LAUSR

Impulsive uses of collective memory to rally support for decolonised education have been a characteristic of the student movement, establishing clear divisions through binary oppositional thinking. Analysing the binaries that constitute the decolonial turn, I highlight misconceptions of decoloniality which facilitate the erasure of oppositional voices in decolonisation. Misconceptions of decoloniality manifest as the dismissal of all “non-African” knowledge as colonial. I subsequently caution the perverted inversions of power in knowledge production in Higher Education South Africa and interrogate positions which I perceive as recreating fundamentalisms in the quest for decolonised education. Using a decolonial critique that frames education as emancipatory, I argue for the impossibility of separable categories. I conclude by raising two questions, which require further investigation: what is the role of Higher Education in South Africa today, and does decolonial thinking in praxis displace assumptions that continue to perpetuate and maintain coloniality in the South African academe?