Information

Membership Number: FCA3403

Membership Type: Fellowship

Division: Humanities

Corresponding Email: *******ndlovugatshen@ucalgary.ca

Homepage(s): https://profiles.ucalgary.ca/sabelo-ndlovu-gatsheni 

Present and Previous Positions

Full Professor of History and Canada Research Chair (CRC) Tier 1in Pluralistic Societies: Epistemic Pluralism and Ecologies of Knowledges at the University of Calgary

Fields of Scholarship and Research Interests

Professor Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is a distinguished historian and decolonial theorist whose work has become widely influential across African history, political thought, postcolonial studies, and the humanities more broadly. Trained originally as a historian, he has developed a body of scholarship that moves from the historical study of Zimbabwe, nationalism, identity, and state formation to larger questions concerning coloniality, knowledge, epistemic justice, and the place of Africa within global intellectual life. 

His research has helped give sharper conceptual form to debates on decolonization, decoloniality, and the politics of knowledge in the contemporary world. A major thread running through his scholarship is the interrogation of how empire, colonialism, and their afterlives have shaped political institutions, historical consciousness, and systems of knowledge. In this connection, he is especially associated with work on coloniality, epistemic freedom, the cognitive empire, and the need to rethink intellectual production from the vantage point of Africa and the Global South. His writings have spoken not only to historians of Africa, but also to scholars working in development studies, international studies, education, philosophy, and critical theory. 

His academic work also bears an important institutional and public dimension. In South Africa and beyond, he has been closely engaged with major debates on curriculum transformation, decolonizing the university, and the renewal of academic life through more plural and globally attentive frameworks of knowledge. This combination of historical depth, conceptual ambition, and institutional engagement has made him one of the significant African voices in contemporary discussions of decolonization and the future of the humanities and social sciences.

Honors, Awards and Other Membership

Ali Mazrui Award for Scholarship and Research Excellence, Toyin Falola International Conference on Africa and the Diaspora, 2015
Chancellor’s Prize for Excellence in Research, University of South Africa, 2014
Member, Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), admitted 2013
National Research Foundation (NRF) Rated Social Scientist, South Africa
Restitution Award, Restitution Foundation of South Africa, 2016
Recognized by Le Monde Afrique among leading African thinkers on decolonizing African thought, 2016
Fellow, African Studies Centre, Leiden
Member, British International Studies Association (BISA)
Member, Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA)

Selected Publications

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=K_TTLasAAAAJ&hl=en 

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization. London and New York: Routledge, 2018.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. Decolonization, Development and Knowledge in Africa: Turning Over a New Leaf. London and New York: Routledge, 2020.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization. Dakar: CODESRIA Books, 2013.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. Do Zimbabweans Exist? Trajectories of Nationalism, National Identity Formation and Crisis in a Postcolonial State. Bern and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. “Internationalization of Higher Education for Pluriversality: A Decolonial Reflection.” Journal of the British Academy 9, suppl. 1 (2021): 77–98.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. “The Cognitive Empire, Politics of Knowledge and African Intellectual Productions: Reflections on Struggles for Epistemic Freedom and Resurgence of Decolonization in the Twenty-First Century.” Third World Quarterly (2020).

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. and Siphamandla Zondi, eds. Decolonizing the University, Knowledge Systems and Disciplines in Africa. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2016.

Mpofu, Busani, and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, eds. The Dynamics of Changing Higher Education in the Global South. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020.

Other Information

https://www.uj.ac.za/members/prof-sabelo-j-ndlovu-gatsheni/ 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabelo_J._Ndlovu-Gatsheni