Chimurenga epistemologies

diasporic entanglements, colonial afterlives and the struggle of thinking other worlds

Abstract

This paper employs and engages with Chimurenga (the Shona word for the Zimbabwean war of liberation), as a decolonial approach from the Global South. In a move to a more holistic approach to scholarship on museums and heritage in Africa, Chimurenga as a site of resistance in direct response to colonial imposition – is examined in a broader context that expands beyond the limited conceptualisation of Chimurenga as simply political resistance fixed in time or history; but rather, as a philosophy that informs an epistemological understanding, an anticolonial epistemological gesture. Rather than focus on a museum/museums per se, we choose here to utilise indigenous ways of knowing as an approach that can be the foundation from which different approaches to material culture and belongings and processes and histories of museumization can be responded to.