BORROWED MIRRORS

The frameworks we trust do more than describe reality. They help decide whose reality counts.

We inherit standards for recognising good leadership, credible knowledge, meaningful progress and legitimate authority. As these standards become embedded in institutions and societies, we stop seeing them as choices. They begin to feel like reality itself.  

But every framework has a field of vision. When a framework travels beyond the conditions for which it was designed, it may retain its authority while losing its accuracy. A person can be taught to mistrust valuable parts of themselves. An institution can misdiagnose capability as resistance or knowledge as culture. A society can expend enormous effort becoming legible to standards that were never equipped to recognise its reality. Borrowed Mirrors names this condition recognition failure: the distance between what is present and what the prevailing instrument can see.

Moving across identity, leadership, knowledge, measurement and institutional power, Vongai Nyahunzvi exposes the five distortions through which borrowed frameworks operate, the tax people pay to become legible and the misdiagnosis economy that grows around solving the wrong problems.

Drawing African intellectual traditions into serious conversation with contemporary practice, she rejects both uncritical imitation and automatic rejection. The challenge is more demanding: examine what our frameworks reveal, confront what they obscure, and recover the authority to retain, reframe, rebuild, or refuse them.