Ecologies of Knowledge in Chirere’s Tudikidiki (2007): on Decolonial Ontological Turn

Abstract

This article is an attempt to bring decolonial strands of critical thinking to African/Zimbabwean literary tradition. It explores how Memory Chirere uses the short story genre as a territory of practical life where decolonial practical relations of emancipatory knowledge production are weighed. It argues that the anthology, Tudikidiki, (2007) as Chirere's territory of artisanship of practices, evokes ecologies of knowledge crucial for developing decolonial options. From decolonial epistemic perspective, the article posits that the enduring historical duration of coloniality has elucidated the presence of unequal relations in African knowledge production systems. In its multiple manifestations, coloniality has disfigured, distorted, reconfigured and eventually transformed African ways of knowing. The result is epistemicide, in which Western epistemic systems are valorised as indispensable and unassailable, while indigenous forms of African knowing are vilified as setting a site for conflicting savage desires and derisions. Against this background, this paper considers the imperative need for engaging both indigenous theoretical and practical epistemological projects in terms of the nuances of decoloniality within literary studies. It insists that decolonial turn necessitates a process of ontological change that speaks to the emergency of nascent ecologies of knowledges.