Unpacking Decoloniality and Decolonial Education: South Africa and the World

Abstract

In this article I unpack the terms ‘decoloniality’ and ‘decolonial’ as a means to address their respective histories in the South African context whilst also drawing on key examples within the global South. Many countries in the global South share histories of usurpation, coloniality and brutality at the hands of the same European colonisers. So, I offer, with overlaps, examples of the early stages of Portuguese, Dutch, British, Spanish, Italian and German colonialism, and their attempts at enslavement and colonisation. Whilst colonisation was for Europeans an escape from poverty, warfare, famine and disease, the pro- mise of immediate and continued wealth through usurpation, settler-coloniality and the acquisition of raw materials through forced slave labour in Africa and the Americas, it secured their prosperity into the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies, the afterlife of which they remain beneficiaries to, and which historical texts fraudulently offer them praiseworthy mention as empire builders.