The book "Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity" is authored by one the leading scholars of ideas relating to decolonization and coloniality. In this 2013 book, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni draws out the meaning and implications of coloniality, and sets the foundation for his widely cited 2018 book (Epistemic Freedom in Africa). There are chapters on South Africa and Zimbabwe as cases. A few notes:
"What is emphasized here is one of the core ideological life-springs of colonel conquest and colonial violence was the questioning of the very humanity of colonized people. Questioning the humanity of the colonized people authorized even slavery and other forms of abuse, repression, exploitation, and domination..." (p. 35)
"Global imperial designs refer to the core technologies of modernity that underpinned its expansion into the non-Western parts of the world from the fifteenth century onwards. Race and Euro-American epistemology, particularly its techno-scientific knowledge claims, were used to classify and name the world according to a Euro-Christian Modernist imaginary. African peoples, and others whose cultures and ways of life were not informed by imperatives of Euro-Christian modernity, were deemed to be barbarians - a people who did not belong to history and had no history." (p. 49)
"The field of development studies is terribly affected by what Žižek terms 'weak thought' as opposed to 'strong thought' privileging what he described as 'large-scale expansions' and 'true ideas' which are 'indestructible' and have the capability to 'always return every time they are 'proclaimed dead'. Weak thought has even blinded some academics and intellectuals to such an extent that they continue to uncritically believe in the innocence of development discourses and to defend wrong causes when they masquerade as possessive and developmental and operate under such acceptable terms as democracy, reform development, good governance, and humanitarian intervention without recognising and sifting out the dangerous colonial matrices embedded in them." (p. 82)
"What is wanted is a higher education that does not lead to alteration of African people from their societies and communities. But cultural transformation does not mean the disconnection of Africans from the ambit of global human society and broader human problems. it only implies that a confident African is one rooted in his or her society and whose locus of enunciation is African, Such an African would be able to formulate culturally friendly resolutions of the challenges facing the continent. Particularly speaking, cultural transformation, when creative, seeks a way of blending African and Euro-American epistemologies in an endeavour to advance and enrich the understanding of African experience, problems, and challenges. But it also entails a drive to decolonize knowledge, curriculum, epistemology, pedagogies, power, and institutional cultures" (p.180)
