Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Biographic Data
| ID | 176007 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sabelo |
| FAMILY NAME | Ndlovu-Gatsheni |
| SIGNATURE | NDLOVU-GATSHENI S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of South Africa |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5477-607X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 440 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Knowledge Is Life: Decolonial Reflections on the Epistemic Politics of Knowing
This article advances the proposition that knowledge is life, drawn from the African Ndebele aphorism ukungazi kufana lokufa (ignorance is like being dead), as the conceptual scaffolding for a meditation on what knowledge once was, what was done to it under modernity/coloniality, and what it must become if humanity is to survive its present civilizational crisis. It traces how knowledge was extracted from communal life, redefined as expertise, en…
African Decolonial Theory: A Conversation
Antipode has become a key platform for engaging with decolonial and anticolonial scholarship, as well as adjacent fields such as Black geographies, Indigenous studies, Latin American feminism, and work on settler‐colonialism. African reference points in this literature, however, have been far less common, both in the journal and more broadly in radical geography. Recognizing that there are several loci of enunciation for decolonial and anticoloni…
Knowing - Unknowing: African Studies at the Crossroads
The Sage Handbook of Decolonial Theory
Intellectual imperialism and decolonisation in African studies
The concepts of the cognitive empire, coloniality of knowledge, the Africanist enterprise, and decolonial turns provide effective means of unmasking resilient and invisible intellectual imperialism in African studies. A close analysis of the major turns in African studies, ranging from the overarching Black radical turn to the African nationalist, Afro-Marxist political economy, postcolonial, gender/feminist and current resurgent decolonial inter…
On the African Utopic Registers of the Future
Africans have consistently produced utopic registers of the future as part of their struggles for reexistence and reworlding from their vantage points, within a modern world in which their humanity was questioned, their past, present and the future denied. This article introduces African utopic registers as freedom dreams and carriers of aspirations of reworlding from Africa. It confronts coloniality of time as a constraining device to the possib…
Ten challenges in reconfiguring African Studies
African Studies is characterised by intellectual contestations and epistemic struggles. These have become accentuated in the context of the current resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the twenty-first century. This article delineates and reflects on 10 challenges confronting reconfiguring African Studies, namely genealogical, epistemic, linguistic, chronological, theoretical, spatial (area studies, country studies), androcentric, disciplina…
Thinking as Moving – Knowledge Practices and Decolonial Frames in African Studies
Architectural Expertise and the Coloniality of Knowledge: Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni in Conversation with Kenny Cupers
The structure of this interview will be in three parts. We will start with an introduction to some of your main ideas, particularly as articulated in your book Decolonization, Development and Knowledge in Africa. Then we will focus on how these ideas affect our understanding of architecture, and finally we will explore their repercussions for the writing of architectural history. PART 1 Kenny CupersI had initially asked you to be part of the conf…
European War and Global South Perspectives
Ten challenges in reconfiguring African Studies
African Studies is characterised by intellectual contestations and epistemic struggles. These have become accentuated in the context of the current resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the twenty-first century. This article delineates and reflects on 10 challenges confronting reconfiguring African Studies, namely genealogical, epistemic, linguistic, chronological, theoretical, spatial (area studies, country studies), androcentric, disciplina…
Beyond the coloniser’s model of the world: Towards reworlding from the Global South
The reworlding of the world from the Global South directly challenges the resilient coloniser’s model of the world. The coloniser’s model of the world sustains the contemporary hierarchical and asymmetrical modern world system with Europe and North America at its apex of power. Consequently, reworlding from the Global South materialised as a counter-hegemonic initiative driven by struggles of the wretched of the earth for re-existence, liberation…
Decolonizing Knowledge: Reflections from Africa
At the centre of the resurgent and insurgent decolonization of the 21st century—also known as decoloniality—reverberate overlapping existential (coloniality of being/denied/questioned being), material (dispossession/destitution/political economy of knowledge), historical (theft of history and denial of history), epistemic (cognitive empire/coloniality of knowledge), and identitarian (defined and ruled) issues. This article uses the case of Africa…
African Studies in Distress: German Scholarship on Africa and the Neglected Challenge of Decoloniality
This paper is a response to Matthias Basedau's article published in issue 55/2020 of the present journal. At a time when African Studies scholarship is rising beyond the flogging of dead horses, certain strands in the field in Germany seem to ignore much of the valuable scholarship and intellectual contributions by excellent African and non-African researchers alike. It is striking to see how Basedau falls prey to the same shortcomings that he dr…
Political Modernity and the Postcolonial New World Order
The current world order is organized into invented, self-contained modern nationstates in defiance of realities of globalization, planetary human entanglements and visions of a debordered, denationalised, and deterritorialized, pluriversal world. Modern self-contained nation-states are epistemically products of Euromodernity and ideologically products of modern methodological nationalism. Inevitably, at the centre of Euromodernity has been the un…
The primacy of knowledge in the making of shifting modern global imaginaries
Marxism and Decolonization in the 21st Century: Living Theories and True Ideas
Revisiting Marxism and decolonisation through the legacy of Samir Amin
Samir Amin’s legacy of deployment of Marxist science, dedication to pan-Africanism and commitment to revolutionary liberation of the global South from imperialism and capitalism is re-evaluated from an epistemological vantage point. This is necessary because Amin raised fundamental epistemological issues as he challenged the discipline of economics, built institutions which advanced alternative thinking, and consistently created concepts and theo…
The cognitive empire, politics of knowledge and African intellectual productions: Reflections on struggles for epistemic freedom and resurgence of decolonisation in the twenty-first century
What has been the contribution of African intellectuals to postcolonial and decolonial scholarship? This question arises because there is emphasis on privileging works of Diasporic scholars from the Middle East and South Asia for postcolonialism and Diasporic scholars from South America for decoloniality/decolonisation. This article contributes to the complex politics of knowledge in Africa through centring often-ignored contributions of African …
Le long tournant décolonial dans les études africaines. Défis de la réécriture de l'Afrique
Cet article s'intéresse au long tournant décolonial et à la manière dont il a pu troubler d'autres tournants qui ont touché les sciences humaines et sociales. Le tournant décolonial continue d'animer les luttes visant à libérer les études africaines des imbrications coloniales, des modèles impériaux mondiaux, du carcan des area studies et de l'actuelle économie mondiale du savoir. Cette approche permet non seulement de révéler d'invisibles dynami…
Mbeki's 'I am an African' Speech: Mobilising Psycho-Political Resources for Political Reconstitution of Post-Apartheid South Africa
We offer a critical reading of Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech to illustrate how he foregrounded humaning, namely ontoepistemological recovery, as a key dimension of psycho-political reconstruction. Mbeki’s speech, delivered on the occasion of the adoption of South Africa’s democratic Constitution, was inherent to the larger quest to (re)imagine South Africa and (South)Africanness and assert independent Black intellectual thought. Position…
Decolonization, Development and Knowledge in Africa: Turning Over a New Leaf
"This provocative book is anchored on the insurgent and resurgent spirit of decolonization of the twenty-first century. The author calls upon Africa to turn over a new leaf in the domains of politics, economy and knowledge as it frees itself from imperial global designs and global coloniality. With a focus on Africa and its Diaspora, the author calls for a radical turning over of a new leaf predicated on decolonial turn and epistemic freedom. The…
The History and Political Transition of Zimbabwe: From Mugabe to Mnangagwa
Geopolitics of Power and Knowledge in the Covid-19 Pandemic: Decolonial Reflections on a Global Crisis
This article offers a provisional decolonial reading of the crisis created by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The article performs five interrelated tasks. The first task addresses the question of knowledge and theorizing during exceptional moments. A decolonial case is made for seeking mitigations and solutions to COVID-19 based on the African knowledge and epistemologies from the Global South. Africa in particular and the Global S…
African Decolonization's Past and Present Trajectories
Decolonization has reemerged as a compelling vision of a better future
Decoloniality as the Future of Africa
Decoloniality is not only a long‐standing political and epistemological movement aimed at liberation of (ex‐) colonized peoples from global coloniality but also a way of thinking, knowing, and doing. It is part of marginalized but persistent movements that merged from struggles against the slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, neo‐colonialism, and underdevelopment as constitutive negative elements of Euro‐North American‐centric modern…
Making Sense of Mugabeism in Local and Global Politics: So Blair, keep your England and let me keep my Zimbabwe
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has emerged as one of the most controversial political figures since 2000, eliciting both admiration and condemnation. What is termed 'Mugabeism' is a summation of a constellation of political controversies, political behaviour, political ideas, utterances, rhetoric and actions that have crystallised around Mugabe's political life. It is a contested phenomenon with the nationalist aligned scholars understanding…
The cognitive empire, politics of knowledge and African intellectual productions: Reflections on struggles for epistemic freedom and resurgence of decolonisation in the twenty-first century
What has been the contribution of African intellectuals to postcolonial and decolonial scholarship? This question arises because there is emphasis on privileging works of Diasporic scholars from the Middle East and South Asia for postcolonialism and Diasporic scholars from South America for decoloniality/decolonisation. This article contributes to the complex politics of knowledge in Africa through centring often-ignored contributions of African …
Making Sense of Cultural Nationalism and the Politics of Commemoration under the Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe
This article examines the range of cultural events and activities that were promoted by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) in the 2000s under the banner of the Third Chimurenga. It contributes to a lively debate on post-2000 cultural imaginings of a fetishised nation riddled by contestations over state power. The article posits that the ‘cultural’ nationalism that was promoted through the Third Chimurenga emerged…
Africa for Africans or Africa for 'Natives' Only? 'New Nationalism' and Nativism in Zimbabwe and South Africa
This article makes historical sense of the recent signs of the metamorphosis of nationalism into nativism in Zimbabwe and South Africa. The central thesis of the article is that the resurgence of Afro-radicalism and nativism in post-settler and post-apartheid societies partly reflected deep-rooted antinomies of black liberation thought and partly current ideological conundrums linked to the limits of both the African national project and global l…
RethinkingChimurengaandGukurahundiin Zimbabwe: A Critique of Partisan National History
This article examines how the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) sought to inscribe a nationalist monologic history in Zimbabwe in order prop up its claim to be the progenitor and guardian of the postcolonial nation. Since its formation in 1963, it has worked tirelessly to claim to be the only authentic force with a sacred historic mission to deliver the colonized people from settler colonial rule. To achieve this objective…
The Entrapment of Africa within the Global Colonial Matrices of Power: Eurocentrism, Coloniality, and Deimperialization in the Twenty-first Century
This article deploys world-systems analysis and the concept of coloniality to examine the experience of the African people within the modern world-system since 1492, a date that figuratively marks the birth of the modern world-system and its shifting international orders. Africa’s experience is contextualized within six international orders: the post-1492 order, the Westphalian order that emerged in 1648, the post-1884–1885 Berlin consensus, the …
Fiftieth Anniversary of Decolonisation in Africa: A Moment of Celebration or Critical Reflection
This article deploys the concept of coloniality of power to critically reflect on the decolonisation process, using a 'colonial difference' perspective which enables a critical reflection on the limits of decolonisation from the side of the ex-colonised ordinary citizens of Africa. Three principal arguments are advanced. First, celebration of the decolonisation process as the proudest moment in African history obscures the continuing operation of…
African Studies in Distress: German Scholarship on Africa and the Neglected Challenge of Decoloniality
This paper is a response to Matthias Basedau's article published in issue 55/2020 of the present journal. At a time when African Studies scholarship is rising beyond the flogging of dead horses, certain strands in the field in Germany seem to ignore much of the valuable scholarship and intellectual contributions by excellent African and non-African researchers alike. It is striking to see how Basedau falls prey to the same shortcomings that he dr…
Reinvoking the past in the present: Changing identities and appropriations of Joshua Nkomo in post-colonial Zimbabwe
This article discusses the histories, narratives and representations that have been produced by and on former ZAPU leader and Vice-President of Zimbabwe, Joshua Nkomo. We focus on the multiple identities and subject positions that Nkomo came to inhabit in the way in which he was represented in ZANU-PF's discourse of the early 1980s; his self-representation in Nkomo's 1984 autobiography Nkomo: the story of my life and subsequent appropriations of …
Beyond the coloniser’s model of the world: Towards reworlding from the Global South
The reworlding of the world from the Global South directly challenges the resilient coloniser’s model of the world. The coloniser’s model of the world sustains the contemporary hierarchical and asymmetrical modern world system with Europe and North America at its apex of power. Consequently, reworlding from the Global South materialised as a counter-hegemonic initiative driven by struggles of the wretched of the earth for re-existence, liberation…
Geopolitics of Power and Knowledge in the Covid-19 Pandemic: Decolonial Reflections on a Global Crisis
This article offers a provisional decolonial reading of the crisis created by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The article performs five interrelated tasks. The first task addresses the question of knowledge and theorizing during exceptional moments. A decolonial case is made for seeking mitigations and solutions to COVID-19 based on the African knowledge and epistemologies from the Global South. Africa in particular and the Global S…
Provisional Notes on Decolonizing Research Methodology and Undoing Its Dirty History
Decolonizing research methodology is a vast and complex task of undoing its dirty history. The dirty history is so hidden within research methodology that only a careful decolonial mind can unmask and reveal it. This task of decolonizing research methodology lies at the core of struggles for epistemic freedom involving rethinking and unthinking dominant ways of producing knowledge. This short article tackles the sacred cow of research methodology…
Beyond the Equator There Are No Sins: Coloniality and Violence in Africa
The phenomenon of violence has pervaded African people’s lives across precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial historical epochs. While it is easy to codify manifestations of violence such as precolonial raiding, colonial wars of conquest, and nationalist resistance wars, there are many other forms whose logic is harder to understand, such as terrorism, xenophobia, racist-inspired violence, criminality, rape, torture, and maiming. This study deplo…
Revisiting Marxism and decolonisation through the legacy of Samir Amin
Samir Amin’s legacy of deployment of Marxist science, dedication to pan-Africanism and commitment to revolutionary liberation of the global South from imperialism and capitalism is re-evaluated from an epistemological vantage point. This is necessary because Amin raised fundamental epistemological issues as he challenged the discipline of economics, built institutions which advanced alternative thinking, and consistently created concepts and theo…
African Decolonization's Past and Present Trajectories
Decolonization has reemerged as a compelling vision of a better future
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Phinda
The World Cup, Vuvuzelas, Flag-Waving Patriots and the Burden of Building South Africa
The recent hosting of the World Cup by South Africa invoked what Michael Billig has termed ‘banal nationalism’, manifesting itself through blowing of ‘Vuvuzelas’, waving and displaying of the national flag on vehicles, as well as the wearing of sports regalia (Football Friday) by the people across racial, ethnic and class divisions. The support for the national team—‘Bafana Bafana’ occupied the national centre stage and became the main symbol aro…
The death of the Subject with a capital 'S' and the perils of belonging: A study of the construction of ethnocracy in Zimbabwe
This article seeks to analyse the dynamics of politics of ethnocracy in Zimbabwe. Ethnocracy developed as an indictment on civic and inclusive nationalism. The contest between forces of ethnocracy and those of inclusive nationalism permeated the struggles for liberation, reducing them to a complex terrain of mobilisation of ethnicity and regionalism, displacing all pretensions and rhetoric of national unity. At birth in 1980, Zimbabwe was permeat…
From a ‘terrorist’ to global icon: A critical decolonial ethical tribute to Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela of South Africa
This article examines Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela’s political life and legacy from the perspective of critical decolonial liberation ethics, which privileges a paradigm of peace, humanism and racial harmony and opposes the imperial/colonial/apartheid paradigm of war, racial hatred and separation of races. This system emerged in the 15th century and was driven by the desire to conquer, dispossess, colonise, exploit and segregate people according to …
Beyond Mugabe-centric narratives of the Zimbabwe crisis
The figure of President Robert Gabriel Mugabe seems to be haunting not only the Zimbabwean internal political landscape but also academic narratives of the crisis that engulfed the country at the beginning of the third millennium. Books informed by divergent ideological and disciplinary persuasions continue to be written by those who participated in the liberation struggle, such as Zvakanyorwa Wilbert Sadomba, keen to articulate the ‘authentic’ o…
Do ‘Africans’ exist? Genealogies and paradoxes of African identities and the discourses of nativism and xenophobia
One of the paradoxes of the making of African nations and African identities is the recent metamorphoses and mutations of African nationalism from civic principles founded on the slogan of ‘diverse people unite’ to narrow, autochthonous, nativist and xenophobic forms that breed violence. This article seeks to examine key contours in the making of African identities, with a specific focus on historical, cartographic, and hegemonic processes that c…
The Decolonial Mandela: Embodiment of Peace, Justice, and Humanism
This article provides a fresh decolonial reading of Nelson Mandela’s political life and legacy as an embodiment of critical decolonial ethics of liberation that is opposed to imperial/colonial/apartheid paradigm of war and its logics of racial profiling, classification, and hierarchization of human beings. The paradigm of war is underpinned by the paradigm of difference and working in combination, they enabled the denial of the humanity of black …
Re-thinking the Colonial Encounter in Zimbabwe in the Early Twentieth Century
An orthodox nationalist scholarship has always defined the colonial encounter between the Ndebele and the early Rhodesian settlers in the dichotomous terms of domination and resistance pioneered by T.O. Ranger in the 1960s. In this article, I seek to transcend this traditional conceptualisation of the colonial encounter by recognising mimicry, hybridity, negotiation and alienation as the central aspects of the encounter between the coloniser and …
A World without Others? Specter of Difference and Toxic Identitarian Politics
The specter of “difference” has been haunting the modern world since the time of colonial encounters. The paradigm of the “One,” which portended the death of difference and diversity, is equally problematic. Consequently, the modern world faces resilient and paradoxical notions of a world without difference, which continues to throw up toxic identitarian politics predicated on racism, tribalism, sexism, patriarchy, xenophobia, homophobia, and eve…
Re-thinking the Colonial Encounter in Zimbabwe in the Early Twentieth Century
An orthodox nationalist scholarship has always defined the colonial encounter between the Ndebele and the early Rhodesian settlers in the dichotomous terms of domination and resistance pioneered by T.O. Ranger in the 1960s. In this article, I seek to transcend this traditional conceptualisation of the colonial encounter by recognising mimicry, hybridity, negotiation and alienation as the central aspects of the encounter between the coloniser and …
Making Sense of Mugabeism in Local and Global Politics: So Blair, keep your England and let me keep my Zimbabwe
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has emerged as one of the most controversial political figures since 2000, eliciting both admiration and condemnation. What is termed 'Mugabeism' is a summation of a constellation of political controversies, political behaviour, political ideas, utterances, rhetoric and actions that have crystallised around Mugabe's political life. It is a contested phenomenon with the nationalist aligned scholars understanding…
Making Sense of Cultural Nationalism and the Politics of Commemoration under the Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe
This article examines the range of cultural events and activities that were promoted by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) in the 2000s under the banner of the Third Chimurenga. It contributes to a lively debate on post-2000 cultural imaginings of a fetishised nation riddled by contestations over state power. The article posits that the ‘cultural’ nationalism that was promoted through the Third Chimurenga emerged…
Africa for Africans or Africa for 'Natives' Only? 'New Nationalism' and Nativism in Zimbabwe and South Africa
This article makes historical sense of the recent signs of the metamorphosis of nationalism into nativism in Zimbabwe and South Africa. The central thesis of the article is that the resurgence of Afro-radicalism and nativism in post-settler and post-apartheid societies partly reflected deep-rooted antinomies of black liberation thought and partly current ideological conundrums linked to the limits of both the African national project and global l…
Do ‘Zimbabweans’ Exist: Trajectories of Nationalism, National Identity Formation and Crisis in a Postcolonial State
Angola–Zimbabwe Relations: A Study in the Search for Regional Alliances
The common approach to the study of foreign policies of Southern African Development Community (SADC) states is to locate them within the context of ‘brother presidents’ and ‘sister liberation movements’. There is emphasis on liberation war camaraderie as a key variable. However, Angola–Zimbabwe (read as MPLA–ZANU-PF and MPLA–MDC) relations have no noticeable strong liberation war-time ties. The relations are traceable to the post-1980 period whe…
Crossing the Zambezi: The Politics of Landscape on a Central African Frontier
Crossing the Zambezi: The Politics of Landscape on a Central African Frontier Joann McGregor London and Harare, James Currey and Weaver Press, 2009 v+237 pp., ISBN: 978-1-84701-402-3 (James Currey
Do ‘Africans’ exist? Genealogies and paradoxes of African identities and the discourses of nativism and xenophobia
One of the paradoxes of the making of African nations and African identities is the recent metamorphoses and mutations of African nationalism from civic principles founded on the slogan of ‘diverse people unite’ to narrow, autochthonous, nativist and xenophobic forms that breed violence. This article seeks to examine key contours in the making of African identities, with a specific focus on historical, cartographic, and hegemonic processes that c…
Reinvoking the past in the present: Changing identities and appropriations of Joshua Nkomo in post-colonial Zimbabwe
This article discusses the histories, narratives and representations that have been produced by and on former ZAPU leader and Vice-President of Zimbabwe, Joshua Nkomo. We focus on the multiple identities and subject positions that Nkomo came to inhabit in the way in which he was represented in ZANU-PF's discourse of the early 1980s; his self-representation in Nkomo's 1984 autobiography Nkomo: the story of my life and subsequent appropriations of …
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Phinda
The World Cup, Vuvuzelas, Flag-Waving Patriots and the Burden of Building South Africa
The recent hosting of the World Cup by South Africa invoked what Michael Billig has termed ‘banal nationalism’, manifesting itself through blowing of ‘Vuvuzelas’, waving and displaying of the national flag on vehicles, as well as the wearing of sports regalia (Football Friday) by the people across racial, ethnic and class divisions. The support for the national team—‘Bafana Bafana’ occupied the national centre stage and became the main symbol aro…
Fiftieth Anniversary of Decolonisation in Africa: A Moment of Celebration or Critical Reflection
This article deploys the concept of coloniality of power to critically reflect on the decolonisation process, using a 'colonial difference' perspective which enables a critical reflection on the limits of decolonisation from the side of the ex-colonised ordinary citizens of Africa. Three principal arguments are advanced. First, celebration of the decolonisation process as the proudest moment in African history obscures the continuing operation of…
Beyond the Equator There Are No Sins: Coloniality and Violence in Africa
The phenomenon of violence has pervaded African people’s lives across precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial historical epochs. While it is easy to codify manifestations of violence such as precolonial raiding, colonial wars of conquest, and nationalist resistance wars, there are many other forms whose logic is harder to understand, such as terrorism, xenophobia, racist-inspired violence, criminality, rape, torture, and maiming. This study deplo…
Racialised ethnicities and ethnicised races: Reflections on the making of South Africanism
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatshenia*Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is a Professor in the Department of Development Studies at the University of South Africa. His major publications include Do 'Zimbabweans' Exist? (Peter Lang 2009), The African Neo-Colonized World (CODESRIA, in-press), and over 50 journal articles and book chapters on history and politics in Zimbabwe and South Africa. a University of South Africa, Department of Development Studies , PO Box 392,…
Beyond Mugabe-centric narratives of the Zimbabwe crisis
The figure of President Robert Gabriel Mugabe seems to be haunting not only the Zimbabwean internal political landscape but also academic narratives of the crisis that engulfed the country at the beginning of the third millennium. Books informed by divergent ideological and disciplinary persuasions continue to be written by those who participated in the liberation struggle, such as Zvakanyorwa Wilbert Sadomba, keen to articulate the ‘authentic’ o…
The death of the Subject with a capital 'S' and the perils of belonging: A study of the construction of ethnocracy in Zimbabwe
This article seeks to analyse the dynamics of politics of ethnocracy in Zimbabwe. Ethnocracy developed as an indictment on civic and inclusive nationalism. The contest between forces of ethnocracy and those of inclusive nationalism permeated the struggles for liberation, reducing them to a complex terrain of mobilisation of ethnicity and regionalism, displacing all pretensions and rhetoric of national unity. At birth in 1980, Zimbabwe was permeat…
RethinkingChimurengaandGukurahundiin Zimbabwe: A Critique of Partisan National History
This article examines how the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) sought to inscribe a nationalist monologic history in Zimbabwe in order prop up its claim to be the progenitor and guardian of the postcolonial nation. Since its formation in 1963, it has worked tirelessly to claim to be the only authentic force with a sacred historic mission to deliver the colonized people from settler colonial rule. To achieve this objective…
Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity
Global imperial designs, which have been in place since conquest by western powers, did not suddenly evaporate after decolonization. Global coloniality as a leitmotif of the empire became the order of the day, with its invisible technologies of subjugation continuing to reproduce Africa’s subaltern position, a position characterized by perceived deficits ranging from a lack of civilization, a lack of writing and a lack of history to a lack of dev…
Revisiting the national question and rethinking the political trajectory of Africa in the 21 st century
The national question in postcolonial Africa encapsulates the totality of national and social challenges that needs resolution. These include the burden of building postcolonial nations, reconstructing postcolonial states, promoting economic development, entrenching popular democracy, defending national sovereignty, consolidating political power, and eventually achieving regional integration and pan-African unity, as long term goals. To resolve t…
The Entrapment of Africa within the Global Colonial Matrices of Power: Eurocentrism, Coloniality, and Deimperialization in the Twenty-first Century
This article deploys world-systems analysis and the concept of coloniality to examine the experience of the African people within the modern world-system since 1492, a date that figuratively marks the birth of the modern world-system and its shifting international orders. Africa’s experience is contextualized within six international orders: the post-1492 order, the Westphalian order that emerged in 1648, the post-1884–1885 Berlin consensus, the …
Lozikeyi Dlodlo Queen of the Ndebele: ‘A Very Dangerous and Intriguing Woman’
Lozikeyi Dlodlo Queen of the Ndebele is one of those rare books that deal with a rare theme in Ndebele history. Marieke Faber Clarke and Pathisa Nyathi's book is ground-breaking in the sense that i
From a ‘terrorist’ to global icon: A critical decolonial ethical tribute to Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela of South Africa
This article examines Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela’s political life and legacy from the perspective of critical decolonial liberation ethics, which privileges a paradigm of peace, humanism and racial harmony and opposes the imperial/colonial/apartheid paradigm of war, racial hatred and separation of races. This system emerged in the 15th century and was driven by the desire to conquer, dispossess, colonise, exploit and segregate people according to …
Decoloniality as the Future of Africa
Decoloniality is not only a long‐standing political and epistemological movement aimed at liberation of (ex‐) colonized peoples from global coloniality but also a way of thinking, knowing, and doing. It is part of marginalized but persistent movements that merged from struggles against the slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, neo‐colonialism, and underdevelopment as constitutive negative elements of Euro‐North American‐centric modern…
The Decolonial Mandela: Embodiment of Peace, Justice, and Humanism
This article provides a fresh decolonial reading of Nelson Mandela’s political life and legacy as an embodiment of critical decolonial ethics of liberation that is opposed to imperial/colonial/apartheid paradigm of war and its logics of racial profiling, classification, and hierarchization of human beings. The paradigm of war is underpinned by the paradigm of difference and working in combination, they enabled the denial of the humanity of black …
Ali A Mazrui on the invention of Africa and postcolonial predicaments: ‘My life is one long debate’
Ali A Mazrui’s academic and intellectual fame provoked both deep admiration and severe criticism, causing his intellectual legacy to be caught up between what the South Sudanese scholar Dustan M Wai depicted as ‘Mazruiphilia’ (hagiographical celebration) and ‘Mazruiphobia’ (critical bashing). Mazrui died on 12 October 2014, leaving behind a ‘supermarket of ideas’ and a rich archive that easily immortalises him. This article aims to transcend both…
Political science (44 works) · Sociology (41 works) · Politics (38 works) · Law (37 works) · African cultural and philosophical studies (24 works) · Gender Studies (23 works) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (21 works) · Colonialism (18 works) · Political economy (18 works) · African history and culture studies (17 works)