2026 Gates Cambridge Annual Lecture with Tsitsi Dangarembga

Admission (organiser's words): Event Registration

In this lecture, Tsitsi Dangarembga will argue that modern nations are built around a particular model of human society based on hierarchy, inequality and the accumulation of wealth, and that this model contributes to many of today’s global problems.

Tracing the origins of this system back to 5000BC Varna, Bulgaria, Tsitsi will draw a direct historical trajectory from early forms of inequality to modern capitalism, culminating in the concept of “billionairism”: a late-stage capitalist system in which extreme concentrations of wealth and a growing number of billionaires coexist with increasing global inequality.

Event Registration

About the speaker:

Tsitsi Dangarembga is a Zimbabwean novelist, playwright, filmmaker, and activist, acclaimed for her groundbreaking debut Nervous Conditions (1988)—the first novel in English by a Black Zimbabwean woman—followed by The Book of Not and Booker-shortlisted This Mournable Body. Founder of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa and the International Images Film Festival for Women, she is known for exploring postcolonial identity, gender, and social justice in literary fiction, creative non-fiction and film.

We cordially invite everyone to a drinks reception in the central hall following the lecture.

Times:

5:15pm - Doors open, registration (Main Lecture Theatre, Divinity School)
5:30pm - Start
6:30pm - Drinks Reception
7:00pm - Event ends