Decolonial Summer School shapes minds, challenges thinking

The pertinent and multi-layered topic of decoloniality in the context of South Africa took centre stage during the 2025 Decolonial Summer School, organised by the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Centring African Languages to Decolonise the Curricula (CALDC) – an apt way to kickstart the new year.

The symposium is currently under way in the Neville Alexander Building on lower campus. It started on Monday, 6 January and collects academics, students and members of civil society under one roof for five days of in-depth discussion and debate on this important topic, with a special emphasis on various key sectors in South Africa, including health and education.

Themed “Decoloniality: Mothofatso, land and health as impilo in the contexts of globalist agendas”, the symposium comprised an impressive line-up of speakers, including anti-apartheid activist and theologian Professor Allan Boesak, and Professor Ramon Grosfoguel, Puerto Rican sociologist and Emeritus Professor in decoloniality, international migration and Islamophobia at the University of California, Berkley. Both did a good job of capturing and holding the audience’s attention.

Offering opening remarks on day one, Professor Elelwani Ramugondo, UCT’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Transformation, Student Affairs and Social Responsiveness, told the audience that she grapples with one crucial question: as the country becomes increasingly globalised, in what way does decoloniality become a pipe dream? Professor Ramugondo reminded the audience that they were gathered at UCT, a colonial university, and urged each member of the academy to explore how they could contribute meaningfully to decoloniality at the institution.

Understanding decoloniality

What stood out among the sessions on day one was a video interview with UCT’s Dr Xolisa Guzula, an early-literacy expert in the School of Education. The interview was based on a previous presentation in which Dr Guzula discussed coloniality of languages and multilingualism as a way to challenge monolingualism in the education space.

She told the audience that to understand decoloniality, it’s important that everyone understands coloniality first.

“As a person who’s grown up under colonialism and who’s been fed information about my inferiority – inferiority as a black person, and the inferiority of black, African languages – it means I now have to unlearn those untruths.”

“As a person who’s grown up under colonialism and who’s been fed information about my inferiority – inferiority as a black person, and the inferiority of black, African languages – it means I now have to unlearn those untruths about being black, and start asserting the truths we know about ourselves and about how powerful we are as black people,” Guzula said.

Shaping young minds

She said spaces such as the Decolonial Summer School programme help to shape young minds.

“I am loving this space; because the young people who are here are the ones who raised questions about decoloniality, and who actually forced academics to think about working differently in the institution,” she said.

“And as this Summer School programme continues to [take place], it continues to sustain spaces where decolonial work can be done; [and we can] adopt decolonial thinking, so we can start to make sense of what it really means, in your space, in my space and in our spaces. So, by attending this [programme] it helps to deepen their understanding of decoloniality; and also means that they are teaching each other, and academics as well.”

Involve communities

But for decolonial work to be truly meaningful, Guzula said, the academy must join forces with communities to understand their needs and what matters to them, in order to respond aptly. Doing so will help academia and communities reconceptualise decoloniality together.

However, Guzula noted, there are stumbling blocks. And as she explained, these often relate to an unwillingness to do things differently, because old ideologies are entrenched in communities and their way of living and doing.

“Sometimes people are not receptive to new ways of doing things. Like, if you say, ‘Use African languages in education,’ you get people saying: ‘But we want English – English is the language of the economy,’” she said.

“That’s the kind of thing we grapple with every day. How do we get people to understand that English is not a universal language; and that actually, in many other countries like Norway and Denmark, people use their home languages [to communicate].”

Multilingualism fosters creativity

Guzula believes that encouraging multilingualism promotes creativity and out-of-the-box thinking, because individuals have access to the resources they need in their mother tongue and are therefore able to express themselves freely.

As an early-literacy expert, she said, her work requires that she work alongside both teachers and learners to make in-class learning accessible to African-language-speaking learners. She told the audience that currently, black children are “zombified” in their classrooms, because they don’t fully comprehend the subject matter and are not encouraged to ask questions in their mother tongue.

“But we are dehumanising the African child; because with the erasure of languages comes the erasure of their beings, their identity

“We are silencing them all the time, and it’s worse when we teach in a language they don’t understand. I see the inhumanity towards the black child. The system is humanising the white English-speaking child and the white Afrikaans-speaking child, because they are the only ones allowed to use familiar language that they use at home with their parents,” Guzula said.

“But we are dehumanising the African child; because with the erasure of languages comes the erasure of their beings, their identity, the erasure of their culture. And it’s an erasure of their knowledge systems. And that continues the dehumanisation of the African child.”