Septembre 2024 à juin 2025
Mickias Musiyiwa is a fellow from Zimbabwe and holds a PhD in African languages he obtained from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa in 2013. He did his MA (African Languages and Literature); BA Special Honours in Shona and BA General in History, Economic History and Shona from the University of Zimbabwe in the period 1993-1998.
Since 2017 he has held the position of associate professor in the Department of Heritage and Knowledge Systems at the University of Zimbabwe. He teaches African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS), African heritage and digital humanities. Prior to that he held the position of senior lecturer at the same university in the Department of Languages, Literature and Culture teaching literary theory and African literature. He also taught African popular music at the Zimbabwe College of Music from 2001 to 2005. His teaching experience also includes the supervision and assessment of post-graduate theses.
Mickias Musiyiwa is an interdisciplinary scholar with interest in the following research fields in which he has published many journal articles and book chapters: AIKS, climate change and indigenous knowledge, literary and cultural theories, gender studies, popular music, African folklore, animal studies and children’s literature. He is also a poet and translator.
Chikwamboism: Theorising Oppression from an African Indigenous Epistemological Perspective
This study seeks to develop an African indigenous knowledge based theory for conceptualising the complex and ubiquitous phenomenon of oppression.
Termed chikwamboism or the chikwamboist theory, it proffers an epistemic framework for the comprehension of human oppression some of which has, inter alia, been historically institutionalised variously as slavery, feudalism, capitalism, colonialism, apartheid, imperialism and other localised forms of exploitation that could be gender, race, religion, age or culture based. (Human) oppression is understood as the (usually overtly and/or covertly systemic and relentless) subjection of an individual or a group to forms of domination by another individual or group or organisation which results in the oppressed’s deprivation in very sphere of life. Oppression’s tenacity and unabated harm to humanity is the study’s research problem calling for the interrogation of its nature in quest of conceptual ideas to understand it. Oppression fuels human injustice. It hinders humanity’s pursuit of its existential meaning. Because oppression mutates, it is therefore incumbent upon researchers to theorise and discover new insights in order to (re)strategise anew in combating it. The theory’s significance is its construction from Afro-centred epistemologies, often marginalised due to the global epistemic dominance of western intellectualism.
MUSIYIWA, Mickias. “The Pluralistic Notion of Zvipuka: Shona Indigenous Knowledge and Human and Nonhuman Animal Interaction in Zimbabwe,” Religion, Volume 53, Issue 4, 2023, pp. 677-699. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0048721X.2023.2258709
MUSIYIWA, Mickias. “A Nation Burdened by an Unappeased Ngozi? A ‘Folk’ Cultural Perspective on Zimbabwe’s Stagnation,” Oliver Nyambi, Tendai Mangena & Gibson Ncube, (eds.), Cultures of Change in Contemporary Zimbabwe: Socio-Political Transition From Mugabe to Mnangagwa, New York, Routledge, 2022, pp. 202-216.
MUSIYIWA, Mickias. “Literature and the Battle against Covid-19 in Zimbabwe: A Study of Flight Mlambo’s Digital Verse,” Journal of Literary Studies, Special Issue, Volume 38, Number 1, 2022, pp. 1-17.
https://unisapressjournals.co.za/index.php/jls/article/view/10419/5385
MUSIYIWA, Mickias. “The Paradoxical Negotiation of Coloniality and Postcoloniality in African Children’s Literature with Particular Reference to Zimbabwe,” John Stephens, (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, New York, Routledge, 2018, pp. 135-144.
MUSIYIWA, Mickias. “Shona as a Land-Based Nature Culture: A Study of the (Re)Construction of the Shona Land Mythology in Popular Songs,” Fiona Moolla (ed), African Nature Cultures: Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural Forms, Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2016, pp. 49-76.
