Epistemic decoloniality of westernised higher education: A discourse on curriculum justice and knowledge integration at historically white universities in South Africa

Abstract

This article seeks to delve deeper into the discourse about the epistemic decoloniality of Westernised higher education in South Africa. Discrete academic studies have indicated that African Knowledge paradigms have not found a home in South Africa’s Westernised academies yet; knowledge patterns remain foreign and colonized. The current curriculum at a section of Historically White Universities in South Africa largely reflects the colonial and apartheid worldviews and is disconnected from African realities, including the lived experiences of most black South Africans, taking into account Arts and Humanities. Based on an examination of the decoloniality project and curriculum dishonesty and reform through literature study, the article calls for critical rethinking and reconfiguration, which should position South Africa, Africa, and last of all, the globe at the centre of knowledge production. Epistemic decoloniality at South Africa’s Historically White Universities should not be pursued with knowledge violence but rather with scholarly debate. This article introduces the framework of decoloniality by tracing the genesis of (South) Africa’s knowledge coloniality and initiates a discussion on the current epistemic decoloniality in South Africa’s Westernised higher education. The focus is on curriculum justice and knowledge integration across Historically White Universities in South Africa. The last portion of the paper applies the proposed measures to evaluate the cogency of decolonial discourses.

Introduction and context: Situation analysis

Coloniality is not over, its all over the globe (Mignolo, 2011b: 2), and a segment of South Africa’s Historically White Universities (HWU) are no exception (Mogashana, 2014: 142). Coloniality has become highhanded, thus preventing ‘other’ forms of knowledge to become admitted into a number of the above Universities (Le Grange 2016: 1–2; Mignolo, 2011a: 46, Quijano, 2000). Nevertheless, the decoloniality project is also back on the world rostrum. It is a critique of the dominant Eurocentric academic model. The fight against what the (South) African and Latin American scholars term epistemic coloniality and ‘knowledge genocide’; continuous production of theories based on European traditions, ‘the only ones capable of reaching universality’ (Quijano, 2000; Diop, 1974: 47; Ngugi Wa Thiongo, 1986: 4), which resulted in what the European historian John M Headly (2008) celebrated with enthusiasm as the ‘Europeanization of the World.’ The Eurocentric anthropological theory involves knowing about 'others' but a process that never fully acknowledges these 'others' as thinking and knowledge-producing subjects (Mignolo, 2011b: 103). Knowledge can only be deemed universal if pluriversal. Pluriversity is not merely an extension of Eurocentric model throughout the world and now being reproduced at several Historically White Universities (HWU) in South Africa. Pluriversity, in a sense, means a process of knowledge production that is open to epistemic diversity (cf. Césaire, 2012: 48; Mbembe, 2016: 37). Some scholars in (South) Africa paraphrase it as the ‘province of knowledge’ or Knowledge unity in diversity (Ubuntology). Pluriversity implies that the South Africa’s ‘Westernised Universities’ in the 21st century ought to operate in both the (South) African and global contexts.

The query is, should the Historically White Universities in South Africa continue downgrading the African thought systems and embark on upgrading the Western streams perceived to be efficacious and yet not addressing the lived experiences of most South Africans, precisely in Arts and Humanities? A cohort of South African Black academics (including a polyphony of white professionals) at Historically White Universities (University of Cape Town, North-West University, Wits University, University of Pretoria, Rhodes and Stellenbosch University) is mounting pressure for an end to the hegemony of the Western epistemological traditions, cultures, histories, languages and figures, and incorporation of ‘other’ South African, African and global outlook and experiences as central tenets of curriculum, teaching, learning, and research at these universities (Heleta, 2016: 1; Mogashana, 2014: 145). The scholars maintain that decolonizing hegemonic Westernised higher education curriculum in Humanities and Social Sciences can be a powerful catalyst for change in achieving educational, cultural, political, and socio-economic development goals. They further reason that a need for innovation in education that inspires thinking, action, and becoming agents of change is critical for all (South) Africans by exploring the Afrocentric stance beside canonical West (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018: 18; Mbembe, 2016: 33; Le Grange, 2016: 4). Inversely, a couple of White elites at the Historically White Universities argue that “Europe of knowledge is an irreplaceable factor for social and human growth, and capable of giving the necessary competencies to face the challenges of the new millennium, and an indispensable component to consolidate and enrich the South African citizenship and the globe” (cf. Ansell, 2004; Dionyssis, 2000; Boaventura, 2012). In other words, some HWU theorists acknowledge the Western stream as sound knowledge production that has been sustaining humanity (South Africans and others) from time immemorial and cannot just be wished away in a single day. This standpoint was also shared by Helen Zille, South African politician and former national leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA). On 16 March 2017, she tweeted, “The legacy of colonialism was not all bad because it had left a legacy of institutions, infrastructure, and hearty knowledge system which South Africa could build upon.” Following accusations that she was endorsing coloniality, Zille noted that her views had been misconstrued and apologized unreservedly for a tweet that may have fallen fresh as a defence of coloniality (Campbell, 2017).

However, Steve Biko had beforehand denounced the notion that the ‘white academia should be the only pacesetter’ in terms of knowledge evolution and construction in South Africa (Biko 1986: 25). Biko argued that a country in Africa ought to reflect African cultures, values, and perspectives, and if the majority is Africans in that country, that majority should determine the ‘broad direction taken by the joint cultures and worldviews of that society’ (Biko, 1986: 26). In digesting the meaning of decoloniality and Biko’s philosophy of majority rule in the current South African universities’ discussions, Matthew Mogashana (2014: 145) traces the idea’s genesis to the Pan-African liberationist ideals of the 1960s. He argues that the current calls for epistemic decoloniality at a section of South Africa’s Westernised Universities are rooted in Afrocentrism (valorization of all that is African), which is based on a binary code of the ‘modern west’ versus ‘traditional African.’ The traditional African received a boost in South Africa’s higher education with the assertion that the modern west streams have been highly publicized at HWU. In contrast, local knowledge systems, values, and languages have been subjugated by colonialism and apartheid. Hence, ‘traditional African’ needs to be freed from these shackles and fully rehabilitated and restated at these Universities (see Mogashana, 2014:146 cf. Ngugi Wa Thiongo, 1986: 60).

According to Tshaka (2009: 149), the South African Department of Education in 2008 critiqued several Historically White Universities for having achieved so little since 1994 to ‘open up to the traditions of knowledge, to explore new frontiers of knowledge, preferably Afrocentric in character. The Department maintains that while all the universities have had new policies about transformation, the institutional cultures and the epistemological traditions at some Historically White Universities have not considerably changed. In other words, the policies might be there, but the willingness to implement them is lacking. Hence, many South African Westernized Universities’ curriculum structures and knowledge systems remain a breeding ground for knowledge hegemony instead of eliminating epistemic hegemonic identities.

Some white folks have interpreted epistemic decoloniality and curriculum reform at the Historically White Universities in South Africa as the ‘return of black tribes' and a reaction against the ‘minority’ (“#AllWhite Statues MustFall” has been presumed as a living example against the South African Whites). However, given the historical, political, and socio-economic background of oppression and exploitation in South Africa that has given rise to and that motivates and explains decoloniality, the eagerness of people to return to what they perceive to be the sources of their knowledge, cultural identity, and their’ roots,’ is perfectly understandable. In other words, the desire to (re)turn to and (re)embrace the local values and Indigenous traditions (cultural, educational, religious, and other) is crucial.

Therefore, looking at the current knowledge trajectories at Historically White Universities in South Africa, pieces of evidence show that most knowledge developments or curricula (disciplines) emerge out of a particular context and to solve some specific predicaments; for instance, the Reformed Theology evolved out of Protestant Reformation in Europe. Thus, I am not sure if some of South Africa’s HWU are making positive or discordant efforts to intervene and promote critical cognizance and relevance while exclusive of the African worldviews and issues in Arts and Humanities. Additionally, this article indicates that there is something profoundly wrong when, for example, the hegemonic curriculum designed to meet the needs of colonialism and apartheid should continue well into the liberation era at several Historically White Universities (HWU) in South Africa.

The question thus is: How should we rethink and re-construct epistemic coloniality and curriculum dishonesty at the Westernised Universities in South Africa? The continuity of epistemic coloniality and curriculum dishonesty in the post-colonial and post-apartheid South Africa demand Africology project and curriculum decoloniality at some Historically White Universities. The decoloniality discourse occupies prominent positions in higher education and Public Square in South Africa. Its agenda covers all spheres of life – academic, socio-economic, political, and religious issues. To address the above rudiments, I propose that there is a need, informed by epistemic decoloniality, to venture into the modernization of Indigenous knowledge, de-centre Euro-centrism, and re-centre African knowledge stream; ways of knowing and thinking, change the geography of knowledge, rethink thinking, and re-emphasize curriculum pluriversity. These will shape new knowledge production to achieve sustainability through local epistemological production. Through the decoloniality of knowledge, South Africa’s universities will rethink and re-construct the local knowledge in a global context and apply it to achieve sustainable development and re-claim their identity in the knowledge space.

The purpose of this study is not only to provide a set of answers but also to open up the ways of (re)thinking and (re)structuring curriculum and knowledge system across South Africa’s Universities. The aim is to contribute to knowledge justice discourse at various Historically White Universities (HWU) in South Africa. The three core research questions are:

• What positions are crafted to decolonize epistemic coloniality in a section of South African Westernised higher education?

• What are the attempts to instigate curriculum justice and knowledge integration at some Historically White Universities (HWU) in South Africa?

• How can we exterminate epistemic coloniality and curriculum dishonesty at South Africa’s Westernised Universities?

Situating epistemic coloniality and decoloniality in westernised higher education

The concept of decoloniality varies according to scholars' diverse outlooks and life experiences. Decoloniality, according to Grosfoguel (2011), should not be equated to decolonization. The latter refers to political liberation from colonizers, whereas the former challenges the aftermath or hangover of colonial systems that have remained in place long after the colonial rule has been displaced. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015: 489–490) defines decoloniality as ‘epistemological and political movement; one which speaks to the deepening and widening decolonization movements in those spaces that experienced slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, neo-colonialism, and under-development. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015: 490) further maintains that decoloniality is a political tool for resistance and a social movement that creates space for black people to redefine their identities and reaffirm their humanness as black and African in their very social locations.

Quijano (2000) refers to decoloniality as the complete ‘removal of domination of the non-Indigenous forces' and ‘intellectual amputation’ of colonizers' ideas that make the colonized feel inferior. I view decoloniality not as a legal term but as an action-oriented concept for empowering the Indigenous people to salvage, re-name, re-unite, and re-write history subjects into agents of history. Linking to the present study of the higher education perspective, Sidhu (2008) states that the decoloniality of knowledge implies designing a new model to respond to the implementation gap and lack of Indigenous knowledge content and pedagogies within the Life Orientation (LO) education in South Africa.

Epistemic coloniality: Colonial legacy at (South) African’s Westernised Universities

Any discourse about the decoloniality of higher education is incomplete without reference to the history and aftermath of epistemic coloniality. According to Mamdani (1996: 87), the established colonial knowledge system which has found its home in identifiable South African Westernised higher education today was ushered by the settlers from Europe in the 19th century. It was conceived within the dichotomy of the colonizer and the colonized. It was further bolstered by another binary, the Christian and the non-Christian (cf. Akena, 2014: 113).

Naturally, epistemic coloniality existed within the colonial psyche as a supremacist project. By its very nature, the nineteenth-century epistemic coloniality meant the subversion of the worldviews of Indigenous people and substituting it with European thought systems. For close to three and a half centuries, and especially during the last two, the European thought systems have dominated and posed a severe threat to the Indigenous knowledge of African people and elsewhere. European scholars worked hard for centuries to silence and erase Africa’s historical, scholarly, and cultural contributions and other parts of the ‘non-Western’ world (Mamdani, 1996: 94; Césaire, 2012: 57). Despite the open knowledge of ancient Egyptian civilization and the development of writing in other African kingdoms, the rhetoric of coloniality is that pre-colonial Africa is often regarded as without writing and history (Dopamu, 2014: 28). Nevertheless, in his defence of African Indigenous knowledge, Dopamu (2014: 29) argues that one of the world’s earliest and most elaborate civilizations with its writing system could only have been developed by Africans; other kingdoms and cultures only later came under colonial influence. However, African knowledge treasures were conveyed through rituals, stories, songs, proverbs, adages, and writings.

African texts have been made to lie down peacefully alongside canonical Western texts. For example, the contributions of the pre-colonial (pre-15thcentury) knowledge of recorded histories of Indigenous higher learning in Timbuktu and many other parts of Africa have not been acknowledged. They have been bypassed, ignored, and crushed rather than being accepted and used to serve as the building blocks for contemporary higher education development in the African continent (Akena, 2014:154). The disparaging of traditional education negatively affected the traditional knowledge, which had sustained humanity from time immemorial and had been the source of remedies for multiple societal anomalies. With the disparagement, the African creativity for liberation from intellectual dependence was difficult (Touré, 2014:47).

In South Africa, missionaries and settler elites set up colonial universities, seeing them as disseminators of Western civilization. The colonial universities were unapologetically Eurocentric, patterned after the metropolitan universities in Europe, from which they drew much of their faculty and curricula, proudly proclaiming Eurocentric position in the neo-gothic buildings they erected and Latin mottos they adopted (Heleta, 2016: 2 Madi Mabe, 2013: 169). The apartheid knowledge construction was not much of a diversion from the colonial system. After instituting the apartheid system in 1948, knowledge violence at Historically White Universities was taken to another level. The entire syllabus at HWU served to construct and maintain socio-economic and political ‘features of colonial and apartheid order. While Historically White Universities promoted Eurocentrism, Historically Black Universities were irredeemably condemned to the mediocrity of Bantu education (under-qualification of majority black population), training African students to become servants of white masters (Heleta, 2016: 2).

The above discourse finds its historical impetus in the works of Frantz Fanon. He explored how the colonized people disclaimed their worldviews, internalized the knowledge others bestowed on them, and uncritically adopted Western colonial powers' worldviews, values, and historical narratives (Ogunfuye, 2004: 31). Fanon argues that a Western education transforms one into one bearing a white mask that is alienating. The education project, in other words, is alienating and is in the service of assimilation (Ogunfuye, 2004: 33). Steve Biko popularised the thoughts of Fanon in South Africa by establishing the black consciousness movement. Biko found in Frantz Fanon’ an important interlocutor to think about the internalized inferiority and liberation, an attitude of mind that begins with itself’ (Lebakeng, 2016: 243).

The modern knowledge system in South Africa’s Westernised Universities is an export from former colonizers. From its very inception, South Africa’s Westernised higher education knowledge pattern (humanities and social sciences) has not been an African home-grown institutional design to serve the needs, the well-being, and development of South Africa’s Indigenous people but to promote the legacy and aspiration of the colonizers (Muchie, 2010). Tshaka (2009: 174) maintains that this sad trend continues today in some African universities because some post-independence elite leaders never fought hard to preserve Africa’s epistemological traditions, cultures, histories, and languages. They looked towards Europe for knowledge production when they should have been the manufacturers of new knowledge to meet the challenges of Africa’s political and socio-economic existence. I am inclined to suggest that several Historically White Universities (HWU) in South Africa should emerge from this knowledge assault. What is essential now is to address the question: How can higher education knowledge not be Westernized but be appropriate to all South Africans, particularly in humanities and social sciences?

Current epistemic decoloniality discourse on westernised higher education

According to Mbembe (2016: 32), today’s consensus is that some higher education institutions in (South) Africa are Westernized. They are Westernized in the sense that they are the local signposts of a dominant academic model based on Eurocentric epistemic canon. Eurocentric epistemic canon is a canon that spurns other knowledge traditions and attributes truth only to the Western way of knowledge production, which privileges the knowledge produced by men from five countries: Italy, France, England, Germany, and the United States (Wallerstein, 2004: 147; Parker, 2008: 103). These social theories based on the socio-historical experience of the Western world constitute the foundation of knowledge (Social Sciences and Humanities) in ‘Westernized Universities' in South Africa today. The job of Africans or the Blacks at a number of South Africa’s Westernized Universities is reduced to that of learning theories born from the experiences and problems of a particular region of the world with its particular time/space dimension and applying them to other geographical locations even if the experiences and time/space of the former are quite different from the latter. The emerging consensus is that the Westernised institutions of learning in South Africa must undergo a process of knowledge De-Westernisation. The task before the scholars is to give content to this call.

De-westernization: the decoloniality stance as epistemic justice

Since 2015, the conversation in higher education in South Africa has shifted from a transformation imperative toward a decolonial perspective. Beyond the rhetoric of demographic change, the decolonial perspective advocates for knowledge justice as the foundation of higher education activities. The higher education institution is fundamentally a space for knowledge production that is applied to shape the societies in which we live. Two key points to anatomize concerning epistemic decoloniality:

First, epistemic decoloniality reacts to the perpetuation of the Western epistemology of individualism at some Historically White Universities in post-colonial South Africa and calls for a collective post-colonial knowledge design embedded in South African experiences and needs. In other words, decoloniality of knowledge is concerned with the Africans' popular praxis and lived experiences. ‘Lived experience’ refers to the reality as experienced by Africans. As Higgs (2011) defines it: “For Africans, what they know is inseparable from how they know it in the lived experience of their African culture. This sense of Africaness is born from a deep socio-ethical sense of cultural unity that provides the African knowledge with distinctiveness”. The natural question that follows is: When is an intellectual product considered African? Ogunfuye (2004: 36) distinguishes between the geographical and cultural criteria; the geographical criterion regards a product as African if it is produced by an individual who lives in Africa, while the cultural approach considers a scholarly artefact as African when it displays ‘conceptual underpinnings of African culture’ and endeavors to address African challenges.

Secondly, epistemic decoloniality rethinks community-based research from a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach. Bottom-up knowledge creation is primarily substantial for generating new and pertinent knowledge. Doing so contributes to synergetic knowledge in South Africa that utilizes the diversity of intellectual resources that emerge from knowledge production to serve the best interest of society. The call for reinventing African Indigenous knowledge should be welcomed as long as it is used to enrich the collaboration between knowledge systems and promote dialogue between cultures.

Post-colonial critique of epistemic decoloniality and Afrocentrism

Some Westernised theorists in South Africa have identified decoloniality of knowledge as a ‘false philosophy of nativism and Afro-radicalism’ as Africans try to regain their lost knowledge. The theorists have interpreted the aphorism of epistemic decoloniality as adversarial and confrontational towards the West. They perceive decoloniality as dangerously departing from the pressing academic priorities, ethico-political concerns, and ‘humanistic imperatives' of African intellectual agenda. The epistemic decoloniality turn, of which Afrocentrism is part, is being criticized for magnifying some of the theoretical prejudices and flaws of which post-colonial studies have already been accused (Higgs, 2011). Eloff (2017) describes the falsehood of nativism and Afro-radicalism as the main cause of conflict, violence, and genocide of the minority (i.e., the killing of white farmers in South Africa) in post-independence South Africa. In other words, just like other ‘victimization ideologies,’ deceitful nativism and Afro-radicalism produce a form of ‘bio-racism’ that fights off those considered outsiders, invaders, abusers of a culture that is not theirs.

In the words of Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013:11): “What is needed is not the rigorous critiques of ideologies emerging from the zone of the colonized but to understand life in this very zone.” Decoloniality ideologies emerged from the global South precisely to counteract the global North’s linearity, unicentrism and universalist claims, ideas of individualistic progress vis-à-vis valorization of diversity, plural micro-narratives, and ‘alternative modernities' (Quijano, 2000). The quest for authenticity and autonomy is a crucial component of African and black intellectuals from history to the contemporary epoch, including diasporic thinkers, Pan-Africanism, Afro-centrism, and decoloniality. These successive intellectual movements in (South) Africa revolve around the assumption that Black (South) African identity existed and still survives and should be defined, nurtured, and promoted notably in all South African Westernised Universities. The source of this identity is variously identified, with race having a prominent role, and history, arts, culture, psychology, and ethics are proposed as secondary factors (Ogunfuye, 2004: 89, Parker, 2008: 157). Euro-American imperialist and colonial epistemology at Westernised Universities in South Africa is based on the notion of Africa as radical alterity, as a negative counterpart of the Euro-American self. Epistemic decoloniality appropriates this binary opposition, inverting each pole’s positive/negative connotations and turning the dichotomy into a celebration of African exceptionalism and uniqueness. The common objective is to regain lost ontological density and cultural and human integrity denied by European colonialists at some Historically White Universities in South Africa. The construction of an Afro-centric knowledge system is imperative to reverse Eurocentrism and decolonize knowledge at South Africa’s Westernised Universities. Thus, Africans in South Africa’s Historically White Universities are the genuine victims of this system of ‘knowledge power,’ and they have little choice but to reveal a ‘psychosis of victimhood.’

According to Ansell (2004), knowledge decoloniality activists in South Africa, by and large, do not seem to consider their education as a matter of high priority, simply directing all their energies towards the attainment of what they call ‘free, quality, decolonized education. Instead of appropriating valuable Westernised scholarship, which has sustained humanity for time immemorial, epistemic decoloniality strands focus on concepts such as Eurocentric knowledge violence and coloniality. However, the marketization of South African knowledge over the last four decades and gradual insertion of South African higher education institutions into the global landscape in post-apartheid times has resulted in the production of graduates who are quickly assimilated into the global market-friendly economy”.

Knowledge decoloniality in South Africa is by no means monolithic, marked by both militant and moderate factions. The militant faction regards violent action as the accurate measure of decoloniality and calls for complete subversion and destruction of colonial concepts and their scientific achievement or knowledge. They hold that higher education in South Africa should include African academics, and African languages as means of communication, and the curriculum must comprise the African-based worldviews only; the ‘#FeesMust Fall’ student movement in South Africa represents such a militant approach. The moderate factions, in contrast, seek to construct a new African knowledge system by appropriating what is valuable from the Western thought system and rejecting that which is not relevant to the African experience. Supporters of the militant brand often accuse the moderate decoloniality thinkers of employing a restricted understanding of decoloniality to validate African philosophy in the eyes of the West. In contrast, the moderate group is critical of extreme and violent elements of radical discourse, decontextualized, and the artificial manner in which the thoughts of Fanon are interpreted. Truth-seeking demands that intellectuals and opinion-makers in South Africa should not construct distorted rival epistemologies but positive singleness of ideology.

Refuting post-colonial critique of epistemic justice

Some Westernized logicians in South Africa are shockingly criticizing those who were/are victims of the ‘dark side’ of modernity and epistemology. To characterize people’s genuine pains inflicted by malicious processes of coloniality is dishonest. Epistemic coloniality at HWU in South Africa is still alive and well, causing intellectual discomfort to the colonized, which must be disdained. Besides, decoloniality of knowledge in some South Africa’s Westernised Universities is not synonymous with essentialism and fundamentalism. It is a perspective that is critical of Eurocentric and Third World fundamentalists. All fundamentalists share (including Eurocentric one) the premise that there is only one knowledge tradition to achieve truth and universality (Parker, 2008: 139). Decoloniality of knowledge is not a single school of thought but a family of diverse thought systems that suppose coloniality is fuelling and exacerbating the global problem. Although some decolonial positions might degenerate into nativism and fundamentalism, the critique is not generalizable to all decolonial thoughts and initiatives (Mignolo, 2011b: 257; Grosfoguel, 2011).

According to Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013: 11): “Epistemic decoloniality of South Africa’s Westernised Universities is born out of the realization that the modern world is an asymmetrical world order that is sustained by epistemological and pedagogical coloniality. The coloniality continues to produce limitless alienated South Africans who are socialized into hating the (South) Africa that produced them and liking the Europe and America that reject them.” Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013: 11) further adds, “We do not have South African Universities; we have ‘Westernised Universities' in South Africa.” In other words, South Africa has many Westernised Universities that reproduce Euro-Western knowledge streams and curricula. The foreign knowledge and curriculum continue to befuddle the (South) African minds with research methodologies and inculcate information about equilibrium. These are bits of knowledge that do not question methodologies and the present asymmetrical world order. In several Historically White Universities (HWU), research methods and methodologies are never accepted as neutral but are unmasked as technologies of subjectivation, if not surveillance tools that prevent the emergence of another-thinking, another-logic, and another-world view. Research methodologies and curricula are tools of gate-keeping at HWU.

Curriculum justice and knowledge integration at Historically White Universities

Curriculum refers to content (what is taught), process (how teaching occurs), and context (relevance and ethical practices of teachers' work; Desaia and Sanya 2016: 718). In a precise lingo, the curriculum is the story that we tell students about their past, present, and future. This view of the curriculum enables us to ask, what stories are students told about their past, present, and future, and who conveys the stories? Another pathway to defining a curriculum is a mechanism that distributes access to knowledge and knowing (15; Etieyibo, 2016: 405). Fomunyam and Teferra (2017: 197–198) argues that curriculum should focus on planned (curriculum-as-planned) as well as lived (curriculum-as-lived) - how the curriculum is lived by the students, academics, and society, and using this experience as a basis to contest epistemic coloniality and curriculum dishonesty.

Curriculum dishonesty: Eurocentric academic model

The current curriculum at various Historically White Universities in South Africa primarily reflects the colonial and apartheid worldviews and is disconnected from African realities, including the lived experiences of most black South Africans, considering Humanities and Social Sciences. The European thought systems at several HWU in South Africa are perceived as the standard on which the curriculum should be based and rooted. However, such a curriculum does not develop students' critical skills to understand, advance, and move the majority of the citizens forward.

Since 1994, some Historically White Universities (HWU) in South Africa have not virtually done enough as far as curriculum is concerned to open up their students’ prospects about Africa. Curriculum dishonesty has contributed to students' ignorance about the continent. Fomunyam and Teferra (2017: 197) and Tisani (2004: 174) state it pertinently: “Eurocentric curriculum at HWU focuses on the idea of ‘Europe as a metaphor’ and turns Africans into bit players without intent on the pitch of world history and knowledge and running late to catch up with Western epistemology and modernity.” The failure to decolonize curriculum at many Historically White Universities has ‘left unchallenged and untrammeled the kind of knowledge passed onto South African students as ‘unquestionable truth’ (Fomunyam and Teferra (2017:181). The curriculum continues to ‘reinforce the prejudice’ that there is not much we can learn from Africa and that ‘universal knowledge rests on Western scholarship’ (Tisani, 2004:183). Accordingly, most South African academics at Historically White Universities who teach about Africa rely predominantly on Western interpretation of the continent. The South African curriculum constructed by African scholars is largely ignored (Etieyibo, 2016:409; Mamdani 1996:177).

I have noted that under the dictates of Eurocentrism and coloniality, with the geopolitics of knowledge, the South African higher education curriculum produced from a non-Western perspective has to wrestle with the inferiority complex. The burden, therefore, lies on the decolonized universities (Historically Black Universities) to transcend the notion of inferiority by seeking knowledge honesty, taking South Africa and the concerns of its people as the preferential option for knowledge liberation and curriculum reform.

Curriculum reform: Decoloniality of knowledge layout

Curriculum reform is at a marathon in South Africa today - reorientation away from colonial and apartheid knowledge tradition, in which the curriculum was used as a tool of exclusion, to a democratic curriculum that is inclusive of all human thought (Lebakeng, 2016: 247). Decolonial curriculum content in higher education aims to bridge the gap between the learners' past, the existing social experiences, and new learning experiences. Being able to relate to the meaning of abstract implies that learners must be taught/learn in their sociogram or social experiences in order to overcome the inequality of the past and to confront the current and future development challenges, mainly in the context of the increasingly globalizing environment (Sidhu, 2008: 79; Touré, 2014: 203). However, the Department of Higher Education (DHE) 2008 critiqued the universities, particularly the Historically White Universities, for doing too little to change curriculum since the demise of colonialism and apartheid. The Department concluded in 2008 that the transformation efforts have not ‘translated into any significant shifts in the structure and content of curriculum’ at various Historically White Universities. The DHE reported that the curriculum at several HWUs is inextricably intertwined with the institutional culture; given that the latter remains Eurocentric at Historically White Institutions, the institutional environment is not conducive to curriculum transformation (Department of Education, 2008).

Therefore, from a curriculum stance, my recommendation is that African scholars should not endorse a phenomenon such as globalization without criticism if knowledge is based on any form of imperialism. Hence, to learn the language of deliberative democracy, I call for a revitalized knowledge and curriculum characterized by tolerance, critical and sceptical inquiry, and commitment to a humanistic and egalitarian society.

Challenges to curriculum decoloniality

South Africa’s government is progressively involved in persuading higher education out of its ivory tower. According to the 1997 White Paper on Higher Education, the higher institutions of learning are expected to intensify their responsiveness to societal interests and needs. Hence, institutions are urged to restructure curricula to meet the needs of an increasingly technologically oriented economy, train a highly qualified and skilled workforce, deliver requisite research and knowledge to equip the society to address national needs and participate in a rapidly changing and competitive global situation (Mogashana, 2014: 204; Quijano, 2000).

Curriculum decoloniality has become central to policy formulation as South Africa endeavors to meet pressing national needs in a global context, and higher education, especially Historically White Universities, are grappling with this as they rethink the curriculum. While efforts to restructure curriculum show evidence of institutions attempting to become responsive, the outcomes are sometimes incompatible with responding to immediate market needs. The irony is that they may not produce a self-programmable labour force that is mandatory for the new knowledge economy. Thus, the role of higher education must shift from induction into specialized knowledge of specific disciplines to developing broad, generic, and transferable skills. In essence, higher education in (South) Africa must strike a balance between the local and global knowledge economy, as embellished below.

A new benchmark to isolate coloniality of knowledge and curriculum dishonesty

How can some Historically White Universities in South Africa be re-oriented from the one suffocating Africology and Indigeneity to one unshackling the home-grown epistemology? This is a fundamental epistemological question that is often disdained in debates on the future of (South) Africa. The African Union (AU) agenda 2063 articulates the need for a knowledge paradigm shift without elaborating on a well-defined epistemological and ideological foundation for such a change. However, by presenting this question, this article endeavors to neutralize the hegemonic forces that cast off Africanacity at several Westernised Universities in South Africa. It attempts to decolonize South Africa’s Westernised higher education to meet pressing national needs in a global context. The article, therefore, joins the call by Tisani (2004: 175) that “There is a need to design the stratagems to re-claim and modernize the African Indigenous knowledge to counter the threat of knowledge identity loss; informed by epistemic decoloniality.”

According to Mamdani (1996: 183), the debate on knowledge decoloniality highlights epistemological challenges and the urgent need for engagement on the concept at (South) African universities in the 21^st Century. He proceeds to state: “If you regard yourselves as prisoners in this ongoing colonizing project, then your task should be to scrutinize the historical legacy and contemporary reality, discarding some parts of the contentious thought systems and adapting others to a new-found purpose.” Henceforth, this section aims to map a way forward for South Africa’s higher education by tapping into the resourcefulness of epistemic decoloniality. It comprises antidote A and B, as espoused below.

Antidote A: Reimagining decoloniality of knowledge at some Westernised Universities

Epistemic decoloniality is about justice that addresses the colonial knowledge violence across South Africa’s Universities. First and foremost, for epistemic decoloniality of Westernised higher education to be a success story in the country, South Africa’s Westernised Universities should venture into modernization of Indigenous knowledge on the contemporary ground to give shape to a new-found epistemological production for socio-economic practices, taking into account Humanities and Social Sciences. Interaction with Indigenous Knowledge can help reconfigure the knowledge that can remedy some intractable problems in South African communities. However, the current knowledge pattern at many Historically White Universities (HWU) in South Africa is questionable about the commitment to advancing Indigeneity. As Tandwa and Sesant (2016: 18) argue: “There is scepticism in the ability of the Indigenous Knowledge (IK) to contribute to sustainable living standard, and also the cynicism that it may lead to conundrums and perhaps outright contradictions.” Although most South Africa’s Historically Black Universities endorse Indigeneity, a number of Historically White Universities continue to reproduce epistemic coloniality predominantly in Humanities and Social Sciences.

Many of South Africa’s Westernised higher education institutions reside in the asymmetrical world order sustained by colonial matrices of power and epistemologies and pedagogies of equilibrium that continue to produce ‘intellectually alien South Africans at Historically White Universities. Quijano (2000) states it as follows: “It is those with Westernised worldviews at the institutions of higher learning in the global South who control and force certain kinds of knowledge on others. This kind of coloniality distorts cognizance, controls practice, and directs discourses, thereby exposing the rest (the black scholars at some Westernised Universities) without the possibility of discovering anything, except through prescribed Eurocentric epistemologies, discourses, and practices”. Therefore, the article recommends that all South African scholars at Historically White Universities should emerge from knowledge assault and raise awareness about the significance of Knowledge Indigeneity in Humanities and Social Sciences, which must be conveyed through primary and higher education as the foundation of knowledge cruciality. Knowledge Indigeneity can help redress home-grown knowledge in the country.

Secondly, the call for epistemic decoloniality of South Africa’s Westernised higher education is a project of re-centring and rejecting the notion that South Africa’s Historically White Universities are merely the extension of the West and that the modern West is the backbone of South Africa’s consciousness and cultural heritage. It is not about closing the door to Western scholarship. It is about defining the centre clearly; South Africa has to place its knowledge at the centre. In other words, higher education institutions in South Africa are means of knowledge about ourselves, radiating outwards and then locating peoples around us; with South Africa at the centre of things, not existing as a satellite of other countries, things must be seen from our perspective.

Some Westernised Universities in South Africa run the risk of continuing the trend of reduplicating Euro-Western systems in the African context if they do not de-link themselves from the West. The de-linking process does not imply that South Africa’s HWU cannot learn and draw knowledge from the West. The learning and drawing from the Western canon should not be done to appease the West but out of shared vision and knowledge. African scholars should rethink knowledge from the “inside-towards-out” approach to knowing. The copy and paste approach is counter-productive and distorts meaning, considering Euro-Western narratives that continue to re-orient most HWU programs in South Africa.

Thirdly, decoloniality of knowledge at some South African Westernised Universities is the agenda of changing the geography of knowledge from Western modernity to African people who have the potential and knowledge to address their vulnerabilities. Altering the geography of reason means the three decolonial moves. (1) It means challenging the Euro-American historical experiences as the only repositories of rational thinking. (2) It regards a product as African when produced by an individual who lives on the continent. (3) The cultural approach considers a scholarly artefact an African product when it displays the ‘conceptual underpinnings of African culture’ and endeavors to address African challenges. The centrality to altering the geography of reason arises from the dismemberment of African knowledge at HWU and the human family. Knowledge at Historically White Universities in South Africa has continued to radiate from the hegemonic centre (Europe and North America) despite a globalized worldview (Mignolo, 2011b: 252; Ogunfuye, 2004: 38; Touré, 2014: 95; Msila, 2017: 203).

The Fourth approach toward epistemic decoloniality of Westernised Universities, according to Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018: 39), is rethinking thinking. It is informed by a firm conviction that all human beings are not only born into a knowledge system but are legitimate thinkers and constructers of genuine knowledge. Rethinking thinking should enable HWU to dive deeper into the disciplines of Humanities and Social Sciences to assess whether they are still helpful or not and confront the philosophy of history, which still fails to disconnect itself from the imaginary of Europe as the world of knowledge. The apparent epistemic and systemic crisis at many South African Historically White (HWU) invites them to rethink and even unthink the ‘order of knowledge.’ In other words, they need to empty irrelevant colonial ‘hard disk together with its software’ and retain the valuable scholarship of Europe and beyond.

The last new path forward at several Historically White Universities is epistemic ‘pluriversity.’ Epistemic pluriversity is not the Western academic model presumed to be universal but a process of knowledge production that is open to ‘epistemic diversity. The Western epistemological perspective is not the sole viewpoint but one amongst equals or many. Therefore, I call upon all Historically White Universities in South Africa to ‘drink from Africa’s wealth of knowledge,’ specifically in Humanities and Social Science, rather than continuing to feed on Western scholarship and reproduce the Western knowledge system in an African context.

Antidote B: New conception about curriculum Justice at some Historically White Universities

There are several approaches that one might consider to invoke curriculum justice. However, central to any approach must be rethinking the subject matter. According to Grosfoguel (2013: 83) and Le Grange (2016: 9), curriculum justice at Historically White Universities should comprise liberating thought from ‘Descartes cogito’ - I think therefore I am, to ‘Ubuntology’ - I am because we are. In other words, the decolonized curriculum must celebrate unity in diversity of human scholarship. Rather than subjectivity - being individual, it should be ecological. This article also indicates that decolonized curriculum should be defined by a paradigm shift in the subjectivity, from the arrogant “I" of some Westernised Universities' philosophy of individualism to humble “I” embedded, embodied, extended, and enacted. The abandonment of the ‘Ubuntu’ philosophy in curriculum development at the HWU indicates the collapse of African scholarship and the global decoloniality movement.

A decolonized curriculum at all Historically White Universities must be grounded on 4Rs central to an emergent Indigenous paradigm. The 4Rs comprise relational accountability, respectful representation, reciprocal appropriation, and rights and regulation. Relational accountability implies that all curriculum parts are connected globally and that curriculum is accountable to all (human) relations. Respectful representation relates to how the curriculum acknowledges and creates space for voices and knowledge of Indigenous people. Reciprocal appropriation ensures that both communities and universities share the benefits of knowledge produced and transmitted. Rights and regulation refer to observing the ethical protocols that accord ownership of knowledge (where appropriate) to Indigenous peoples of the world.

Conclusion: Towards a decolonial future at South Africa’s Westernised Universities

This article has reinstated that epistemic coloniality is not over; its all over the globe, and some Historically White Universities in South Africa are no exception. Coloniality has become authoritarian, thus preventing other forms of knowledge to become admitted into the country. According to Sidhu (2008:93), epistemic coloniality existed naturally within the colonial psyche as a supremacist project. The knowledge colonizers at a segment of Historically White Universities continue to construct and maintain colonial epistemological order while exclusive of African worldviews and issues. In other words, the institutional cultures and traditions of knowledge have not considerably changed at HWU. When one presents an Afrocentric knowledge construct at these institutions of higher learning, it is viewed with suspicion, and in many instances, it is outrightly rejected. The task of Africans at a number of Westernized Universities in South Africa is reduced to that of learning the Western theories born from the experiences and problems of a particular region of the world (Europe and North America) and applying them to other geographical locations, including South Africa even if the experiences of the former are wholly distinctive from the latter. Hence, domestication of the Western stream (in Humanities and Social Sciences) as an African product is a false construct, though it may help to comprehend the Western knowledge development.

South Africa’s Black students and a couple of black intellectuals (plus a polyphony of white academics) at several Historically White Universities are contesting to end the hegemony of Western thought and culture and engaging African worldviews and issues; students and scholars want to be free thinkers and makers of their future. The emerging consensus in South Africa today is that all higher education institutions must undergo a process of knowledge decoloniality. In the light of the above state of affairs, I am inclined to suggest that decoloniality theory must enable South Africa’s academics to wrestle for a new identity by crafting different knowledge systems for South Africa’s higher institutions of learning, specifically in Humanities and Social Sciences. To be precise, they should modernize Indigenity, re-centre knowledge, shift the geography of knowledge, rethink thinking, heighten epistemic pluriversity, and curriculum should celebrate ‘unity in diversity (Ubuntology) of human scholarship, to give shape to new knowledge production for political and socio-economic practices, to achieve sustainability through local knowledge. In suggesting these, it is not an attempt to disdain other streams, most especially the Western stream. The article merely maps out directions and perspectives the study of culture and text will inevitably take across South Africa’s Universities.