Radical Zambezian Reimagination is a way of thinking, feeling, and being that flows like the rivers it draws upon. It reimagines spatial, cultural, and ecological relationships through the accumulated wisdom of communities shaped by the Zambezi River and its tributaries. It refuses the rigidity of colonial boundaries, linear histories, and fixed territories, privileging instead relational, riverine ways of knowing, where care, reciprocity, and accountability extend to humans, non-human kin, and the waters, soils, and skies that sustain life. Knowledge in this framework moves like water, shifting with seasons, currents, and cycles of growth, decay, and renewal. It is living, fluid, and responsive, acknowledging the presence of memory and possibility at every turn.

The Zambezi itself is both compass and guide. Its tributaries, wetlands, floodplains, and confluence with the Indian Ocean form an interconnected web of life, where rivers are not lines on a map but living networks that link clouds to aquifers, rains to wetlands, and land to sea. Thinking with the Zambezi is to think in movement, in flows of memory and inheritance, where the past is not behind us but active within land, water, and community. The wounds of extraction, displacement, and colonial interruption ripple through ecosystems and social fabrics, and healing emerges through the restoration of these flows, the care of disrupted relationships, and the revival of ecological and spiritual continuity.

“Zambezia” is a horizon rather than a fixed place. It names a mode of belonging that transcends the nation-state, inviting what can be described as “river thinking,” a consciousness in which kinship, obligation, and care cross temporal, spatial, and species boundaries. It recognises the authority of ancestors, waters, and non-human life as higher than imposed laws, and uses that authority to guide repair, continuity, and futurity. Radical Zambezian Reimagination is a stance of refusal, declining the frameworks of colonial recognition, and opening paths for regenerative futures rooted in cycles, relations, and attentive care.

Example: Through Radical Zambezian Reimagination, communities imagine futures in which knowledge, land, and water systems are restored and reconnected. In these futures, ecological balance, relational accountability, and intergenerational care are restored, and past, present, and future converge like tributaries into a river, carrying memory, presence, and possibility together. Here, repair is not an end but an ongoing, flowing practice, a continual dialogue with water, land, and ancestors.