Original Research

Contrapuntal curriculum and epistemic transformation in South African universities

Aslam Fataar

Received: 15 July 2025; Accepted: 15 Sept. 2025; Published: 16 Oct. 2025

Copyright: © 2025. The Author Licensee: AOSIS.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Abstract

This article calls for a fundamental reconstitution of the South African university curriculum through a contrapuntal lens that centres epistemic justice. Drawing on Edward Said’s concepts of worldliness and contrapuntal reading, it argues that dominant knowledge systems must be brought into critical and sustained dialogue with the subjugated epistemologies they have historically excluded. Rather than conceiving the curriculum as a neutral repository of inherited content, the article positions it as a site of ongoing epistemic contestation and structural exclusion. It revisits the Mafeje, Makgoba, and Mamdani affairs as key historical flashpoints that exposed the university’s deep-seated resistance to African and Global South intellectual traditions, often under the guise of safeguarding academic preparedness and institutional standards. The analysis then turns to the post-apartheid shift towards skills-based and managerialist curriculum models. While framed as inclusive and pragmatic, these models have narrowed the curriculum’s scope, sidelining historical critique, ethical reflection, and epistemic diversity in favour of throughput, market readiness, and technical proficiency. In response, the article then explores the marginalised intellectual and cultural contributions of enslaved and indigenous communities at the Cape. Their vernacular literacies, oral traditions, and relational knowledge practices are presented as generative resources for curriculum renewal. The article concludes by proposing five guiding principles: epistemic redistribution, plural reasoning, relational pedagogy, problem-centred learning, and assessment for justice. Together, these offer a framework for reimagining the university as a democratic and socially responsive space of inclusive knowledge making.

Contribution: The article advances a contrapuntal curriculum framework that reconstitutes South African university knowledge structures through historical critique and epistemic justice.

Keywords: curriculum transformation; epistemic justice, contrapuntal reading; indigenous and enslaved knowledge; post-apartheid higher education.

Introduction

From residue and symbolism to structural redesign

The call to decolonise higher education in South Africa, sharpened by the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall movements, uncovered the deep structural inequalities embedded within the university’s knowledge systems. While the protests initially focused on colonial statues and iconography, their power lay in exposing the epistemic stance of the university: what qualifies as legitimate knowledge, which histories are prioritised, and how curricula shape possibilities for justice, recognition, and transformation (Fataar 2018). The demand was therefore not merely for symbolic change but for a fundamental redesign of curricular structures so that African, indigenous, and historically marginalised traditions could influence the university’s intellectual foundations. Yet, in the years since, the disparity between rhetorical commitment and actual structural reform has become increasingly evident, raising questions about the depth and direction of curricular change.

Although decolonisation is often mentioned in university discussions, real curriculum changes remain infrequent. Reforms are typically limited to symbolically including marginal voices or texts without changing the core logic of disciplinary knowledge and teaching methods (Jansen 2017). African, indigenous, and other historically marginalised traditions continue to be regarded as add-ons rather than essential parts of curriculum design. This tendency has been termed ‘decolonial washing’, where rhetorical gestures conceal the absence of genuine structural reform (Le Grange et al. 2020; Luescher et al. 2025). What emerges here is not only a problem of content but also an orientation problem: curriculum changes that do not challenge the epistemic foundations of the university tend to reproduce colonial knowledge structures through structural neglect and delayed integration.

Alongside these limitations, many notable examples of meaningful curriculum work have arisen since 2015. Scholars such as Malgas (2024:240–251), in her integration of ubuntu into agricultural science, and Noks Makunga and her colleagues’ ethnobotany research (Makunga, Kai & Sieniawska 2022) demonstrate the potential of reorienting disciplinary knowledge through inclusive frameworks. These efforts show that the issue is not a lack of curriculum activity but rather the absence of a guiding framework capable of directing innovation towards structural change. Too often, promising initiatives remain fragmented or marginal, unable to challenge dominant logics or establish curriculum authority. What is needed, I argue, is a contrapuntal approach that emphasises epistemic inclusivity as the foundation for reorganising the university’s epistemic structures. Without such an approach, decolonial curriculum work risks becoming marginalised, leaving core structures unchallenged.

It is in response to this deadlock that the article champions a contrapuntal approach to curriculum redesign. Drawing on Edward Said’s ideas of worldliness and contrapuntal reading, it positions curriculum work within its historical and material ties to empire while creating a dialogical space between dominant and subjugated knowledge traditions (Said 1981, 1994). Worldliness places ideas in their worldly contexts, and contrapuntal reading engages them in critical and relational dialogue. Together, these concepts shift the debate from mere content diversification towards a fundamental reorganisation of how knowledge is understood, connected, and taught. A contrapuntal curriculum encourages ongoing engagement between different traditions while respecting their distinctiveness. It treats the university as a space of ethical responsibility and historical accountability, fostering deeper forms of epistemic repair.

In practical terms, this approach would guide curriculum design and pedagogy to enable dialogical encounters across knowledge traditions. For example, enlightenment-era botanical science could be taught alongside Khoisan and enslaved healing practices, revealing contrasting approaches to the natural world, care, and classification. Similarly, Western literary texts that stage conquest and dispossession might be read in conversation with oral traditions and narratives of survival and resistance. These encounters equip students with critical literacies attuned to complexity, historical entanglement, and ethical responsibility.

The argument unfolds in three interrelated dimensions. The first returns to three pivotal episodes during apartheid and in the early democratic period – the Mafeje, Makgoba, and Mamdani affairs. These moments expose the institutional resistance to centring African thought and reveal how efforts to transform the curriculum were met with technocratic and liberal rationalisations that upheld the status quo. Although these episodes took place before and during the 1990s, their structural effects endure in the organisation of knowledge within South African universities.

The second dimension criticises the rise of a skills focus and managerial approaches that have shaped curriculum reform since the democratic transition. Driven by policy imperatives such as employability, throughput, and institutional efficiency, these models have replaced the deeper goals of epistemic transformation. They promote a limited understanding of inclusion and often reduce curriculum to technical training. This has weakened the university’s ability to address historical injustice, diverse knowledge traditions, and socially responsive learning.

The third dimension turns to the intellectual and cultural life of enslaved and indigenous communities at the Cape of Good Hope. Despite conditions of extreme dispossession, these communities produced enduring traditions of meaning-making through oral storytelling, vernacular literacies, ethical instruction, and communal memory. They were not passive victims but agents of cultural survival. This section proposes a contrapuntal reading of their histories as archives of epistemic creativity, capable of informing curriculum design rooted in care, justice, and plural understanding.

This article builds on an earlier inquiry (Fataar 2024) that highlighted the significance of contrapuntal worldliness for decolonial pedagogy. While that work laid the theoretical foundation, this article applies and broadens the approach to the South African university curriculum, placing it within historical flashpoints, neoliberal reforms, and subaltern epistemologies. It concludes by offering a practical and conceptual framework for curriculum reform. The framework features five guiding principles: epistemic redistribution, plural reasoning, relational pedagogy, problem-centred learning, and assessment for justice. Collectively, these principles go beyond critique to suggest, in a non-exhaustive way, concrete pathways for reimagining the university curriculum as a space for inclusive, historically grounded, and ethically engaged knowledge production.

Methodologically, the article is conceptual and theoretical, based on document analysis. It uses a contrapuntal reading, drawing on Edward Said’s idea of placing dominant and subaltern traditions in critical dialogue. This interpretive approach challenges the hierarchies of legitimacy that have long shaped the university, allowing suppressed traditions to be heard alongside dominant ones. In this way, the article develops an alternative curricular and pedagogical framework that is inclusive, historically grounded, and ethically engaged. This framework, in turn, provides the foundation for the practical principles outlined in the concluding section.

Institutional flashpoints: Mafeje, Makgoba, and Mamdani

The curriculum question in South African higher education cannot be disentangled from the historical structures of race, power, and knowledge that have shaped the university (Pillay 1990, Badat 2009, Motala & Menon 2023). While the language of decolonisation has gained traction in the post-1994 period, substantive curriculum transformation has often remained elusive, blocked by institutional cultures and epistemic assumptions that reproduce exclusion in subtle but no less potent forms (Jansen & Walters 2023). To understand this persistence, this article returns to three emblematic episodes – the Mafeje, Makgoba, and Mamdani affairs – which function as institutional flashpoints. These moments do not merely belong to the past; they expose the recurring fault lines along which university knowledge is contested, delegitimised, and protected. Read contrapuntally, they reveal how the university positions itself as a neutral site while actively managing the boundaries of intellectual legitimacy and cultural belonging.

The Mafeje affair at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1968 was not simply an act of racial discrimination. Instead, as Hendricks (2008) argues, it was an institutional assertion of epistemic control. Archie Mafeje, a brilliant African scholar with international recognition, was offered a senior lectureship in Social Anthropology. Under pressure from the apartheid government, UCT rescinded the appointment. The university’s compliance, cloaked in political expediency, masked a deeper reality: it revealed how the university functioned as an instrument of epistemic gatekeeping. Mafeje’s intellectual presence threatened the fragile epistemic consensus of racial liberalism under apartheid, in which African perspectives were tolerable only if they remained peripheral. Mafeje’s exclusion symbolised the university’s refusal to allow African intellectual authority to inhabit the centre of knowledge production (Hendricks 2008:447). The Mafeje affair exposed, in the apartheid era, how the university upheld colonial ways of knowing by refusing to engage African thought on its own terms, that is, from the standpoint of African histories, experiences, and intellectual traditions.

Moving to 1995, the Makgoba affair at the University of the Witwatersrand revealed the continuation of these dynamics in post-apartheid form (Statman & Ansell 2000). Professor Malegapuru Makgoba, an immunologist and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, was subjected to a coordinated campaign of discreditation by a cohort of senior white academics. The stated concern was the accuracy of his academic CV, which Martin (1997:7) describes as impeccable; the deeper issue was institutional power. Makgoba, in idiosyncratic style, publicly critiqued the institutional culture at Wits and called for the Africanisation of university leadership and identity. His intervention challenged the residual whiteness of South African academic life, where transformation was often presented as demographic adjustment rather than epistemic reconstitution. The backlash he faced was personal and ideological. His attackers positioned themselves as guardians of academic excellence, but in doing so, revealed a defensive anxiety about losing their grip on the university’s epistemic architecture. The Makgoba affair exposed the limits of political transformation when severed from deeper curricular and cultural change (Martin 1997:10). It showed that the university could embrace the post-apartheid moment while rejecting the African perspectives that might de-centre its inherited norms (Mamdani 1997).

The Mamdani affair (1996–1998) marked one of the most explicit and consequential confrontations over curriculum politics in post-apartheid South African higher education. Mahmood Mamdani, a globally respected scholar of African history and politics, was appointed to design and teach a foundation course in African Studies at the UCT as part of a broader effort to transform the curriculum. His proposed syllabus, Problematising Africa, sought to challenge essentialist and exotic portrayals of the continent, centre African intellectual traditions, and interrogate the Eurocentric epistemologies through which Africa had long been constructed in academic knowledge (Mamdani 1998a, 1998b). The course represented a conceptually integrated, cross-disciplinary approach that aimed to reframe Africa as a site of theoretical production and intellectual agency. The university, however, rejected the syllabus, arguing that it was too theoretical and inaccessible for black students. As Jansen (1998) observed, this rationale masked a deeper epistemic exclusion under the guise of pedagogical concern.

As Mamdani’s curriculum came under scrutiny and was ultimately set aside, structural and pedagogical critiques emerged from within UCT that sought to rationalise and justify the university’s decision, framing it as a response to curricular form and delivery rather than a rejection of its epistemic content. These arguments aimed to deflect criticism by portraying the issue as one of institutional fit and pedagogical appropriateness, rather than as resistance to African-centred knowledge. Ensor (1998) interpreted the conflict through Basil Bernstein’s distinction between curriculum codes, arguing that Mamdani’s syllabus embodied an integrated code, favouring theoretical coherence across disciplinary boundaries within an institutional environment that operated according to a collection code, which compartmentalised knowledge into discrete disciplines. From this view, the rejection of Mamdani’s course reflected not a judgement on its intellectual merit, but its incompatibility with UCT’s entrenched curricular architecture.

While not dismissing the importance of content, Ensor’s analysis focused on the form through which knowledge is organised and delivered. Similarly, Hall (1998) raised concerns about academic preparedness, emphasising that foundational curricula should be scaffolded to support students, particularly those from under-resourced schooling backgrounds, as they transition from inadequate schooling into the demands of university learning. He advocated for accessible, skills-based academic induction, including writing support and incremental engagement with academic discourse. Although important for addressing educational inequality, Hall’s position ultimately served to oppose Mamdani’s intervention. While Hall acknowledged the intellectual value of Problematising Africa, he deemed it unsuitable for first-year students because of its conceptual density and theoretical abstraction.

These perspectives by Ensor and Hall, while valuable in illuminating institutional and pedagogical constraints, ultimately sidestepped the central issue Mamdani sought to expose: the epistemic politics of curriculum design, that is, who decides what counts as foundational knowledge, and by which frameworks that knowledge is legitimised. Their critiques redirected attention to curriculum form and access mechanisms, rather than confronting the authority that governs what is taught and why. In doing so, they risked reinforcing the very boundaries of exclusion that Mamdani was challenging.

Mamdani’s position was not only principled but also diagnostically sharp, as it exposed deep-seated fault lines in the politics of knowledge, including struggles over what counts as foundational knowledge and who has the authority to decide. These contests continue to shape South African higher education in more subdued but enduring ways today. Mamdani argued that UCT’s response reflected what he called ‘its own version of Bantu education’ (Mamdani 1998b:72). This was an institutional logic in which black students were granted access to the university, yet systematically shielded from critical African scholarship under the guise of promoting accessibility. At the heart of his critique was the unresolved tension between widening access and transforming the substance of the curriculum. A university cannot claim to be transformed while continuing to police the boundaries of legitimate knowledge in ways that marginalise African perspectives. The Mamdani affair thus laid bare a central contradiction of post-apartheid higher education: the embrace of demographic inclusion without a corresponding commitment to epistemic justice. It exposed the persistence of colonial knowledge hierarchies within institutions that profess transformation, and remains a defining moment in the ongoing struggle over what it means to decolonise the curriculum in South African universities.

Together, these three episodes provide a historical grammar of resistance to curriculum transformation. They show how African intellectual thought is often met with suspicion or rejection, either through direct exclusion (Mafeje), institutional undermining (Makgoba), or curricular sanitisation (Mamdani). Importantly, these are not anomalies. Viewed contrapuntally, as Edward Said would urge, they reveal a pattern, which is a repeated disavowal of the possibility that African and subaltern knowledge traditions can serve as generative centres of academic inquiry. Each episode was justified through rationales such as student welfare and academic preparedness. Yet, I would argue, beneath these explanations lay deeper epistemic anxieties embedded in the university system, anxieties about what happens when Africa begins to speak for itself, and when the enslaved, indigenous, and historically excluded are no longer content to be studied but insist on setting the terms of study.

These anxieties have not receded into the past; they reappear in different forms. The suspension of Dr. Pedro Mzileni in 2023 at the University of the Free State, after a lecture on coloniality and decolonisation, demonstrates how critical voices remain vulnerable to institutional penalties (Mzileni 2024:7). Similar to earlier incidents, justifications were employed, but the 2024 report by the South African Human Rights Commission clarifies that the core issue was the threat to academic freedom itself (South African Human Rights Commission 2024:28–29). This case underscores how unresolved epistemic insecurities resurface whenever African and indigenous knowledge systems seek recognition within the curriculum.

These flashpoints must be understood as historical wounds but also as curricular texts. They tell us what the university then feared, what it protected, and what it could not yet imagine. In this sense, they demand more than remembrance, but, instead, contrapuntal engagement. When read in dialogue with the epistemic labour of the indigenous and enslaved at the Cape, these moments allow us to see that curriculum is not neutral terrain. It is structured by what it silences, by what it deems unteachable, and by who is deemed unqualified to teach. Mafeje, Makgoba, and Mamdani all attempted to shift this terrain. The backlash they faced underscores the need for a curriculum politics that goes beyond symbolic inclusion to actively recompose the structures of knowledge, authority, and pedagogy. Without such structural transformation, efforts at inclusion risk reproducing old injustices in new forms.

To move towards a contrapuntal curriculum, we must begin with this recognition: the epistemic exclusions these professors encountered are not exceptions, but enduring features of the university. Addressing them demands more than recovering marginalised figures; it calls for reconfiguring the very terms by which knowledge is judged, organised, and taught. This section’s groundwork sets the stage for the article’s next focus: examining the rise of technocratic, skills-based curricular models in the post-Mamdani period and their role in depoliticising the demand for epistemic justice.

After Mamdani: Skills discourse, managerialism, and the knowledge question

The aftermath of the Mamdani affair in 1996 did not simply reflect a missed opportunity for curricular reform; it signalled the beginning of a deeper reconfiguration of the post-apartheid university’s approach to curriculum, knowledge, and pedagogy. Instead of initiating a broader process of epistemic interrogation, of asking whose knowledge matters, how it is legitimised, and to what ends, the institutional response across the sector largely pivoted to procedural and technicist solutions. The question of curriculum was recast not in terms of what knowledge should be taught, but how to better deliver existing content through measurable skills and outcomes. In this way, Mamdani’s rejected syllabus marked the rejection of African-centred epistemic labour and the entrenchment of a curriculum model that foregrounded the managerial (Fataar 2001, Badat 2009).

By the early 2000s, South African higher education was increasingly influenced by policies emphasising access, throughput, and graduate success (Fataar 2003). These priorities were critical for a society emerging from the violent exclusions of apartheid. Nonetheless, the methods used to pursue these goals, such as expanding academic development programmes, generic skills training, and modular curricula, often preserved the existing epistemic framework. Although these reforms appeared inclusive, they diverted focus from the core issue of curriculum transformation. They redefined the structural need for knowledge reform into a managerial discourse centred on efficiency, accountability, and student performance (Boughey 2003). These shifts correlate with the broader neoliberal trend in higher education. Since the mid-1990s, curriculum priorities have increasingly been framed in terms of performance and market responsiveness, with little attention to decolonial epistemic reform (Hlatswayo 2022: 6). Heleta and Dilraj (2024) point out that recent statements from the Department of Higher Education continue this pattern, where decolonisation is often merely symbolic, with managerial approaches still prevailing.

This trend was reinforced by national education policies, including Curriculum 2005 in the school sector and the National Qualifications Framework (NQF), both of which institutionalised outcomes-based education across the education system (Fataar 2001). While designed to democratise learning access and increase mobility, these policies produced an instrumentalist orientation to knowledge that was measured by competencies, tick-box descriptors, and learning outcomes that favoured technical mastery over critical inquiry. In such contexts, the deeper epistemological and ethical questions were often sidelined in favour of administratively legible forms of success.

Within this architecture, Academic Development (AD) units emerged at institutions, tasked with supporting black students who were deemed ‘underprepared’ for the rigours of academic life (Boughey 2003). Although well-meaning in intent, these interventions often revolved around decontextualised skills training, including academic literacy, time management, and study strategies, rather than engaging students in the cultural, historical, and epistemological complexities of disciplinary thought. In doing so, AD models inadvertently reinforced the idea that students needed to adjust to the university, rather than questioning how the university might need to transform to engage their intellectual legacies and lived realities. The very students these programmes sought to uplift were thus structurally denied access to knowledge traditions that could have served as vehicles for self-recognition, critique, and scholarly innovation.

In the South African university context, the rise of a competence-driven model of curriculum design has produced what might be called ‘thin’ knowledge, fragmented, decontextualised, and stripped of its ethical and political moorings. This model separates skills from content, process from substance, and learning from meaning. By reconstituting knowledge as neutral and universal, it depoliticises education and forecloses interrogation of its colonial inheritances. In this configuration, the curriculum becomes a mechanism for producing employable individuals rather than cultivating critically engaged citizens capable of rethinking the world.

In this sense, the post-Mamdani shift represents an epistemic deflection. It relocates the burden of transformation onto individual students and lecturers, sidestepping the deeper collective restructuring that a decolonial curriculum demands. A key mechanism in this deflection is the discursive framing of African and subaltern knowledges as ‘insufficiently rigorous’, or ‘pedagogically inaccessible’. These framings are often justified as pedagogical necessities, that is, as practical decisions aimed at meeting students ‘where they are’. Yet this appeal to a supportive pedagogy functions less as a neutral concern for student learning and more as a legitimating discourse that preserves the existing hierarchy of knowledge. By portraying African perspectives as beyond the academic grasp of new entrants, institutions effectively delegitimise this knowledge without having to engage them. In doing so, they present exclusion as educational care, and resistance to transformation as academic prudence. What is lost in this manoeuvre is precisely what Mamdani (1998a) insisted upon: the right of all students to engage the intellectual traditions of Africa not as supplementary or remedial, but as central to their formation as critical thinkers in a postcolonial society.

Edward Said’s notion of worldliness helps us to diagnose this moment. A worldly curriculum, in Said’s (1994) terms, must be embedded in the historical and cultural conditions of its production and reception. It cannot pretend neutrality. Yet the managerial curriculum that emerged after Mamdani was marked by a retreat into abstraction, in other words, a disavowal of the very world in which education is situated. It privileged learning as a private skillset, rather than a social practice of ethical and epistemic responsibility.

If Mamdani’s confrontation exposed the anxieties of the university when challenged to recentre African epistemologies, the decades that followed saw the institutionalisation of a curriculum model designed more for compliance and containment than for justice. This managerial mode allowed universities to present the appearance of progress, based on a discourse of improved metrics, streamlined programmes and diverse student bodies, while preserving the authority of inherited canons and marginalising the knowledge systems of colonised peoples.

The result has been a dissonance at the heart of post-apartheid education: universities committed in their symbolic discourse to transformation, but structured in practice by epistemic inertia. Even where African authors appear on syllabi, they are often appended to unchanged frameworks, inserted as representatives rather than as knowledge makers and theorists, as perspectives rather than as paradigms. Inclusion becomes a substitute for reconstitution.

This section, then, foregrounded a central tension that haunts the contemporary curriculum: How can universities reclaim the epistemic richness and coherence of disciplinary knowledge while creating the conceptual and ethical space for subaltern world-making? The challenge is not to abandon rigour or coherence, but to remake them in light of the histories, struggles, and intellectual traditions that have long been excluded from the academy’s centre.

The following section takes up this challenge by exploring the intellectual and cultural contributions of the enslaved and indigenous people at the Cape of Good Hope. Drawing on a contrapuntal reading of this archive, including oral histories, cultural practices, and literary reimaginings, it offers a broad way of thinking about knowledge. This shows that curriculum transformation is both an urgent task for the present and a process grounded in longstanding histories of knowledge-making, creativity, and survival.

Contrapuntal histories: The enslaved and indigenous people of the Cape

Having examined how institutional flashpoints and the post-Mamdani shift towards skills-based managerialism exposed and reinforced epistemic exclusions in South African higher education, this section turns to an example of what those exclusions have historically obscured: the intellectual, cultural, and relational life-worlds of the enslaved and indigenous people at the Cape. While the previous sections diagnosed the structural mechanisms of curriculum closure through race-based marginalisation, institutional gatekeeping, and technocratic abstraction, this section invites a contrapuntal rereading of subaltern knowledge as a generative resource for curriculum transformation.

A contrapuntal reading, as developed by Said (1994), is a method of interpretation that brings dominant and subordinated narratives into critical relation, reading them alongside one another to surface suppressed voices and epistemologies. It resists linear, singular accounts of history by highlighting the multiple perspectives and asymmetries of power that shape historical meaning. Said’s (1981:36) related concept of worldliness encourages reading texts and histories within their material conditions, attending to their entanglements with empire, domination, and resistance. Together, these concepts invite us to interpret history not as a Eurocentric continuum but as a space of overlapping presences, tensions, and struggles. A contrapuntal reading urges attention to the marginalised voices that dominant narratives obscure, foregrounding the creativity, agency, and world-making practices of colonised peoples, such as the enslaved and indigenous at the Cape. In this sense, contrapuntal reading becomes not only an interpretive method but a practice of epistemic justice.

This section builds on the theoretical foundation established in my 2024 article (Fataar 2024), which emphasised the significance of contrapuntal worldliness in rethinking curriculum. Here, the contrapuntal approach is applied to curriculum studies by highlighting the epistemic creativity of enslaved and indigenous communities as a basis for reshaping South African university curricula. In doing so, I show how contrapuntal reading enables the development of a more inclusive and structurally reconfigured curriculum that integrates marginalised voices while transforming the frameworks through which knowledge is recognised and taught.

Drawing on Said’s concepts of worldliness and contrapuntal reading, I argue that enslaved and indigenous communities were not epistemically lacking but were, in fact, producers of situated, resilient, and enduring forms of knowledge. These histories, often sidelined in dominant curricula, must be engaged not as supplementary content but as foundational to meaningful curricular renewal.

Colonial historiography in South Africa has long framed enslaved and indigenous people as silent recipients of domination, as labourers or objects of governance rather than as knowledge bearers. This framing, deeply embedded in educational and institutional discourse, renders their experiences visible only through the lens of economic function, demographic shifts, or resistance narratives. They are not positioned as intellectual actors. This erasure has translated into curricular invisibility, with school and university syllabi often treating slavery and indigenous dispossession as historical background rather than as sites of epistemic innovation.

Edward Said’s notion of worldliness disrupts this erasure by repositioning the enslaved and indigenous as political, cultural, and intellectual actors embedded in global and local flows of migration, dispossession, exchange, and adaptation. A contrapuntal reading of their histories resists the flattening effects of colonial archives by surfacing suppressed knowledges and holding dominant and subaltern narratives in generative tension. When read alongside dominant accounts, these subaltern perspectives enrich our understanding, presenting a fuller, more plural view of the past and its relevance to contemporary curriculum-making.

Long before colonisation, the Cape was home to Khoekhoe and San communities with deeply rooted social, cosmological, and ecological knowledge systems. With the arrival of the Dutch East India Company in the mid-1600s, the Cape became a strategic and contested zone within both the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds. It was shaped by settler colonial expansion, dispossession, and the forced migration of enslaved people brought from Madagascar, Mozambique, India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia. These enslaved communities carried with them diverse religious traditions, healing knowledge, philosophical outlooks, and linguistic repertoires (Mellet 2024). Under harsh conditions, elements of these traditions were not erased but were selectively preserved, adapted, and transmitted across generations. Meanwhile, the Khoekhoe and San peoples, although violently disrupted and displaced, maintained and transformed their practices in ways that intersected with those of the enslaved. These encounters gave rise to new cultural forms and hybrid knowledge systems, emerging from both resistance and adaptation (Mellet 2024).

Together, these communities produced lifeworlds rooted in improvisation, resistance, and care. In domestic spaces, marketplaces, spiritual gatherings, and oral traditions, they created hybridised forms of knowledge that sustained their communities (Worden 1985). These were not merely survival strategies but modes of world-making. Language became a domain of experimentation and invention: Kaaps-Afrikaans emerged as a creole vernacular shaped by Dutch, Arabic, Malay, Portuguese, and Khoisan idioms (Davids 2011). This was not linguistic degeneration but epistemic creativity. Oral storytelling, communal rituals, and material culture embodied and transmitted this hybrid knowledge.

Women were central to these world-making processes (Baderoon 2014). Their epistemic labour included oral traditions, midwifery, herbal knowledge, and the intergenerational transmission of ethics, memory, and cultural practice. As healers, caretakers, and cultural custodians, they sustained forms of knowledge long overlooked by formal institutions. Contemporary literature such as Sylvia Vollenhoven’s Keeper of the Kumm: Ancestral Longing and Belonging of a Boesmankind (2016), Yvette Christiansē’s Unconfessed (2006), and June Bam’s Ausi Told Me: Why Cape Herstoriographies Matter (2021) reanimate these dimensions by offering counter-narratives that portray enslaved and indigenous women as thinkers, mourners, and moral agents.

Unconfessed centres on the inner life of an enslaved woman who navigates grief, captivity, and resistance, while Keeper of the Kumm explores ancestral memory, spiritual inheritance, and the transmission of knowledge across generations. Ausi Told Me offers powerful insight into the deep histories of indigenous life at the Cape, focusing on female knowledge keepers who sustained oral traditions, ecological wisdom, and social continuity despite colonial and apartheid-era dispossession. Bam highlights their resistance to forced removals and their determined efforts to safeguard the plants, languages, and spiritual practices that once flourished in their communities. She makes a compelling case for recognising vernacular and intergenerational knowledge as vital to scholarly inquiry, cultural healing, and decolonial recovery. Together, these texts challenge dominant historical silences by centring the emotional, ethical, and intellectual lives of women, which are excluded from the official archive.

Drawing on Radhakrishnan (2003:63–65), these hybrid practices represent a form of vernacular or everyday humanism. This refers to an ethical and intellectual tradition grounded in daily lived experience, shaped by local histories and struggles, and committed to dignity and justice from below. It emerges from conditions of dispossession, is adapted through relationships, and is passed down through embodied and relational forms of knowledge. Enslaved and indigenous communities at the Cape cultivated and carried these traditions. They offer an alternative genealogy of knowledge shaped by relational ethics, spiritual insight, multilingual expression, and ecological connectedness. These communities were not passive recipients of modernity but active participants in shaping cultural and intellectual futures.

To centre these histories in curriculum work is not to romanticise suffering or collapse difference into identity claims. Rather, it is to take seriously the proposition that enslaved and indigenous people were and are producers of knowledge that matters. It is to recognise that literacy, cosmology, ethics, and philosophy emerged not only in European centres but also in Cape slave quarters, indigenous settlements, communal rituals, and informal schools. A contrapuntal curriculum reads across these spaces to remap what counts as legitimate knowledge.

This reframing demands a shift from symbolic inclusion to structural transformation. It calls for more than the insertion of content. It invites rethinking the categories of curricular validity, the pedagogical rhythms of teaching, and the assumptions that underpin assessment and learning. Said’s contrapuntal method enables us to read the epistemologies of the colonised alongside those of the coloniser without erasure, revealing their tensions and enabling more honest engagements with power.

The enslaved and indigenous peoples of the Cape offer not only historical content but also methodological and philosophical resources for curriculum rethinking. Their legacy invites us to value oral knowledge, relational pedagogy, ecological wisdom, and spiritual inquiry. Their literacies urge us to expand what we consider a text, and their ways of being call us to reimagine what it means to know, teach, and learn in the university.

This archive of the enslaved demonstrates how a knowledge approach, guided by a contrapuntal method, can reveal broader exclusions in student and academic communities, including those based on working-class backgrounds, gender, disability, race, rurality, and mobility. Emphasising the epistemic contributions of enslaved and indigenous peoples aims to shed light on curriculum reorganisation processes centred on historical restitution and modern justice.

This section provided a historicised conceptual anchor for the argument in this article. It linked the critique of epistemic exclusion with a proposal for ethical and curricular recomposition by showing that the epistemologies of the enslaved and indigenous were neither erased nor extinguished. They remain latent possibilities for curricular renewal. They offer a grammar of relation and a vocabulary of justice capable of informing a contrapuntal university curriculum.

The final section develops this insight into a practical proposal. Drawing on the histories surfaced here and the conceptual orientation of contrapuntal worldliness, it outlines five principles for curriculum transformation. These principles aim to move beyond symbolic gestures and offer pathways towards epistemic justice as the foundation for a renewed, democratic, and humane university.

A working conclusion: Towards a reconstituted curriculum

This article demonstrates that interconnected forces influence the South African curriculum: the exclusion of African intellectual authority, the neoliberal shift towards skills and efficiency, and the marginalisation of enslaved and indigenous knowledge systems. From the Mafeje, Makgoba, and Mamdani affairs, through the post-apartheid focus on throughput and employability, to the sidelining of vernacular epistemologies, the curriculum acts as a battleground of deep-seated epistemic conflict. These forces underscore institutional anxieties about Africa’s intellectual self-representation and the disruptive influence of subaltern knowledge traditions that aim to shape the parameters of academic inquiry.

In response, the article promotes an inclusive approach as a resource for renewal, demonstrating how the creative, relational, and ethical knowledge of enslaved and indigenous communities can challenge inherited canons and reshape curriculum aims. Building on this, it introduces a conceptual and practical framework grounded in Edward Said’s ideas of contrapuntal reading and worldliness, offering guiding principles for reconstructing the curriculum on the basis of epistemic justice.

The argument began by revisiting the Mafeje, Makgoba, and Mamdani affairs, which revealed how universities marginalised African and Global South epistemologies under the guise of neutrality and academic standards. These episodes were markers of enduring resistance to curriculum transformation. The analysis then examined the post-apartheid embrace of skills-based and managerialist models. Driven by metrics of throughput and employability, these reforms displaced historical critique and ethical engagement, reinforcing the epistemic status quo while presenting themselves as inclusive and pragmatic.

The article then turned to the intellectual and cultural contributions of enslaved and indigenous communities at the Cape. These communities nurtured rich traditions of oral, spiritual, ecological, and relational knowledge. Conceived as vernacular humanism, these practices provide ethical and pedagogical resources for curriculum renewal. They represent living archives of care, community, and creativity sustained under conditions of dispossession. They must be treated as foundational to curriculum reconstitution. In doing so, they challenge colonial frameworks and open the way for the university to become an inclusive, dialogical, and socially responsive space of knowledge-making. The Cape archive thus serves as a methodological exemplar, showing how other excluded knowledge, including black, working-class, gendered, rural, or disability traditions, can likewise be contrapuntally incorporated into curriculum reconstitution.

To move from critique to reconstruction, I outline five orienting principles: epistemic redistribution, plural reasoning, relational pedagogy, problem-centred learning, and assessment for justice. These principles are not exhaustive prescriptions but indicative pathways for the structural reconstitution of the curriculum. They extend beyond the inclusion of content to propose a reorganisation of curricular and pedagogical foundations that addresses historical injustice while enabling more inclusive, dialogical, and generative futures.

Epistemic redistribution requires a decisive shift in what counts as core knowledge. African and indigenous epistemologies should be integrated at the centre of curricular design. This could involve foregrounding the theological writings of enslaved scholars, the communal and political knowledge embedded in matrilineal traditions, or the political thought preserved in oral storytelling.

Plural reasoning affirms the multiplicity and equal legitimacy of knowledge forms.. It encourages students to engage oral, spiritual, artistic, empirical, and philosophical traditions as distinct yet equally valuable ways of understanding the world. For example, African cosmologies may be studied alongside modern physics, not as competing systems but as resources for cultivating the capacity to think across complexity and difference.

Relational pedagogy defines teaching as an encounter of care, reciprocity, and co-creation. It highlights learning relationships that are accountable to communities and histories. Students may learn from and with local knowledge holders or elders, drawing on forms of knowledge that exist beyond academic structures but are integral to their lived experiences.

Problem-centred learning reorients curriculum design around pressing social and ecological challenges. Instead of abstract disciplinary divisions, it organises learning around issues such as climate change, land justice, or educational inequality. This approach encourages students to mobilise diverse epistemic resources to address these challenges in creative and situated ways.

Assessment for justice reimagines how learning is demonstrated. Moving away from standardised examinations, it embraces oral history projects, reflective writing, collaborative portfolios, and community-based research. These forms of assessment value ethical reflection, positionality, and applied knowledge as central dimensions of academic practice.

Taken together, these principles affirm the transformative imperative central to this article: the curriculum must be reconstituted as a living, ethical structure oriented towards epistemic justice. Curriculum reconstitution entails diversifying content in ways that are accompanied by a fundamental reordering of how knowledge is valued, taught, and connected to histories of dispossession and struggle. A contrapuntal curriculum, grounded in Said’s idea of worldliness, places marginalised epistemologies at the centre of the university’s renewal. By foregrounding traditions of knowledge born from struggle, care, and community, and by cultivating dialogical engagements across knowledge systems, the university can become a space of ethical co-creation where learning is rooted in historical truth, responsive to community, and directed towards just, plural, and sustainable futures.

Conclusion

The question remains how such a reconstituted curriculum might take shape in universities that remain neoliberal, Eurocentric, and structurally resistant to epistemic reform. The Department of Higher Education and Training has consistently deprioritised curriculum transformation, both before and after the 2015–2016 student protests and the apparent decolonial turn that followed. Moving towards the kind of curriculum envisioned here will require confronting the entrenched managerial cultures, audit regimes, and performance-driven metrics that define higher education. It calls for building collective pressure from students, scholars, and communities to make epistemic justice central to institutional agendas, and for cultivating leadership willing to resist the narrowing logics of market responsiveness. It also demands that state policy shift its priorities from throughput and efficiency towards supporting curricular transformation as a matter of social justice and democratic renewal. This is the curriculum’s unfinished task: to repair what was silenced and to teach in ways that affirm the full worth of diverse ways of knowing.

Acknowledgements

The author declares that no financial or personal relationships inappropriately influenced the writing of this article.

A.F. is the sole author of this research article.

This article followed all ethical standards for research without direct contact with human or animal subjects.

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and are the product of professional research. They do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated institution, funder, agency or that of the publisher. The author is responsible for this article’s results, findings and content.

References