Decoloniality is not only a long-standing political and epistemological movement aimed at liberation of (ex-) colonized peoples from global coloniality but also a way of thinking, knowing, and doing. It is part of marginalized but persistent movements that merged from struggles against the slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, neo-colonialism, and underdevelopment as constitutive negative elements of Euro-North American-centric modernity. As an epistemological movement, it has always been overshadowed by hegemonic Euro-North American-centric intellectual thought and social theories. As a political movement, it has consistently been subjected to surveillance of global imperial designs and colonial matrices of power. But today, decoloniality is remerging at a time when the erstwhile hegemonic Euro-North American-centric modernity and its dominant epistemology are experiencing an epistemological break. This epistemic break highlights how Euro-North American-centric modernity has created modern problems of which it has no modern solutions and how theories/knowledges generated from a Euro-North American-centric context have become exhausted if not obstacles to the understanding of contemporary human issues. This essay introduces, defines, and explains the necessity for decoloniality as a liberatory language of the future for Africa.

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Original citation:Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. and Willems, Wendy (2009) 'independence,' 'heroes' and 'unity' in Abstract This article examines the range of cultural events and activities promoted by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) in the 2000s under the banner of the Third Chimurenga. It contributes to the lively debate on post-2000 cultural imaginings of a fetishised nation riddled by contestations over state power. The article posits that the version of 'cultural' nationalism promoted as part of the Third Chimurenga emerged partly as a political response to the failures of 'developmental' nationalism of the 1980s and 1990s and partly as a continuation and intensification of the previous imaginings of Zimbabwe that began in the 1960s. Through a range of cultural activities, the ruling party sought to legitimise its continued rule of Zimbabwe in the face of the challenges posed to its rule by the increasingly popular Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and the growing number of civil society organisations. Through the specific genre of the 'music gala', cultural nationalism came to attribute new meanings to concepts such as

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