Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse (legally Manzini)

Professional Bio

Zinhle’s dissertation project, Towards an Existential-Phenomenological Standpoint (ESP) Reading of Blackwomen’s Autobiographies Under Apartheid South Africa, explores how the autobiographies of two South African Blackwomen, Mamphela Ramphele: A Life (1995) and Caesarina Kona Makhoere: No Child's Play: In Prison Under Apartheid (1998), can be used to articulate a unique standpoint on the lived experience of being Black and woman under Apartheid South Africa. The works of Anika Simpson, Patricia Hill Collins and Pumla Dineo Gqola are introduced as methodological antecedents to explore the aspects of an achieved standpoint, which also offer a continuation of existentialism expressed by the South African Black Consciousness Philosophy (articulated by Steve Biko, N.C Manganyi and Mabogo More) and Jean-Paul Sartre scholarship. The project develops an existential standpoint approach; rooted in experience and transgression and aimed at the concrete, freedom, praxis, and achievement.   

Among her honours as a Mandela Rhodes Scholar and Allan Gray Orbis Fellow, Zinhle is currently a dissertation fellow with the Africana Research Center at Penn State from Spring 2023, in addition to a research affiliation with the DSI-NRF SARChI Chair in African Feminist Imagination at the Nelson Mandela University; and serves as a co-moderator of the feminist dialogues and book talks for the African Feminist Initiative here at Penn State. Some of her academic work is published in the Critical Philosophy of Race Journal, South African Journal of Philosophy, Agenda and Journal of World Philosophies. Zinhle also holds a 200hr yoga certification and is an artist and writer.