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Principles and cross-cutting themes in the Framework
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This chapter theorises the politics of knowledge production in order to understand the ways in which Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) could be framed as bases for promoting transformative classroom practices in Zimbabwe. Doing so is necessary as the school curricula of many education systems in postcolonial Africa remain subservient to the Wester...
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... In deploying the notion of politics of knowledge (Moyo and Gonye 2021;Fataar and Subreenduth 2015), we seek to revisit the idea that knowledge is essentially a human construction and that, as such, knowledge represents the embedded and lived realities of those who produce it. An understanding of knowledge as socially and historically constructed imbues knowledge with a culture and history that makes it inescapably a political undertaking. ...
This study undertakes a decolonial reading of the Zimbabwean history curriculum as an exemplar of how knowledge and pedagogy could be reframed as the basis for curricular justice in a global imaginary that is predicated on the epistemic hegemony of the Global North. The study which is framed as a conceptual research article introduces and argues for undoing historicide as a heuristic within the broader scope of the epistemic decolonial turn. The Zimbabwean history curriculum, as a unit of analysis, is referenced to exemplify entrapment within the Cartesian paradigm of knowing, despite the country’s political independence. The argument developed is that history curricula that do not interrogate the geography and biography of knowledge entrench the hegemonic narrative of the coloniality of power and by extension colonial historiography. The paper suggests that the way out of the epistemic quandary that pervades the Zimbabwean history curriculum entails re-envisioning curricular practices in ways that ensure the emergence of a pluriverse in which we reclaim, restitute and legitimate our knowledges and histories, and affirm our ontological densities as equal to those of the Global North.
In this article I engage with literary representation to argue that although Paul Chidyausiku intended to display the functions of Zimbabwean traditional dance in his re-imagined precolonial Shona society of the novella Broken Roots (1984), he ends up unconsciously suggesting its dysfunctions as well. The paper draws on the functionalist approach and the dysfunctional theory to interpret both the positive and negative connotations surrounding the represented performance contexts. In his recreated early society, Chidyausiku configures dance as performing either decolonial, socialisation, celebratory or gender roles, among others. The article, however, finds Chidyausiku’s overall depiction of the performing society as sometimes ambivalent, thus implying his conflicting conceptualisation of both his African society and the cultural phenomena, including dance, imbedded within it.
