Decolonisation and the Risks of Exception in South African Higher Education

Amid competing arguments of what it “looks like” and what it “should be doing”, decolonisation in higher education in post-apartheid South Africa has become increasingly problematised and stultified. On the one hand, a coalescence between decolonisation and Africanisation has taken root in a propagation of decolonisation-as-Blackness and, hence, by implication, anti-whiteness. On the other hand, there is a worrying resort to structural and epistemic violence, which has come to characterise student protests. I argue that decolonisation can neither erase colonialism through a language of exception nor through a language of violence. Decolonisation calls for an epistemic re-prioritisation and restoration of what makes us all human. This means that until students (and others) liberate themselves from a discourse of dichotomous binaries (as found in constructions of Blackness/whiteness), and until they unlearn the violence of colonialism, decolonisation will not evolve in South Africa.