The article talks about the efforts in a new university in Mauritius to design a decolonised approach to teaching and learning social sciences. It's different: in the South African context since the #RhodesMustFall student activists made the notion of a decolonised curriculum popular every other wannabe intellectual manager-academic appropriates the idea, and university third stream research funding offices have their feeding frenzy on new money from the grant making world throwing good money after a good idea at the wrong people and approaches. Oh don't you worry, there will be many more books (of the ilk of #FeesMustFall produced by Booysen et al). But please, keep your hopes down that any of these "research projects and book outputs" result in anything like a curriculum (or fee structure) that is any more transformed/decolonised than pre-2015.
Well, what do the Mauritians say that is so different from the SA story? For one, they are actually seeming to apply their minds quite thoroughly, and in a forward looking way. Not playing the blame game, but creatively seeking out solutions.. The article is not detailed, but there are more than some good hints. In South Africa, the discourse on decolonization (and in that it is similar to the transformation discourse of the post-2000 era) is held within a racialised frame of understanding the world - keyword: whiteness. That's appropriate to a point, but SA is now so "post-rainbow" that the whiteness discourse, along with related ones in other even more politicised spaces and with respect to topics, such as land redistribution, unemployment, inequality, poverty and wealth, is actually feeling racist (and here i refer to the expanded definition of racism, not that which claims Africans can't be racist...).
In contrast, the article about social science education at the new African Leadership University takes a different, surprising approach, basing their 'decolonised' social sciences curriculum in 7 principles that thoroughly affirm diversity in so many ways, along with social justice components that are essential for a decolonised African university curriculum. Keywords: open access, reciprocity, multilingualism, internationalism, knowledge production rather than consumption, student-centred, orality along with literacy, literature along with other artefacts of African social reality, and so forth...
Read it here: https://theconversation.com/what-a-new-university-in-africa-is-doing-to-decolonise-social-sciences-77181
And here is an article about the launch of the University in 2016:
http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20160331161118251
