Decolonisation, says Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (University of Calgary in Canada), is not a slogan but an ongoing unfinished struggle rooted in centuries of resistance. In this interview with Zara Qadir for the Global Souths Hub, Sabelo calls for “ecologies of knowledges” that move beyond silos of disciplines in Western universities to embrace knowledges from the Global South.
Drawing on lifelong engagement in epistemic struggles shaped by his Zimbabwean upbringing and his championing of decolonisation of knowledge and institutions in South Africa, which included the founding of decolonial networks and summer schools, Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues that decolonisation is necessary to help us unlearn, re-know. He contends that this process connects struggles against neocolonialism with abolitionist, feminist, Indigenous movements as well as contemporary ones such as Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter, to confront today’s intertwined epistemic, ecological, and political global crises.
1. We often hear the word ‘decolonisation’ today, but what does it mean to you? Why do you think it is so important right now?
There are some who think that “decolonisation” has been reduced to a slogan or metaphor. Yet, for those who have been directly involved in the struggle, it has always been far more than that. As Iranian American academic, Hamid Dabashi reminds us, it is driven by a form of knowledge and politics rooted in battlefields of history, born out of “tears and blood”. Take the struggle of the late author and academic, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who was arrested, imprisoned, and exiled for his decolonial ideas.
Today, some speak of decolonisation as if it suddenly appeared out of nowhere, but decolonisation has a very long, painful and traumatic history. It can be traced back to the revolts of the enslaved, those who resisted racism, slavery, colonialism and capitalism. The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) occupies a place of pride in the unfolding of decolonisation and abolition of enslavement. The leading African historian Paul Tiyambe Zeleza depicted the decolonisation struggles and resistance in Africa that dominated the 20th century as the “proudest moment” in African history. Decolonisation’s resurgence and insurgence in the 21st century demonstrates that it has remained an unfinished liberation project.
“Today, some speak of decolonisation as if it suddenly appeared out of nowhere, but decolonisation has a very long, painful and traumatic histories.”
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Decolonisation is embraced in the Global South, where the majority of humanity is resident. The Global South holds a rich alternative and diverse group of knowledges that have long been ignored or dismissed. While the modernity project (a historical effort rooted in European Enlightenment ideals) promised progress and development for all, in the Global South this often meant something different. Kwame Nkrumah, one of the founding leaders of Ghanian independence and the leading advocate of pan-Africanism, coined the concept “neocolonialism” to name how colonialism survived its physical dismantlement to continue suffocating the economic development of Africa.
Latin American scholars showed how ideas like development and human rights can often mask racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and neoliberalism. These ideas can suppress alternative visions of development—pressuring the South to imitate Northern models of thinking. Terms like underdevelopment, unequal development, maldevelopment, and dependence have been used to explain how Euromodernity has contributed to the destitution of the Global South. This critique is more urgent today than ever as imperialism has reached what the political scientist, Samir Amin termed its “senility.” Think of Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs, a sign of a decaying yet aggressive global order.
Think of what is happening in Gaza. As Walter Mignolo (a scholar best known for his work on decolonial theory) would say: colonialism is not over but all over; it continues to manifest in various forms today.
Now, as we face a global crisis, decolonisation becomes more urgent: Colonialism has already revealed its limits and dangers, and it still carries the potential to push us toward catastrophic outcomes including the possibility of nuclear conflagration.
2. Terms like anti-colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial are often used interchangeably. How do we meaningfully distinguish between them, and why does it matter that we do?
Academia often demands precision, but knowledge born of struggles cannot be reduced to neat categories without losing meaning.
Decolonisation is not just another school of thought. It is rooted in lived experience, survival, and collective memory of those who have endured racism, enslavement, genocides, colonialism, racial capitalism, and patriarchal sexism. It differs from the academic knowledge typically produced in Western universities. The terms anti-colonial, postcolonial and decolonial share a history of resistance —which is why the word “colonial” appears in all of them.
When we discuss the anti-colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial struggles and their unfolding some suggest a threefold approach: genealogies, trajectories, and horizons. For example, postcolonial thought is largely linked to the critique of the British Empire, especially in India, and this critique emerged from scholars from the Global South that were working within Ivy League universities in the USA.
Decolonial thought has many origins to the extent that the philosopher, Nelson Maldonado-Torres described it as a “family of thought” meaning that it is fed by various streams of political struggles and intellectual movements from different regions of the world.
While postcolonialism is focused on the nineteenth century and European empires, decoloniality traces back to 1492 and the colonisation of Latin America. When read carefully, anti-colonial thought becomes a connecting tissue going as far back as the Haitian Revolution and earlier movements, continuing to the current moment of the Black Lives Matter movement and many others.
But rather than focusing on the differences, why not focus on the connections? Today’s decolonial movements are built on anti-colonial struggles, standing on the shoulders of thinkers like sociologist and historian, W. E. B. Du Bois and psychiatrist and scholar Frantz Fanon. As sociologist, Julian Go states, anti-colonial thought has evolved through three waves.
Anti-colonial thought shifted from armed struggles around 1973 with the assassination of a Bissau-Guinean anti-colonial leader, Amilcar Cabral into postcolonial thought that reverberated within universities.
Scholars like critical theorist Homi Bhabha, and literary theorist, and feminist critic, Gayatri Spivak reworked these ideas as academic discourse, which was most visible among Global South diaspora academics in US Ivy League institutions.
But for me, the key point is not the differences but the connections and convergences of these streams of thought. Remember that colonialism worked through imposition of divisions and binaries. Decolonisation works through connecting and relating so as to construct another world.
We should resist siloing of ideas and instead see ecologies of thought that cut across time, space, and generations. For example, the Black Lives Matter or Rhodes Must Fall movements show this by bringing together struggles of race, gender, sexuality and more. Our struggles are not singular but multiple, connected and overlapping.
3. Were there moments or experiences from your early life that shaped your path as a decolonial thinker?
I was born in Zimbabwe during the anti-colonial struggle. Five of my brothers joined the guerrilla fighters, and from a young age I knew my family was part of a war. Their sudden disappearances left me asking: why did they leave everything behind to fight? At night, as children, we often overheard our parents whisper that they had gone to war, but during the day we were told we didn’t know where they were. That silence shaped my curiosity.
When Zimbabwe became politically independent in the 1980s, the ruling party Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF) soon showed some violent politics by declaring a war on the minority Ndebele-speaking people (1983-1987), killing over 20,000 accusing them of supporting dissidents. I come from the Ndebele-speaking people and this war disturbed my relationship with Zimbabwean nationalism. At a young age, I had experienced its two faces: its anti-colonial politics that promised independence and the postcolonial state that turned against its own people. This experience developed my critical attitude to both nationalism and colonialism in equal measure.
When I entered university in 1990, nationalism and Marxism were still powerful forces. Even after the end of the Soviet Union, Marxism remained influential in many departments and faculties. I ended up studying History and Economic History, which exposed me to two dominant schools of thought: nationalist historiography, which sought to recover histories erased or distorted by colonialism, and Marxist political economy, which focused on the structural problems of capitalism.
Anti-colonial African resistance scholarship influenced my thinking deeply. For my BA Honours dissertation, I focused on Ndebele-speaking people’s resistance to colonialism in 1896. In my master’s thesis, I examined how colonial rule criminalised African life and cultural practices between 1900 and 1923. For my doctorate, I explored whether pre-colonial African societies had their own notions of democracy and human rights, cognisant of the historical fact that African people used different languages, vocabularies, and idioms to express their rights and entitlements. My focus was on the history of Ndebele-speaking people from 1818 to 1934.
In the 1990s, the discourses on democracy and human rights were emerging as powerful forces that inspired global hope. Political commentators described this period as a “third wave of democratisation” capturing the moment of triumphalism of neoliberalism at the end of the Cold War. Against this backdrop, my doctoral research asked several crucial questions:
- How did pre-colonial leaders govern their people?
- How was a balance between consent and coercion established?
- How was hegemony constructed and power exercised?
- How did the notions of a nation and a civil society co-exist with the overarching structure of a kingdom? What shaped relations between men and women?
- How were resources accumulated, owned and distributed?
- How was justice delivered?
- What role did spirituality play in the kingdom?
I also explored the impact of colonial encounters and how early colonialism affected the Ndebele-speaking people. The theoretical framework I used was Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Hegemony refers to a process by which a dominant group maintains its power and influence over other groups through cultural, economic, and political means. It took me to the broader field of postcolonial studies and the critique of colonial knowledge, a process I had begun to do under the influence of African nationalist historiography. I therefore trace my concern with these epistemological issues from the 1990s at the University of Zimbabwe.
4. Could you tell us more about the Decolonial Summer Schools that you contributed to setting up?
In 2005, I left Zimbabwe to South Africa, where I began to build a robust decolonial scholarship for which I am known for today. At the time, South Africa was grappling with the transformation of society and institutions as it transitioned from apartheid colonialism to democracy. This national agenda appealed to me and I saw it as a struggle that called for active contribution from an African and Black academic.
In 2011, at the University of South Africa (UNISA) I founded the Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN) to bring young scholars together around decolonial thought. I also sought out connections with Latin American decolonial scholars and together we established annual decolonial summer schools at UNISA. With students, mentees and other scholars we took a leading role in applying decolonial thought in advancing the struggles for decolonisation of universities in South Africa, questioning the very idea and mission of the university, its institutional cultures, governance and management practices, scholarship, languages of learning, and approaches to teaching, research, curriculum and pedagogy.
At first, many conservative elements dismissed the decolonisation agenda as outdated. However, with the outbreak of the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall movements in 2015 and 2016, it became clear that decolonial thought was a revolutionary force for inspiring concrete change, inspiring struggles of the victims of racism, enslavement, colonialism, capitalism, hetero-patriarchal sexism, and neoliberalism. When the Black Lives Matter movement broke out in the US the decolonisation struggles gave these struggles renewed momentum, extending the call for decolonisation to a planetary scale.
The first University of South Africa Decolonial Summer School was held in 2014. Before that, the founding members of ADERN had been attending the Barcelona International Decolonial Summer School in Spain, led by Professor Ramon Grosfoguel. I, along with Professor Rosemary Moeketsi, then Dean of the College of Human Sciences, began discussions to establish similar annual summer schools at UNISA.
Since then, Summer Schools have since grown into an annual tradition inspiring other universities, including KwaZulu-Natal and Cape Town. For me, this is proof that decoloniality has taken root — an achievement I see as a marker of success.
5. Your role challenges how knowledge is understood and valued, bringing together different strands of decolonial thought. What does this mean to you personally, and why do you think it has taken so long for a position like this to exist?
My current role as Professor and Canada Research Chair (CRC) Tier 1 in Pluralistic Societies—Epistemic Pluralism and Ecologies of Knowledges at the University of Calgary, builds on work I first began in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Previously, from 2020 to 2024, I served as Professor and Chair in Epistemologies of the Global South with an Emphasis on Africa at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.
Across these two roles, my research is driven by a central commitment: the decolonisation of knowledge. I explore how decolonised ways of knowing can strengthen pluralistic societies and reimagine universities as spaces of liberation—places where multiple epistemic traditions can thrive. My work focuses on creating institutions rooted in epistemic pluralism, ecologies of knowledges, and mosaic pedagogies, ultimately transforming higher education into a site for genuine emancipation and intellectual diversity.
At the moment, universities prefer order over change, silencing and disciplining radical professors and students, with knowledge neatly slotted into disciplines and compartmentalised into departments. Disciplines thin-out knowledge of its richness.
It is crucial not to confuse disciplines with knowledge. Disciplines don’t carry the totality of what we call knowledge. In society, knowledge exists in many forms, often undisciplined. In conversation, people don’t talk about geography, history, and politics but they draw on all their senses to seek to solve problems.
Disciplines, a construct of the Westernised university, ‘discipline’ us, shaping identities and limiting what we can think. We end up confined to containers: “I’m a scientist, not a historian.” By contrast, an “ecology of knowledge” gestured beyond inter-, trans-, and multi-disciplinary interventions which have failed to deal with the cognitive empire and its coloniality of knowledge.
Decolonising knowledge and institutions is never an easy task. Institutions, when put under pressure, often present themselves as embracing decolonisation, while in reality they discipline it, maintaining the status quo. They tinker with the margins of the problem of coloniality. Modern knowledge itself is sustained by its own strong global political economy that reproduces it as a force for capitalism and coloniality.
Today, this struggle continues in new forms. In the US, President Donald Trump has launched a full-scale war against Critical Race Theory, intersectionality theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, African Studies, African-American Studies, Africana Studies, and decolonial thought, primarily through defunding and political intimidation. Professors and students who advance critical thinking often face harassment, while anti-Semitic accusations are weaponised and thrown at many critical scholars and students. Across Europe and North America, right-wing movements are increasingly on the offensive, targeting intellectualism as they pursue their broader and fascist politics.
But the decolonisation struggle has to continue. It is needed now more than ever. Genocide in Gaza has demonstrated beyond a doubt the dangers of colonialism and imperialism. The escalation of anti-black politics indicates that the decolonisation project has remained an unfinished project.
6. Which thinkers, movements, or grassroots struggles from the Global South have most shaped your intellectual and political journey?
I have been influenced by a number of thinkers and movements from Africa, Global Africa and beyond. I have drawn from the Haitian Revolution which saw enslaved Africans rising up successfully against the enslavement industry. Garveyism, Pan-Africanist, and African anti-colonial African movements influenced me a lot.
I was also influenced by leading figures in the African nationalist school such as Terence Osborne Ranger and Ngwabi Bhebe who supervised my PhD. At the University of Zimbabwe, Karl Marx’s ideas influenced me. Thinkers and revolutionaries from the Global South such as CLR James, the historian and activist,, Walter Rodney, sociologist and historian, W. E. B. Du Bois and civil rights activist Malcolm X, all of whom helped broaden our perspectives.
Those marginalised in the academy, like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose detention and exile drew our attention to the power of his ideas, are one of my favourites to read. I draw on his archives as well as consistent African Marxist thinkers, such as Samir Amin. Until his death in 2018, Amin argued that Marxism should be seen not as a failed state ideology but as a scientific method for analysing capitalism. Building on the work of Amin, I strongly believe that Marxism, combined with decolonial thought, remains one of the most powerful tools for exposing the structures and contradictions of global capitalism and global coloniality today. I also learnt a lot from Amilcar Cabral about the weapon of theory.
The thinkers from the Global South have consistently connected the dots between racism, enslavement, colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy, offering a deeper understanding of how these systems sustain one another. From their work, I learnt a lot about the possible end of the contemporary world system and its global orders. As Sylvia Tamale asks, in Decolonization and Afro-Feminism, “Who will connect the dots so our children can understand?” This question continues to guide my thinking.
I am also influenced by the black radical tradition, especially Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism. Over time, my focus turned toward knowledge recovery: bringing back and reviving thinkers once dismissed as irrelevant. Franz Fanon, now widely studied, was once ignored; Cheikh Anta Diop’s thesis was rejected in France, but he is now central to decolonial thought and the theory of Afrocentricity. I was also influenced by the Subaltern School in Asia, which shifted our vocabulary from “class” to “subaltern.” In Latin America, my collaborations with scholars such as the semiotics scholar Walter Mignolo, sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel, and philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres through summer schools and joint publications, have all strongly shaped my research and thinking.
7. Decolonisation can sound rather abstract, but can you give us some small, everyday acts that people can follow to begin unlearning colonial mindsets and practices?
In universities, I see how decolonisation is often treated as an abstract idea. Knowledge is lifted from the ordinary and made complex, as if complication itself proves intelligence. But decolonisation can also be understood at the borders and margins, where people live their everyday lives: speaking other languages, practising alternative ways of living and sustaining rituals and spiritualities outside dominant traditions. If we approach these spaces with humility, people begin to share their wisdom and knowledge, and we can learn from knowledge accumulated and passed down through generations.
Like many, I once thought earning a degree (or degrees) was enough, that afterwards I could simply go and teach, but I’ve realised I still need to learn. When I talk with people, I go through a process of unlearning. I catch myself thinking, “I didn’t know this. I misunderstood why they did it that way. I was too quick to judge”. Then they explain, “This practice has a purpose”. It draws on a kind of knowledge not taught at university. Acquiring this form of practical knowledge has proven eye-opening and invaluable to me.
8. Are there any emerging themes, collaborations, or creative projects you’re excited about — ones that continue to push the boundaries of your work?
I have moved to Canada to take up a Canada Research Chair in Pluralistic Societies- Epistemic Pluralism and Ecologies of Knowledges. I see this as an opportunity to engage with the kinds of questions we have been discussing, especially the idea of pluralistic societies in the context of growing transnational migration and escalating fascism. Too often, policy remains stuck in 20th-century nationalism, lagging behind today’s global realities, and when that gap widens, strange behaviours emerge of building what political theorist, Wendy Brown termed “walled states.”
The reality is that people are already spread across the world. What we need now is to find better ways to help them connect and relate to one another. I reflect on the fact that when people increasingly began encountering one another across the world in the fifteenth century, knowledge about the wider world was very limited. However, today, things are different. We have access to vast knowledge, and there is no part of the world that remains unknown to us. I once imagined that if this knowledge was used correctly, we would be living in a world of acceptance and coexistence. The patriarchy and ideas of superiority should have weakened long ago, but these systems persist.
9. What motivates you when progress feels slow?
I approach my work more as a service rather than simply a career. Faced with today’s crises, this work is not optional to me. To give up would be to accept death or destruction.
What we need is a form of knowledge that lets us re-live, re-exist, and imagine new possibilities — knowledge as resilient as bamboo, with the power to repair our shared planet. When we bring in the questions of colonisation and decolonisation, it reminds us to rethink our relationship with the Earth, recognising it as a shared home for humans, non-humans and all natural life.
The historian and political theorist, Achille Mbembe reminds us that colonialism was, at its core, preoccupied with possession. Colonisers asked, “Who owns the earth?” and answered, “We do”, and they sought to enforce this claim by dictating how others could exist within it.
I often think of this when I travel. At airports, I’m asked, “What brings you here?” My instinctive reply is, “Where else am I supposed to be?” If you already think you know where I belong, then tell me. I thought I was a human being, free to move like anyone else, so why is my presence questioned?
“Some people move freely, while others must carry numerous documents and endless justifications for their right to travel. That is colonialism at work.”
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
I believe decolonisation is vital today because we stand at a crossroads. Global entanglements are deepening, but alongside this reality we have narrowing nationalism, rising xenophobia, and rising attempts to criminalise mobility – but I argue that mobility is as fundamental to being human as deciding to settle somewhere; you cannot legitimise one while condemning the other. People have always moved across rivers, borders, and landscapes. The task now is to mobilise diverse knowledge forms that help strangers live together, draw ecologies of knowledges from social pluralism, and cultivate pluralistic societies.
