Nompumelelo Motlafi is a lecturer in African Politics at the Department of Political Sciences at the University of South Africa. As a fledgling academic and developing scholar, her research interests have included the study of political identity, political violence, the politics of gender-based violence, post-conflict justice and transformation, African feminism and decolonial thought. Though focused on the larger African context, her research interests have originated from her experiences – sometimes intimate - of racial and ethnic conflicts during the last years of the Apartheid era and continuing into the post-1994 democratic era in South Africa.