Welcome to a curated collection of resources exploring the vibrant lives and legacies of Zimbabwean communities in Britain. This page invites you to journey beyond official narratives, delving into the hidden histories and personal stories that resonate within the archives of everyday life.
This page is a living archive, constantly evolving with the contributions of our collaborators and the evolving narratives of the Zimbabwean diaspora. We invite you to engage with these resources, reflect on their significance, and contribute your own stories and experiences. Let us embark on a journey together, exploring the social lives of Zimbabweans and amplifying the voices that often remain unheard.
The Benin tusk and Zulu beadwork: Practicing decolonial work at Manchester Museum through shared authority
Abstract
The museum world is currently grappling with questions of how to decolonize anthropologi- cal collections and many of these debates are epistemologically oriented. In pursuit of colonial ordering, material culture was extracted from colonized societies, deprived of its contextual meaning, and scrutinized through the lens of colonial knowledge. This article considers how an empirical decolonial practice can be applied drawing on from the current work at the Manchester Museum (MM). Dialogue, open engagements, multivocal conversations, collab- orations, and shared authority in knowledge production are some of the decolonial strategies that I share. To illustrate this praxis turn in museum decolonial work, I first look at how we have addressed cultural objects looted from Benin in 1897 that we hold and “contain” at MM in our living cultures collection, underscoring a commitment by MM to transparency and a provision of access to the living collection by different groups of people. The second example is drawn from a collaborative provenance research that I undertook with Nongoma com- munity members in South Africa in rewriting biographies of Zulu beadwork that we house at MM. Overall, I argue that decolonization should embrace a relational practice of caring for objects through active relations of reciprocity and dialogue with communities. The downside of decolonial practices and how are they are inherently shaped by power imbalances and ten- sions between curators and communities is also critically discussed.
Decolonising the archaeology of indigenous artisanal gold mining in Eastern Zimbabwe
Abstract
In this paper, I will look at how I utilised archaeological ethnography as a methodology to study ancient and contemporary indigenous gold mining practices in Eastern Zimbabwe. Subsequently, I will present an archaeological field research that I undertook at Nyahokwe and Saungweme sites between 2016 and 2017 and move on to show how material culture recovered was collaboratively interpreted in conversations with contemporary indigenous gold miners. I argue that by using archaeological ethnography as a field methodology that privileges multivocality, this ultimately decolonised archaeology’s underlying politics which is protected by expert hegemonic discourses. During the field study at Nyahokwe and Saungweme sites artisanal miners popularly known as makorokozas revealed their localised understanding of crucibles and hammerstones that were recovered during both archaeological excavations and surface collections. Thus, used as decolonised methodology, archaeological ethnography allowed for multiple voices to be embraced in archaeological knowledge production.
My Allotment by Mai Thandiwe
My country of birth is Zimbabwe. I have lived in Oxford for more than 20 years and before I moved to Headington in 2005, I lived in Littlemore, Oxford. While I was living in Littlemore I took an adult access course for higher education (HE) and I enjoyed very much learning especially debating/sharing ideas with my fellow students about topics taught to us by our tutors and having time to socialise with other students. The access (HE) course enabled me to do a law degree at Oxford Brookes University. In Zimbabwe I went to a boarding school at Lower Gweru Adventist secondary school, but for my primary school education, I went to study at a school not far away from my parents’ home. It was in a village I grew up in Mazvihwa under headman Mr Maveta. My late father with the support of my late mother was also a headman in Mazvihwa until his passing in 2021. Being a headman is an important role of solving disputes in rural villages. Although my father was a headman for his community, my late parents and grandmother (my father’s mother) with the assistance of family and extended family were able to run their own subsistence farm very effectively.