Epistemic justice through ontological reclamation in pedagogy : detailing mutual (in)fallibility using inseparable categories

Abstract

Impulsive uses of collective memory to rally support for decolonised education, establishing clear divisions through binary oppositional thinking, have been characteristic of the student movement. Analysing the binaries that constitute the decolonial turn, I highlight misconceptions of decoloniality that facilitate the erasure of oppositional voices in decolonisation. Misconceptions of decoloniality manifest as the dismissal of all so-called non-African knowledge as colonial. I subsequently caution against the perverted inversions of power in knowledge production in Higher Education in South Africa and interrogate positions that I perceive to be 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, both of which require further investigation: What is the role of Higher Education in South Africa today? Does decolonial thinking in praxis displace assumptions that continue to perpetuate and maintain coloniality in the South African academy?