In discussions with university policy-makers grappling with what it means to decolonise the curriculum in South Africa, one sometimes encounters the view from partisans that the aim is to expunge the West's influence, or that the objective should be to displace Western knowledge and replace it with African or Afrocentric knowledge. And, on the other hand, those sceptical of or opposed to the need to decolonise knowledge refer to this aim as a kind of parody, articulated as a lament that describes the problem with injunctions to decolonise knowledge. This latter view would then go on to describe, perhaps with more nuance than expressed in the above-quoted tweet by the former leader of the official opposition party in post-apartheid South Africa, how colonialism gifted the colonies technology and infrastructure, healthcare and the rule of law. Let us not, these voices would warn, throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater. The assumption is that despite the violent history of colonialism, without that intervention there would not be a modern society. As an argument, it offers a defence of the legacy of colonialism based on the benefits of technology. In turn, technology is assumed to be an achievement of scientific thinking, which in turn is understood to be a gift to humanity from Western civilisation. This chapter problematises various assumptions in this argument about Western knowledge and also some of the ways in which it is critiqued by some proponents of decolonising knowledge.

As a reaction to the kind of thinking expressed by those who defend colonialism as a bad but ultimately good fact of history, the sentiment that displacing Western knowledge with African knowledge would, on the face of it, make sense as a decolonial act.