In 1955, the Asian and African nations gathered at the Bandung Conference solemnly condemned all forms of colonialism. Four years later, at the Second World Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Rome from late March to early April, Aime Cesaire spoke of the ‘solemn hour’ when colonialism discovered itself to be ‘mortal’, ‘perishable’, having ‘lost its historical assurance’. He added: ‘And isn't the best sign of this the sudden success of a neologism that is now making its way into everyday vocabulary: decolonization?’

Today, the success of what is no longer a neologism is undeniable. In the sense in which it is now mainly used – freeing the mind from the coloniality (another neologism) with which it has been inculcated – ‘decolonisation’ is a buzzword as well as a watchword. There is a global demand to decolonise the mind by decolonising art, museums, architecture, the imaginary, aesthetics, beauty … but, first and foremost, knowledge and consequently the university and its curricula.

The question then is: what does it mean to decolonise knowledge in a university?

One important lesson of Suren Pillay's Predicaments of Knowledge is that posing the question in such general terms runs the risk of being sterile and of limiting the reflection to the assertion, repeated in various ways, that the coloniality of so-called Western epistemology must be opposed by the resistance of so-called Southern epistemologies. On the contrary, the book shows, we need to take a concrete situation as the starting point for an analytical approach that can lead to a precise understanding of what a decolonised curriculum can look like.

Post-apartheid South Africa, analysed in this book, offers itself to reflection as both a concrete situation to think about and a case to consider as exemplary in the sense that it sheds light, beyond its particularity, on the general question of the decolonisation of knowledge. In a word, Suren Pillay's question of what a post-apartheid education might look like is the best approach to the general question of what it means to decolonise knowledge.