Coloniality and the Mbuya Nehanda Statue: A Decolonial Analysis of Twitter Users’ Comments

ABSTRACT

This paper interrogates debates that took place after the erection of the statue of Mbuya Nehanda, a Zimbabwean liberation war heroine. The paper employs thematic analysis and [Thompson, J. B. 1990. Ideology and Modern Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press] ideological schema to explore the underlying discourses and ideological assumptions evoked by the tweets that circulated on the Mbuya Nehanda Twitter hashtag (#MbuyaNehanda). Considering Twitter as an agonistic space of contestation and resistance, the paper examines the political and cultural significance of the Mbuya Nehanda statue at this moment in Zimbabwe’s history, bringing into focus the contestations over history, culture, and memory in the postcolonial nation. Findings reveal that the state’s politicisation of the memory of Mbuya Nehanda foils its attempt to create a collective remembering of her due to the fragmentations that exist in the postcolonial nation. This paper goes beyond critiquing the manifest discourses and tensions between the citizens and the state to consider the possibilities offered by the Mbuya Nehanda statue as a harbinger of new knowledges, not only relating to the continuities and discontinuities of colonial history and the present but to African spirituality as well. Using decolonial perspectives informed by epistemologies of the South, the article argues for epistemic pluriversality that recognises diverse forms of knowledge and diverse ways of being.

KEYWORDS:

• Mbuya Nehanda
• statue
• pluriversality
• de/coloniality
• sociology of absences
• sociology of emergences
• Zimbabwe
• epistemologies of the South

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the National Institute for Humanities and Social Science of South Africa for the funding that made the publication of this article possible. I would also like to acknowledge Prof. Lynette Steenveld’s extraordinary intellectual contribution to the research that led to this work. I am grateful for her guidance and insightful feedback on revisions of this paper. I extend the same gratitude to the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation [Media and Social Belonging] Grant Number: 31700711.