In line with decolonial methodologies that reject the ‘myth of objectivity’ (Zavala 2016), I must disclose my own positionality. I am not a detached observer; I am a Black South African academic who has worked within the very PHEI system I am investigating. This insider status afforded me a nuanced understanding of the institution’s implicit codes and unwritten rules, granting me a level of access and trust that an outsider may have struggled to achieve. Participants spoke to me as a colleague who ‘gets it’.

This position, however, is fraught with tension. My own biography, shaped by the disempowerment I witnessed growing up in the Free State and my lived experiences of marginality within South Africa’s HE sector, fuels my commitment to decoloniality. This deep-seated drive sharpened my sensitivity to the mechanisms of coloniality, but it also carried the risk of over-identification or analytical bias, where I might see only barriers and not possibilities.

To mitigate this, I adopted a rigorous reflexive practice. I maintained a detailed research journal to separate my own emotional responses from the participants’ accounts and engaged in regular peer debriefing with external colleagues to stress test my interpretations against the data.

This paper acknowledges the irony inherent in deploying the ‘colonial research grammar’ (Heleta & Dilraj 2024), a linear and objective academic form, to critique colonial structures. Such adherence to convention may itself risk ‘epistemic violence’ (Heleta 2016). However, the adoption of this format is made with reflexive intent, positioning the paper as a ‘situated’ (Haraway 1988) act of counter-storytelling from within the very system it interrogates.

Ethical clearance to conduct this study was obtained from the University of Cape Town School of Education Ethics Review Committee on 14 September 2024. The ethical clearance number is EDNREC20230902. All participants provided informed written consent and were assured of confidentiality, voluntary participation and the right to withdraw. Pseudonyms were used to protect identities, and all data were stored securely with password protection. Interviews took place in neutral settings to minimise power dynamics, and the study was guided throughout by the principles of respect and justice.

While lecturers were conversant with the theoretical concept of decolonisation, their understanding was largely academic and disconnected from their professional practice. Lecturer-C defined it as a movement ‘aimed at re-evaluating and transforming colonial structures’, while Lecturer-E spoke of the need to ‘foster a non-colonial identity and mindset’. However, this theoretical fluency was consistently paired with an admission of practical impotence. As Lecturer-A starkly put it, ‘My focus will therefore be on the episteme and not on practice’. This statement exemplifies the chasm between intellectual awareness and institutional reality.

A profound sense of powerlessness was a unanimous theme. Lecturers felt their agency was severely curtailed by a rigid, top-down governance structure. While the institution’s official teaching strategy promoted constructivism, in practice, lecturers felt like mere implementers. Lecturer-E explained this contradiction: ‘While lecturers are nominally given the freedom to innovate, they are constrained by prescriptive syllabi and pacers. Thus, there is not much room for deviation’. Here, the language of ‘freedom’ is immediately undercut by the reality of control. What looks like autonomy is, in practice, a tightly managed illusion.

This constrained agency was seen as a direct result of a lack of institutional commitment. The decolonisation discourse, vibrant in the public sphere, was absent from institutional life. Lecturer-A stated, ‘I believe the institution is not showing enough commitment towards decolonisation. I have never been in a committee meeting where this matter has been discussed’. Another lecturer noted with concern that among the institution’s 30 policies, ‘not one of them, not once and not even mentions decolonisation even in passing’. The absence, they suggested, is not accidental but symptomatic of an institution unwilling to name what it refuses to confront. For these lecturers, silence in policy was louder than outright rejection, signalling that decolonisation was not merely overlooked but strategically excluded. The effect, as one participant put it, was a climate where ‘we all know it matters, but it never finds a place on the agenda’.

The most significant inhibitor identified by all participants was the institution’s fundamental identity as a for-profit business. The commercial imperative was seen to supplant all other considerations, framing the curriculum as a product to be sold rather than a site for critical transformation.

Lecturer-A was unequivocal:

This blunt phrasing retort shows that profit outweighs pedagogy.

This sentiment was echoed by Lecturer-F, who located this priority within the corporate structure itself:

In this account, transformation is rejected not as unworthy but as unprofitable.

Lecturer-C expanded on this by observing:

Similarly, Lecturer-D pointed to the dominance of marketing language in academic meetings:

This profit-driven logic creates a culture where social justice issues are not only ignored but actively cordoned off. Lecturer-A described the difficulty of even raising the topic in official spaces, noting that opportunities to do so are limited because ‘this committee has a fixed agenda and sometimes trying to foist such a discussion might be difficult’.

Even more tellingly, Lecturer-E observed that the profit motive is internalised by staff themselves:

The writing is on the wall in that profit drives top decisions and colonises staff imagination. What might begin as creative ideas for transformation quickly dissolves into resignation when weighed against financial imperatives. In this way, coloniality is not enforced through open prohibition but through the quiet disciplining power of market logic.

The Central Curriculum Council (CCC) was identified as the specific locus of power and the primary structural barrier to change. This body was described as the sole determinant of the curriculum, operating with minimal consultation.

The findings reveal a deeply hierarchical institutional culture where communication flows downward rather than laterally. Lecturer-E described a disconnect where ‘national agendas and institutional policies’ are imposed with ‘zero to minimal consultation at the grassroots level’. This sentiment was echoed by colleagues who felt reduced to mere implementers. As Lecturer-B noted, meetings with the council are perceived not as discussions but as ‘briefings’ where ‘decisions have already been made’. Even when lecturers attempt to engage through written submissions, Lecturer-F lamented that these often ‘disappear into a vacuum’, with standardised curricula rolled out later without acknowledgement. This exclusionary dynamic is compounded by the composition of the CCC itself, which Lecturer-C observed is dominated by a ‘narrow demographic’ that fails to reflect the diversity of staff or students, making genuine decolonisation difficult to imagine. Consequently, the centralised control fosters a culture of surveillance rather than innovation, with Lecturer-D noting that local campuses feel ‘constantly monitored’, creating an environment where ‘no one wants to take risks’ for fear of punishment.

This top-down control, combined with a perceived lack of transformation within the CCC itself, creates a closed loop that ensures the institutional ethos remains unchanged. In doing so, it effectively locks the system in a state of morphostasis. Decisions circulate within the same small circle. New ideas struggle to gain entry, and critical voices are silenced before they gather momentum. The result is continuity masked as change, as it were. As Lecturer-F lamented, ‘we raise issues, but they come back to us unchanged, as if nothing was ever said’. This cyclical silencing demonstrates how coloniality persists through decision-making mechanisms, making alternatives impossible.

While lecturers identified barriers that sustained coloniality, they also articulated broader institutional needs that could enable transformation if taken seriously. Several participants highlighted the importance of cultivating a culture of reflexivity within the institution. Lecturer-B explained that ‘without deliberate spaces for critical conversations, we default to technicalities and lose sight of why we teach in the first place’. Others suggested that professional development opportunities could help equip lecturers with the theoretical and pedagogical tools needed to engage meaningfully with decolonisation.

Importantly, some participants called for structural changes that extend beyond the curriculum. Lecturer-D emphasised the need for greater diversity in leadership, noting that ‘representation at the top filters down into how transformation is prioritised or ignored’. In this sense, the lecturers recognised that addressing institutional inertia required not only changes to syllabi but also shifts in governance composition, policy orientation and organisational ethos. These observations point to a latent awareness among staff that decolonisation is a multi-dimensional project. It is as much about reconfiguring power relations as it is about content delivery. Lecturers recognised that transformation cannot be confined to the syllabus alone but must extend into governance and institutional culture.

Despite their frustrations, lecturers did not view decolonisation as an unattainable aspiration. Instead, they offered concrete suggestions for how the institution might begin to engage with it. Some advocated for the integration of African scholarship into reading lists, arguing that such inclusion would both validate indigenous intellectual traditions and expose students to a broader spectrum of knowledge. Lecturer-C proposed that ‘modules should be reframed to reflect African realities rather than treating them as supplementary case studies’.

Others called for more participatory curriculum design processes, where lecturers and even students could contribute meaningfully. Lecturer-E suggested that ‘a consultative model, where campuses can adapt certain modules to local contexts, would create room for authentic innovation’. The recommendations were not radical overhauls but pragmatic steps: developing mentorship programmes for junior black academics, embedding indigenous languages into certain modules, and creating forums for sustained dialogue on decolonisation.

Taken together, these proposals underscore a striking paradox. On the one hand, lecturers felt disempowered and constrained by a centralised, profit-driven system. On the other hand, they demonstrated imaginative capacity and a readiness to participate in transformation if institutional conditions were enabling. Their recommendations reveal not only a critique of the status quo but also an embryonic vision of what a decolonised PHEI might look like.

The coloniality of power, as conceptualised by Quijano (2007), refers to the enduring hierarchical structures that classify and dominate, originally established through race. In this PHEI, this logic is reproduced through the architecture of governance. The findings paint a clear picture of a system where power is concentrated, untransformed and non-negotiable. Lecturers experienced this as a total ‘lack of institutional commitment’ (Lecturer-A), evidenced by decolonisation ‘not even mentioned’ in over 30 institutional policies.

This is the coloniality of power in action. The CCC, with its ‘narrow demographic’ (Lecturer-C) and ‘zero consultation at the grassroots level’ (Lecturer-E), functions as a direct mechanism for reproducing this hierarchy. It operates as a contemporary ‘overrepresentation’ (Wynter 2003) of a specific managerial and epistemological worldview. The result is that the lecturer agency is structurally nullified. Lecturers are repositioned as ‘implementers’, not critical agents, who ‘work to instruction’ (Lecturer-F). Their role is to deliver the ‘product’, not to question its design. Any attempts to ‘foist such a discussion’ (Lecturer-A) are seen as disruptive, not constructive. Thus, the institutional structure actively produces the powerlessness that lecturers describe, short-circuiting the ‘collective agency’ that Archer (1995) identifies as necessary for morphogenesis (social change) and locking the system in stasis.

The coloniality of power (the ‘who’) directly enables the coloniality of knowledge (the ‘what’). As Mignolo (2007) argues, this dimension involves the privileging of Eurocentric epistemologies and the marginalisation of all other ways of knowing. In this case, the profit motive is the generative mechanism that actively enforces this. The curriculum is not a site for intellectual inquiry but a ‘commodity’ (Hlatshwayo 2022) that must be ‘marketable’ (Lecturer-E).

This logic is the ultimate arbiter of epistemic inclusion. Knowledge that aligns with dominant, Global North, ‘market-ready’ paradigms is validated. Knowledge that is critical, indigenous or local, the very core of decolonisation, is dismissed as ‘not marketable’ (Lecturer-E). This is a profound form of epistemic violence (Heleta 2016). It is not a passive omission but an active, market-driven exclusion. The ‘prescriptive syllabi and pacers’ (Lecturer-E) are the instruments of this exclusion, ensuring uniformity and control, and preventing any ‘deviation’ (Lecturer-E).

This framework helps us understand the lecturers’ frustration. Their attempts to decolonise, such as using local examples or African authors, are acts of ‘micro-resistance’. However, these acts are epistemically superficial. They cannot change the structure of the ‘product’ they are tasked to deliver. They can only change the ‘flavour’ of their individual delivery, which has no lasting impact on the institution’s morphostatic state. The institution, in its demand for a standardised ‘product’, denies the very possibility of epistemic justice.

This combination of structural powerlessness (coloniality of power) and epistemic futility (coloniality of knowledge) culminates in the most insidious dimension termed the coloniality of being. This refers to the psychic, existential impact of coloniality, the internalisation of one’s own marginality (Fanon 1967; Wynter 2003). The findings show this mechanism in heartbreaking clarity.

The most potent finding in this regard is Lecturer-E’s admission that ‘Over time, you start to self-censor’. This ‘self-censorship’ is the coloniality of being made manifest. It is the point at which the external structure of oppression is internalised, becoming part of the lecturer’s own ‘being’. The agent, recognising the futility of resistance, pre-emptively silences themself. They internalise the market logic (‘it will be dismissed’) and a sense of ‘fear’ (Lecturer-D) until they ‘stop trying’ (Lecturer-E). This is Fanon’s psychic dismemberment in a 21st-century corporate guise.

This internalisation also manifests in the belief that decolonisation is simply not for them. Lecturer-A’s comment that the institution ‘treats decolonisation as something for public institutions to bother about’ is a devastating insight. It suggests that the PHEI is perceived, even by its own staff, as an ontologically separate space, a commercial zone exempt from the moral and political work of the nation. The ‘being’ of the lecturer is thus split in that they are a critical intellectual in theory (‘episteme’) but a compliant employee in ‘practice’ (Lecturer-A).

In conclusion, the institution is locked in a state of colonial morphostasis, where its form is perfectly reproduced. The generative mechanism of the profit motive, enforced by a centralised, untransformed power structure, activates all three dimensions of coloniality. It strips lecturers of power, dictates a marketable, colonial knowledge, and ultimately disciplines their very being into self-censoring compliance. This creates a closed causal loop from which, as the findings show, there is no obvious structural escape.

A key strength of this study lies in its qualitative case study design, which enabled a ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) and a critical realist analysis of a single, bounded system. This approach allowed the researcher to move beyond describing what lecturers felt (the empirical) to explaining the underlying causal mechanisms (the real) that produced those feelings, namely, the generative mechanisms of profit and centralised governance. The reflexive disclosure of the researcher’s insider positionality is also a strength, enhancing the transparency and interpretive depth of the counter-storytelling process.

Notwithstanding, the study has several limitations that must be critically examined, as their implications shape the boundaries of the claims made.

Firstly, the study is a single-case design with a small, purposive sample of six lecturers. This is a clear limitation. The findings are therefore not statistically generalisable to all PHEIs in South Africa. The implication of this is that while a set of causal mechanisms has been identified in-depth, it cannot be claimed that they operate identically in all corporate HE contexts. Rather than claiming generalisability, this study offers transferability through a ‘thick description’ that presents an analytical model other researchers can apply or contest in comparable contexts.

Secondly, the study is limited to the perspectives of lecturers. The voices of students, administrators, and, most critically, the members of the CCC are absent. This is a significant limitation. The implication is that the understanding of institutional logic presented here is, by necessity, partial. What is visible are the effects of the CCC’s decisions, not the rationales or pressures that inform them. The analysis is therefore derived from the ‘briefings’ (Lecturer-B), without access to the ‘boardroom’. Future research would benefit from triangulating these perspectives to provide a more comprehensive account.

Thirdly, this study confronts the profound methodological and theoretical irony of using theories from the Global North, such as Archer’s social realism and Bhaskar’s critical realism, to analyse a problem of decoloniality. This is a tension and a limitation. However, it could be argued that it is a productive one. Drawing on decolonial theorists (Fanon 1967; Mignolo 2007; Wynter 2003) to define the problem, the analysis employs critical realism and social realism to uncover the generative mechanisms of power that decolonial theory aims to challenge. It is a case of using the ‘master’s tools’ (Lorde 1984), in this instance, to methodically map the structural architecture of the ‘master’s house’, revealing the load-bearing walls of profit and hierarchy that must be understood before they can ever be challenged.

Finally, while the theoretical framework identified the ‘coloniality of language’ (Prah 2017) as a key axis of coloniality, the empirical data from these specific interviews did not yield rich findings on this point. The implication is that this remains a crucial, yet under-interrogated, mechanism within this specific corporate context, requiring its own dedicated future study.

This study set out to investigate the conditions that inhibit decolonisation at a South African PHEI. The findings, analysed through a critical realist lens, reveal a reality far more profound than mere inhibition. They expose a fundamental and structural contradiction that the institutional generative mechanisms of a profit-driven and centrally controlled corporation are not just slowing decolonisation; they are antithetical to it. The institution is not failing at decolonisation; it is succeeding at reproducing coloniality, precisely because its core business model depends on it.

This finding addresses a critical disconnect in the understanding of institutional transformation within the PHEI sector. The original recommendations, which emerged from the lecturers’ own hopes (e.g. ‘decentralise the CCC’, ‘create new policies’), are shown by the study’s own data to be an illusion. The institution cannot decentralise the CCC because doing so would risk the standardisation required to sell its ‘product’ (Lecturer-D) at scale. It cannot prioritise indigenous epistemologies because they are not ‘marketable’ (Lecturer-E). Therefore, the primary implication of this study is that meaningful, structural decolonisation, a true Archerian morphogenesis, is impossible in this context without a complete rupture of the institution’s foundational business model.

This is a stark conclusion, but one that critical realism analysis demands. It affirms that the ‘illusion of change’ is the belief that one can decolonise a system while leaving its generative mechanisms of profit and control intact. The mechanisms of coloniality (power, knowledge, being) and the mechanisms of neoliberal corporatisation (profit, standardisation, hierarchy) are, in this case, one and the same.

Given this reality, what is to be done? To offer recommendations for institutional reform would be to ignore the findings of this study. However, to conclude that lecturers are simply ‘victims’ of this structure would be to ignore their agency. The findings show that even within this closed causal loop, lecturers are not passive. They articulate a profound ‘conceptual fluency’ (Lecturer-C) and a deep desire for change.

The pathway forward, then, is not through institutional reform, but through what I term pathways for bounded agency. These are the micro-resistances that agents can perform within their constraints. If the structure cannot be changed, the experience of the classroom can still be a site of critical consciousness.

Lecturers know they cannot change the ‘prescriptive syllabi’ (Lecturer-E). However, they can change how that syllabus is taught. Instead of attempting to ‘sneak in’ (Lecturer-A) African authors in a tokenistic way, bounded agency involves using the prescribed colonial curriculum itself as an object of critique. This resonates with Freire’s (1970) conscientização. The lecturer’s role shifts from ‘implementer’ (Lecturer-F) to ‘critical facilitator’, asking students: Why are all the authors in this module European? Whose interests does this ‘marketable’ knowledge serve? What is the ‘financial value’ (Lecturer-C) of silencing other epistemologies? This approach does not violate the syllabus, but it decolonises the act of learning, fostering a critical awareness of the coloniality of knowledge that the students are, in fact, ‘clients’ of.

The findings showed that decolonisation is ‘never discussed’ (Lecturer-A) in official committees, which are ‘briefings’ (Lecturer-B). This structural silencing can be countered by agentic action. The professional development and forums for dialogue that lecturers recommended in the findings should not be seen as recommendations for the institution, but as a call to each other. Lecturers can and must create their own parallel, informal and perhaps subversive reflexive spaces, reading groups, lunchtime seminars and peer-mentorship circles where the ‘self-censorship’ (Lecturer-E) is actively undone. This collective agentic act (Archer 1995) is essential for moving from individual frustration to a shared critical consciousness, which is the first step towards any potential collective action.

While the institution’s English-only policy is a structural inhibitor, lecturers retain agency over their own pedagogical language. As Prah (2017) insists, language is central. Lecturers can practice epistemic justice in small ways. These could include validating students’ use of indigenous-language concepts in discussion and by critiquing the market-readiness of English-only mores. This small act challenges the coloniality of being by signalling to students that their own linguistic ‘being’ is valid within the academic space.

These pathways do not lead to institutional transformation. They will not decolonise the PHEI. Let us be clear on that. However, they are not futile. They are acts of intellectual and pedagogical integrity. They are designed to awaken the critical consciousness of the next generation of students who pass through this corporate system, equipping them with the tools to see the ‘illusion’ for what it is.