What does it mean to decolonise? Interrogating the meaning and practice of decoloniality in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Three decades after the formal lowering of the colonial flag, Zimbabwe remains entangled in structures, epistemologies, and hierarchies inherited from settler colonialism. The vocabulary of decolonisation is now ubiquitous in Zimbabwian policy, curriculum reform and public debate, yet its meaning is frequently unsettled, contested or reduced to symbolic gestures such as renaming and Africanisation. This conceptual review interrogates what decolonisation and decoloniality mean within Zimbabwe's historical, political, educational, cultural and socioeconomic contexts, and asks how decolonial ideas can move beyond rhetoric toward substantive transformation. Drawing on the modernity/coloniality school and Af­rican decolonial scholarship, the review employs conceptual analysis and synthesis to distinguish coloniality (an enduring matrix of power, knowledge and being) from decolonisation (the historical event of juridical independence) and decolonial­ity (an ongoing project of epistemic and structural liberation). It advances an integrated conceptual model that maps the persistent coloniality matrix onto five sites of contestation (knowledge and curriculum, language, identity, institutions and public policy, and land and economy) and theorises two divergent pathways: a symbolic pathway that reproduces coloniality and a substantive pathway that regenerates epistemic freedom. The review concludes that genuine decoloniality in Zimbabwe requires the alignment of ep­istemic, institutional and socioeconomic transformation, mediated by political will, epistemic communities, and a relational Ubuntu ethic.