Paper long abstract:

Contestations over production, democratisation and relevance of knowledge and the heightened consciousness of the need to decolonize universities has emerged as one of the major challenges confronting educational institutions in South Africa. The "decolonial turn" is one of the terms that has been thrown around a lot in debates about reforming higher education, organizing institutions and broader struggles for decolonization of universities in South Africa. This paper considers the question of why the idea of a university has become so highly contested in South Africa through a discussion of "decolonial turn" as an explanatory framework that discerns the wider, long historical, political and cultural set of issues and contexts through which educational institutions and knowledge production emerged. Its principal thesis is that the on-going struggles for decolonization of universities in South Africa are a result of the entanglement of institutions and curriculum in a multiplicity of structures of hierarchies of power that emerged out of long colonial history and shaped knowledge production in complex ways which are not only unique to South Africa. The paper pushes to the fore the argument that the long colonial history which formed a world system had long-term consequences and implications for educational institutions in Africa as a spinal framework to help illuminate an understanding of the broader struggles for decolonization of universities.