by Sphesihle Mchunu, University of Cape Town, South Africa
I entered university at a time when the language of decolonisation had become impossible to ignore. Across lecture halls, student movements, policy documents, and academic conferences, we were told that higher education was transforming. We were encouraged to question whose knowledge was valued, whose histories were taught, and whose experiences shaped what counted as legitimate knowledge.
This conversation has been one of the most important developments in my educational journey. Yet there is something about it that continues to astonish me.
Why does decolonisation so often feel like a translation project rather than a transformation project?
These changes matter.
Yet I am often left wondering why African knowledge still seems to require validation through frameworks developed elsewhere. Why must local experiences constantly be translated into concepts that already exist within dominant Western academic traditions before they are considered legitimate?
The contradiction is subtle but striking. We say we want to decolonise knowledge, yet we often continue to evaluate knowledge using the same standards that were established during colonial and postcolonial periods. We make room for African perspectives, but frequently only as additions to existing frameworks rather than as foundations from which entirely new ways of thinking might emerge.
What astonishes me is how easily this contradiction can become invisible.
A curriculum may include African authors while still organising knowledge according to assumptions that originate elsewhere. A university may celebrate diversity while maintaining ideas about expertise, evidence, and legitimacy that remain largely unquestioned. Transformation becomes measured by representation rather than by deeper shifts in how knowledge itself is understood.
Perhaps this is why debates about decolonisation continue to feel unfinished.
The challenge is not simply who appears on the reading list. It is whether we are prepared to imagine different intellectual starting points altogether. It is whether universities can move beyond including African voices within existing conversations and instead allow African experiences, histories, and philosophies to shape the terms of the conversation itself.
I do not have an answer to this question.
What astonishes me is that after years of talking about decolonisation, we are still grappling with the difference between inclusion and transformation. The two are often treated as the same thing, but they are not.
And perhaps recognising that distinction is where the real work begins.
