The paralysis in South African universities following protests by students demanding free, decolonized education persists. In an impressive show of solid defiance reminiscent of the nationalist struggle against apartheid, students at Wits University have issued a raft of demands to administration, even as there are no signs that a solution to the crisis is within sight.

A decolonised curriculum will not neglect other knowledge systems. Universities still have to develop graduates knowledgeable about the world and all its complexity. However, the education must be free from Western epistemological domination, Eurocentrism, epistemic violence and worldviews that were designed to degrade, exploit and subjugate Africans and other formerly colonised peoples.

South Africa’s population is 86% black. Yet between 2010-2014, the Department of Politics at the University of Cape Town has graduated only two black MA students. In 2015, 97% of black applicants were denied admission to the Masters programme. To-date there is not a single black South African enrolled in the programme. Has this exclusion become a way of carving out the task of thinking and intellectual production as an exclusive white preserve?

To tell whether Prof. Mahmood Mamdani has failed to implement the doctoral programme at Makerere Institute of Social Research requires that one is either a doctoral student, a teacher on the programme, or has done fieldwork at MISR with a research question on Mamdani’s ambition and its logistical requirements. Anything other than that is sheer gossip.

During this recent workshop on decolonizing publications and creating writing cultures, particular dilemmas and nuanced opportunities for the decolonization of knowledge were revealed and they are expounded at length in this reflection. It is our hope that this detailed reflection can serve as a rubric of important lessons for critical and Pan-African scholars who are immersed in decolonizing projects in their respective spaces and institutions.