Repositioning of African Indigenous Religion through the Multi-Faith Approach in Zimbabwe

The position and status of African Indigenous Religion (AIR) in the Zimbabwe education system continue to attract scholarly introspection and uncertainty. Despite the dominance of Christianity and Islam, AIR continues to play a critical role in shaping the spiritual, cultural, and social life of communities. This study focuses on the status of AIR in secondary school pedagogy, higher institutions of learning and in the lives of people in Zimbabwe. The study argues that over the years, the approach for religious education in Zimbabwe was Christocentric, which was largely deceptive, as it was essentially influenced by the “world religions” paradigm, which is theologically and ideologically charged. This evokes James L. Cox’s call for a socio-culturally contextualized phenomenological study of AIR in Zimbabwe. This qualitative research employed Cox’s phenomenological approach as a research design and was guided by decoloniality as a theoretical framework. Data were gathered through fieldwork anchored by in-depth interviews with secondary school teachers, lecturers and education officers. In addition, the study utilized document analysis and review of Zimbabwean policies and circulars from the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education (MoPSE) on the implementation of the Heritage-Based Curriculum (HBC) framework and historical accounts of AIR’s role in the public sphere. The study established that the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)-heavy curriculum “minoritized” the humanities pathway by placing Family and Religious Studies as an elective in the lower secondary level, whilst its exclusion in the Secretary’s Circular No.4 of 2024, sent wrong signals about the real status of not only AIR, but the entire subject area of Family and Religious Studies. The study concludes that Cox’s insights into the methodological challenges of studying AIR clarify the broader Western imposed theological paradigms on other religious systems. The phenomenological approach, alongside a decolonial approach, can enhance the repositioning of AIR into multi-faith initiatives in Zimbabwe

Christianity · Curriculum · Decoloniality · Ideology · Indigenization · Indigenous · Missiology · Qualitative research · Religious education · African cultural and philosophical studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Agriculture