Abstract
This chapter examines the possibilities of harnessing Indigenous African dance to initiate some form of epistemic insurrection in the postcolonial Zimbabwean arts education curriculum. The arts education curriculum in Zimbabwe reflects the legacy of British colonialism, with its notions of white supremacy and elitism. This type of education unjustly promotes Eurocentric epistemologies as more worth knowing than African Indigenous arts. It is against this background that the chapter deploys two Zimbabwean Indigenous dances, jerusarema and kongonya, as epistemic insurrectional means to redefine the post-independence arts curriculum. The chapter draws on Critical Race Theory to rethink traditional Zimbabwean dances as alternative, affirming, and emancipatory narratives. It develops AfriCriticism to constitute both dances as post-racist performances that challenge the dominant Eurocentric and African elites’ arts education policies.
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Notes
- 1.
Chimurenga is the Shona word for war of liberation.
- 2.
Zimbabwe became independent in 1980 after a protracted armed struggle.
- 3.
Robert Mugabe is the first black African President of Zimbabwe whose calls to sever links with the West have not been complemented with those to revolutionize the curriculum.
- 4.
The Shona vernacular name for jerusarema was mbende. After the colonialists banned the dance, the defiant Shona still performed it. Its performance fostered a sense of identity and common struggle against cultural strangling among the colonized. To disguise its centrifugal and nationalist potential, the Zimbabwean performers spiced it with some Christian tunes and even performed it after Sunday church services under the new name jerusarema for Jerusalem. The term ‘Shona’ refers to the majority of African people who lived in Zimbabwe (excluding the Ndebele) and comprises sub-groups such as the Manyika, Zezuru, Karanga, Korekore, and Ndau.
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Gonye, J., Moyo, N. (2018). African Dance as an Epistemic Insurrection in Postcolonial Zimbabwean Arts Education Curriculum. In: Kraehe, A., Gaztambide-Fernández, R., Carpenter II, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65256-6_9
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