Rethinking and Reconstituting Indigenous Knowledge and Voices in the Academy in Zimbabwe: A Decolonization Process

Abstract

This chapter focuses on inthgenous knowledge recovery in the academy as an anticolonial and antiracist project that needs to be pursued to liberate the minds of inthgenous academics and researchers who have wittingly or unwittingly adapted Western knowledge as the universal knowledge and the panacea for underdevelopment in Zimbabwe. The anticolonial project evolves from centuries of colonialisms efforts to methothcally erathcate inthgenous ways of seeing and interacting with the world (Simpson, 2004). The colonial project was meant to subjugate and suppress inthgenous peoples historical commemorations (Shizha, 2008). In this project the academy was created as the epicenter of colonial hegemony, indoctrination, and mental colonization. The anticolonial project focuses on decolonization in academic settings in Zimbabwe, rupturing and challenging the current colonial politics of knowledge production and thssemination. The process includes, but is not limited to reclaiming, rethinking, reconstituting, rewriting, and validating the indigenous knowledges and languages, and repositioning them as integral parts of the academy in universities where teaching and learning reinforce hegemonic and oppressive parathgms which allocate thfferential social locations to Western and inthgenous knowledges. The majority of inthgenous academics/scholars in Zimbabwe are conservative and resistant to change and fear challenging the so-called dominant and/or “stable” knowledge.