When the above article was first published online, the quote on pages 12-13 was mistakenly attributed to a member of NAPTOSA. This has since been corrected to PPCE.The author sincerely regrets this error.

In this article, we argue for a new way of thinking about knowledge construction in African higher education as a basis for developing new theoretical and epistemological insights, founded on inclusivity, epistemic freedom, and social justice. We recognise coloniality as a fundamental problem that needs us to scrutinise our knowledge of decolonisation (about decolonisation itself) and our knowledge for decolonisation (to make change possible). Following Bourdieu (1972), such thinking also requires degrees of vigilance that entail fundamental epistemological breaks, or put differently, it requires epistemological decolonisation as a point of departure. Thus, the future of tertiary education in Africa must be located within a new horizon of possibilities, informed by a nuanced political epistemology and ontology embedded in the complex African experience and visibility of the colonised and oppressed. In short, there can be no social justice without epistemic justice.

This article contends that teacher unions' participation in policy making during South Africa's political transition was characterised by assertion of ideological identity (unionism and professionalism) and the cultivation of policy networks and alliances. It is argued that, historically, while teacher unions were divided along political and ideological lines, they have demonstrated flexibility in contesting for influence in the policy arena. In this regard, teacher unions' agency plays an important part and is reflected in changes in organisational strategies to ensure their independence or prevent marginalisation. The article highlights the threat of state co-optation for teacher unions and suggests that a framework for managing teacher union-state relations based on 'professional unionism' could potentially contribute to more effective education service provision. Comparisons with teacher unions' experiences elsewhere in the world are also made, while recognising the specificity of the South African situation.

While there have been several calls for decolonising the curriculum in South Africa, more needs to be done at the level of policy development and especially its implementation. The curriculum decolonisation impetus gained a few years back has abated somewhat, and there is a need to reinstate its significance amidst other imperatives we face in the current troubling times. There appears to be a reluctance to continue the decolonising journey, not least of all because of the continuing dominance of European hegemony in almost all facets of the lives of decolonised people, especially evident in the education sector, and specifically through the curriculum. The paper argues that without the decolonisation of the predominantly Eurocentric curriculum, the achievement of justice for the colonised remains elusive. This entails focusing the decolonisation debate from the objectification of the colonised to centring the African being, a reconceptualisation of epistemology as pluriversal and greater visibility of the colonised and coloniality as pre-conditions for decolonising the curriculum. The article reviews the South African response to decolonial insights and considers their implications for higher education curriculum development and practice. It identifies changing attitudes of, and ownership by, academic staff as a key challenge in the implementation of a decolonised curriculum and concludes with tabulating the implication of key concepts of decolonial theory for the curriculum.

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