This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first section, I describe a project to rethink political theory and political philosophy. It is a project partly responsive to the questions that have been raised over the last years in South African universities, about rethinking the curriculum and ‘decolonising knowledge’. The second part offers a description of a course that I have been teaching at Honours and Master's levels on political violence and the modern state. In recounting these two projects, I wish to offer outlines of possible ways to reconstitute an account of the genealogy of the modern state in Africa, and to think about how this might be done in a less Eurocentric way. It is therefore a theoretical-political argument as much as it is also a pedagogic enterprise.

I commence with a short observation about the concept of decolonisation as it is currently deployed in the political discourse of contemporary South Africa. Decolonisation in its current usage is often no longer a reference to political decolonisation, that moment of decolonisation that transferred political sovereignty from the colonial empires and produced what has been called ‘flag independence’. Talking in the present about decolonisation in the university is more usually a reference to questions of epistemology or knowledge, as distinct from political or economic decolonisation. My own wager is that what is often named as a problem in current discussions about decolonisation in the universities, and in the curriculums of the disciplines specifically, is the problem of Eurocentrism. To be more precise, discussions about decolonisation are often a proxy for calling into question and responding to the problem of Eurocentrism. There are many ways we might understand Eurocentrism. My use is aligned with Adam Sitze's formulation, in his important book on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, The Impossible Machine. Sitze defines Eurocentrism as follows: ‘The mark of Eurocentrism, to be clear, is not that a discourse should happen to look at, or speak of Europe … It is that a discourse should, whether explicitly or implicitly reify the experiences and events of European politics into coherent and self-evidently desirable philosophical norms, in relation to which the often-violent experiences and events of colonial politics figure as empirical deviations, pathologies, perversions, or imitations.’