Relationality and Resilience in a Not So Relational World?

Knowledge, Chivanhu and (De-)Coloniality in 21st Century Conflict-Torn Zimbabwe

by Artwell Nhemachena

This book critically examines the relevance of the increasingly
popular theories on relationality by interfacing those theories with the
African [Shona] modes of engagement known as chivanhu [often
erroneously narrowly translated as tradition]. In other words, the book
takes seriously concerns by African scholars that much of the theories
that have been applied in Africa do not speak to relevance and
faithfulness to the continent. Situated in a recent Zimbabwean context
marked by multiple crises producing multiple forms of violence and want,
the book examines the relevance of relational ontologies and
epistemologies to the everyday life modes of engagements by villagers in
a selected district.

The book unflinchingly surfaces the strengths and
weaknesses of popular theories while at the same time underlining the
exigencies of theorising from Africa using African data as the
millstones. By meticulously and painstakingly unpacking pertinent
issues, the book provides unparalleled intellectual grit for the
contemporary and increasingly popular discourses on (de-)coloniality and
resilience in relation to the African peoples and their [often
deliberately contested] environments, past, present and future. In other
words, the book loudly sounds the bells for the battles to decolonise
and transform Africa on Africa’s own terms. This is a book that would be
extremely useful to scholars, activists, theorists, policy makers and
implementers as well as researchers interested not only in Africa’s
future trajectory but also in the simultaneities of temporalities and
worlds that were sadly overshadowed by colonial epistemologies and
ontologies for the past centuries.

£44.00

Format

Paperback

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About the author

Artwell Nhemachena

Artwell
Nhemachena holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of
Cape Town. He has lectured at a number of universities in Zimbabwe.
Currently he lectures in Sociology at the University of Namibia. He has published journal papers, book chapters and books on violence and conflict, relational ontologies and resilience, environment, development, democracy, research methods, humanitarianism and civil society organisations, anthropological jurisprudence, mining, society and politics, religion, industrial sociology, decoloniality and social theory. He is a laureate and active member of CODESRIA since
2010.

Review

“In examining how people in Eastern Zimbabwe have made sense of,
responded and become resilient to the vagaries of Zimbabwe’s complex,
multiple crises, through a critical and theoretically informed analysis
of Shona cosmologies, Nhemachena has produced a book of wonderful
intellectual ambition and thoughtful ethnographic insight. Critically
engaging his deep and ethnographically grounded understanding of Shona
cosmology and ontologies with theoretical insights from Deleuzian,
Ingoldian and a wealth of other current anthropological approaches,
Nhemachena offers an approach to understanding life and living in parts
of postcolonial and post 2000 Zimbabwe that is unique and will be useful
for scholars of African politics and economy as much as for
anthropologists concerned with African religions and cosmology.”

Joost Fontein, British Institute in Eastern Africa, and author, Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water & Belonging in Southern Zimbabwe, (James Currey, 2015)

“Why must, this compelling book asks, ‘the global’ always be the
reference point for efforts to understand social and cultural diversity
in the contemporary world? Read it for an answer as well as for a way of
improving the questions we ask of knowledge, language, the world.”

Harri Englund, Professor of Anthropology & Director, Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge

“Africanist scholars are increasingly retooling their stock-in-trade –
those tired, Euro-American tropes, epistemologies and metaphysics that
have long organised social science knowledges, objects of study,
problems and explanations surrounding Africa. This book is a major
contribution to these efforts. Through rich ethnography of Zimbabwe’s
troubled times, Artwell Nhemachena not only challenges us to unthink
many familiar social science concepts, conundrums and concerns; he also
provides a novel conceptual architecture through which to do so.”

Todd Sanders, Author of Beyond Bodies: Rainmaking and Sense Making in Tanzania

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