Jairos Gonye

Traditional African dance education as curriculum reimagination in postcolonial Zimbabwe: a rethink of policy and practice of dance education in the primary schools

This paper examines the teaching and learning of traditional dance at primary school level in Zimbabwe as a key aspect of postcolonial curriculum reimagination within the broader project of reclaiming a nation’s heritage. The paper used the survey design to determine how a cohort of primary school teachers understood traditional dance and how they taught and practiced it in primary schools in Zimbabwe. The paper found that although the teachers had relatively fair knowledge of the most popular dances, they had very low competency levels to demonstrate how the dances were performed and done, thus limiting its practice. The paper thus concluded that the teachers were inadequately prepared to teach traditional dances in the primary school partly because of a general reluctance to utilise indigenous knowledge systems as a basis of socially responsive curriculum practice. It is recommended that there be a policy rethinking that should place greater value on dance education as distinct from Music education as well as an improvement in teacher preparation and methods in order to work towards critical postcolonial dance recovery.

Representations of "Difficult Knowledge" in a Post-Colonial Curriculum: Re-Imagining Yvonne Vera's "The Stone Virgins" as a "Pedagogy of Expiation" in the Zimbabwean Secondary School.

This study reframes Yvonne Vera’s novel, The Stone Virgins as a potential secondary school literature text in the Zimbabwean curriculum through which a pedagogy of expiation could be re-imagined. The argument is that the traumatic experiences that Zimbabwe has gone through as a nation require open re-engagement and debate. The study thus employs the notion of ‘difficult knowledge’ as a heuristic to engage with harrowing past events represented in The Stone Virgins in ways that may console and provoke students and teachers into acknowledging collective guilt. Thus, the study advocates for the inclusion of the text in the school syllabus so as to provide space for critical re-engagement with the nation’s unhealed wounds in order to promote expiation and healing.

African Dance as an Epistemic Insurrection in Postcolonial Zimbabwean Arts Education Curriculum

This chapter examines the possibilities of harnessing Indigenous African dance to initiate some form of epistemic insurrection in the postcolonial Zimbabwean arts education curriculum. The arts education curriculum in Zimbabwe reflects the legacy of British colonialism, with its notions of white supremacy and elitism. This type of education unjustly promotes Eurocentric epistemologies as more worth knowing than African Indigenous arts. It is against this background that the chapter deploys two Zimbabwean Indigenous dances, jerusarema and kongonya, as epistemic insurrectional means to redefine the post-independence arts curriculum. The chapter draws on Critical Race Theory to rethink traditional Zimbabwean dances as alternative, affirming, and emancipatory narratives. It develops AfriCriticism to constitute both dances as post-racist performances that challenge the dominant Eurocentric and African elites’ arts education policies.