CAS Film Screening and Panel Discussion: "The Trials of Winnie Mandela"

As part of Worldwide Week at Harvard, the Harvard University Center for African Studies Africa Office will host a special screening of an abridged version of The Trials of Winnie Mandela, a new Netflix documentary series examining the life, political legacy, and contested memory of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring a member of the Mandela family, a producer of the documentary series, and Harvard faculty experts on gender and African politics.

More than three decades after South Africa’s transition to democracy, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela remains one of the most debated figures in the country’s political history. A central leader in the anti-apartheid struggle, she became a highly visible symbol of resistance during Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment. Yet her legacy has also been shaped by controversy, political marginalization, and competing interpretations of her role in South Africa’s liberation movement and democratic transition.

The documentary revisits these tensions through Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s own account of her political life, including her belief that she was sidelined by the African National Congress after playing a major role in the struggle against apartheid.

The discussion will use her story as a starting point for a broader conversation about women and political leadership in Africa. How does gender shape who is recognized as a revolutionary and who gains access to political power? How are African women leaders remembered, judged, or excluded from dominant historical narratives? And what new possibilities are emerging for young women shaping African politics today?

Speakers:

Dr. Panashe Chigumadzi is an award-winning writer and Assistant Professor of African History at Brandeis University. As rapporteur for the African Union’s Committee of Experts on Reparations for Racialized Chattel Enslavement, Colonialism and Apartheid, she conceptualized and drafted the AU Framework for Reparations, A Crime Does Not Rot, 1441–Present, which provided the structural rationale for the landmark March 2026 UN General Assembly resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement “the gravest crime against humanity.” Chigumadzi received her PhD from Harvard University and her Master’s from the University of the Witwatersrand. Her publications include the novel, Sweet Medicine (winner of the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award), the historical memoir, These Bones Will Rise Again (shortlisted for the 2019 Alan Paton Prize for Non-Fiction), and the essay, "What don't you see when you look at me?" (winner of the 2020 Gordon Parks Foundation Prize). Her forthcoming academic monograph, The World is Dead: Ubuntu as an Ethics of War and Conquest under the Nine Wars of Dispossession, 1779–1878, examines 19th-century discourses of Ubuntu and draws on her recovery of over 500 newspaper texts by Black intellectuals in isiXhosa, isiZulu, seTswana, and seSotho.

Tori Ichikowitz is an award-winning South African filmmaker, director, and producer based between Los Angeles and South Africa. She earned her MFA at the American Film Institute Conservatory, where she honed a storytelling voice built on female-led, genre-bending stories that center immigrant and young perspectives. 

For Tori, film is a tool for real-world change. She makes work that challenges audiences to question what they accept and carry those conversations into their own lives and communities. 

Tori served as Brand Strategy Lead Producer for the Slamdance Film Festival, one of the leading festivals for independent filmmakers. Alongside her narrative work, she has worked as a content producer and director for iStore South Africa (Apple Premium Reseller), Nintendo South Africa, and iSchoolAfrica, an NGO in South Africa. 

Marius Kothor is an Assistant Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Dr. Kothor is an historian of 20th century West Africa whose work examines the political and economic lives of a group of Togolese women merchants known as the Nana Benz. Her work has been published in academic and popular outlets including: The American Historical Review, The Oxford Encyclopedia of African History, Africa is a Country, and Black Perspectives. 

Dr. Zoe Marks (Moderator) is the Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard Center for African Studies and a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research and teaching interests focus on the intersections of conflict and political violence; race, gender and inequality; peacebuilding; and African politics.

Her current book project examines the internal dynamics of rebellion in Sierra Leone to understand how and why rebel groups can sustain a viable threat to the state without widespread support. It draws on nearly a decade of fieldwork, several hundred interviews with former combatants and community members, and private archives from members of the Revolutionary United Front. Professor Marks is leading a separate project that examines how wartime experiences shape individual wellbeing and community reintegration after war. Using surveys and social network analysis in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the project compares peaceful and protracted conflict settings, respectively, to explain how mobilization for violence affects prospects for poverty alleviation and peace. Find her full bio HERE.

About Worldwide Week at Harvard

Worldwide Week at Harvard: October 11–17, 2026

Worldwide Week at Harvard showcases the breadth of the university's global engagement. Throughout the week, Harvard Schools, research centers, departments, and student organizations host academic and cultural events with global and international themes, including lectures, performances, receptions, exhibitions, and community gatherings across campus and around the world.