as-therapy workshops, and theatre of the oppressed. In 2016, the Restitution Foundation awarded the Restitution Award to Tshepo and the Khulumani Support Group for their work in restitution and social reconciliation. Madlingozi worked for and with Khulumani Support Group until 2018.
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Tshepo is committed to participatory democracy, collective organising, and social mobilisation. He is a founding board member of the Socio-economic Rights Institute of South Africa, the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CASAC), the Institute for Social Dialogue, and the South African Coalition for Transitional Justice. He has also served on the boards of amandla.mobi, the Zimbabwean Exiles Forum, and the Rural Democracy Trust. Additionally, he was a member of the advisory boards of the Health Justice Initiative and Mining Affected Communities United in Action (MACUA)/Women Affected by Mining United in Action (WAMUA). He contributed to the steering committees of the Right2Protest Project coalition and the African Coalition for Corporate Accountability.
Epistemic justice
& the transformation
of higher education
In line with the principle that ‘there is no social justice without epistemic justice’, Tshepo’s activism for epistemic justice included serving as a co-editor of the South African Journal on Human Rights and the African Human Rights Law Journal. He was also a board member of the Imbiza Journal of African Writing and the Africa IKalafe Pluriversity, and a member of the advisory boards for the Journal of Human Rights Practice and the Australian Human Rights Law Journal. Additionally, he was a founding member of the Pretoria University Law Press. He was a researcher in a five-year European Union-funded project: "Alice, Strange Mirrors, Unsuspected Lessons: Leading Europe to a new way of sharing the world" under the coordination of Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos at the University of Coimbra. This project's main focus was on Epistemologies of the South.
Since there is no epistemic justice without transformed universities, Tshepo has participated in various formal and informal efforts to transform universities and decolonise the curricula. In 2007, he set out this undertaking in an essay titled “Confronting and Dismantling Institutional Racism at the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria." Alongside two students, he founded Tshepo’s Legal Shebeen, a bi-weekly campus-wide platform for student intellectual exchange through debates, seminars, and film screenings. He served on the University of Pretoria, Faculty of Law’s Transformation Committee, the University of the Witwatersrand School of Law’s Transformation Committee, and as an external member of the University of Cape Town Council’s Committee on Social, Ethics and Transformation.
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Tshepo’s research interests focus on the connections among settler colonisation, transitional justice processes, and social movements. Specifically, his work is in three movements. The first examines the historical development of settler colonisation and anti-colonial constitutional ideas in South Africa, alongside the black radical tradition. The second investigates whether South Africa’s transitional justice process—primarily through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and subsequent efforts—has helped dismantle settler colonisation. The third movement considers how contemporary social movements’ constitutional visions foster decolonisation and collective worldmaking.
Teaching, discoursing,
& promoting human rights
He has taught intensive master’s modules at several universities, including the Vienna University of Applied Arts (on the African Human Rights System), the University of Sarajevo (on Critical Approaches to Transitional Justice), and Birzeit University (on Settler Colonialism and Transformative Constitutionalism in South Africa). He is currently an Adjunct Professor of
Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation at Nelson Mandela University, an Extraordinary Professor of Social Justice at Stellenbosch University, a Sessional Postgraduate Supervisor at the School of Law, the University of the Witwatersrand, and a Visiting Professor
at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam.
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In 2024, the President of the Republic of South Africa appointed Madlingozi as a full-time Commissioner at the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC). SAHRC is an independent constitutional body mandated to promote, monitor, and protect human rights. At the SAHRC, he oversees the Commission’s interventions and activities on anti-racism, education, and equality, and he is also the chairperson of its Legal and Ethics Committee. Before joining the Commission, he was the Director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) – a social justice law clinic and research centre - at the University of the Witwatersrand, and an Associate Professor at the School of Law of the same university, where he taught social justice and human rights. He has acted as a consultant for local and international organisations, including the Pan-African Parliament and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
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He contributes to civic discourse and a culture of debate through keynote addresses, panel discussions, TV, radio, and podcast interviews, as well as regular contributions to newspapers and magazines. His interventions and provocations have appeared in various publications and platforms, including the Daily Maverick, The Funambulist, Sowetan, Mail & Guardian, Herri,
City Press, the Sunday Times, GroundUp, and Critical Legal Thinking.
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His family, walking, meditating, and yoga centre him.
