Chapter 10: “Decolonizing The Mind?”: Historiographical Perspectives on Modern Imperialism and Colonialism in Zimbabwean Post-Colonial History Textbooks (1980s–Present Day)¹

Imperialism and colonialism are hallmarks of modern world history whose memories and legacies continue to reverberate today in politics, the economy, culture, and education. As revealed by a plethora of scholarship, the challenge of coming to terms with this past has been a global one shared by former colonizers and colonized alike.

In Africa, a continent long subjected to European colonial rule and profoundly influenced by empire, confronting and departing from this past has been regarded as a priority since the decolonization processes of the 1950s and 1960s. At this time, a series of nationalist projects came into being, geared towards re-imagining arbitrary colonial constructions into cohesive entities with a shared past and a common vision for the future and towards assertingAfrica’s place in the new world order. These projects have entailed writing “authentic” histories from an African perspective (Jewsiewicki & Newbury, 1986;,Neale, 1986) in order to challenge colonial historiography and Eurocentric views that had portrayed the world in terms of “the West and the rest” (Ferguson, 2011) and reduced Africa to a “dark” and ahistoric continent whose past became an appendix to European history. Further, these endeavors have involved concomitant efforts to reform colonial history education as part of a broader “project to dismantle the cultural and epistemological heritage of Eurocentrism” (Powell, 2003, p. 152) for the purpose of “decolonizing the mind” (wa Thiong’o, 1986). Calls to decolonize and Africanize knowledge to enable the continent to take ownership of its past, present, and future remain strong. Despite the urgency attached to the endeavor in the immediate aftermath of decolonization, many have observed that “the vestiges of colonialism continue to haunt former colonial states” (Mavhunga, 2006, p. 441). Widely regarded in Africa as a key tool for the decolonization of the minds, history education in particular has increasingly come under fire as observers have denounced the failure of post-independence school reforms to sufficiently distance curricula and textbooks, and their modes of representation, from dominant and alienating Western and Eurocentric knowledge systems (Bentrovato, 2017).