Since the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ protests which began at the University of Cape Town in March 2015, the decolonisation of knowledge and its dissemination have become central concerns – at least in theory – of South African universities. This has obvious implications beyond the academy, since it is hardly the only South African institution in which the values and assumptions of Europe have been normative in the three decades since the achievement of majority rule. Political commentator Aubrey Matshiqi observes that, in South Africa's democracy, the political majority remain a cultural minority (Matshiqi 2011). The demand for ‘decolonisation’ is, therefore, not restricted to universities – it speaks to all intellectual and cultural life.

The defeat of apartheid removed the legal impediments to citizenship for all, but left many of the hierarchies of the past in place: in effect, the cultural and intellectual underpinnings of Afrikaner Nationalism were discredited, only for those that had sustained an earlier British colonialism to take over (Friedman 2015). Given this, perhaps the only surprise about heightened demands for the decolonisation of thinking, writing and teaching is that they took so long to appear. There is clearly an urgent need for the intellectual equivalent of the negotiation process that produced the political settlement of 1994 – an exchange on how the society's thinkers, writers and teachers should begin to free themselves of colonial assumptions and to think about the society and its challenges in ways that do not reflect the view of the coloniser. That this discussion is overdue is underlined by the fact that a paper arguing for a broad negotiation on the nature of the university was written 30 years ago (Badat et al. 1993).

But, while calls for decolonisation have been very loud, they have not been very distinct: clear articulations of a decolonised intellectual framework have been largely drowned out by rhetorical flourishes. Equally important is that a frequent feature of the rhetoric is its essentialism.