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After emerging from its troubled past, postapartheid South Africa adopted a democratic constitution and cosmopolitanism as path to a peaceful future. Cosmopolitanism, once a vibrant tradition at the turn of the 19th century, disappeared from the apartheid historical canon and memory due to the colonial practice of forced removals. The apartheid fallacy that forced removals were necessary because of urban slum conditions and public health reasons obscured its ideological and economic reasons. Apartheid narratives and traumatic memories of forced removals continue in the postapartheid era and mitigate against the establishment of a nonracial, cosmopolitan society. Notwithstanding the dominance of negative memories, a productive, decolonised version of forced removals can make a positive contribution to social cohesion. This paper offers a multiple historical case study of three pre-apartheid cosmopolitan spaces that were destroyed by the Group Areas Act as framework to suggest how ideology critique can be employed as a decolonising pedagogy. A critical notion of cosmopolitanism is appropriated, using the notion of production of space to explain the role of political and social engineering in the making of place during the colonial-apartheid period. Recommendations suggest how to integrate cosmopolitanism, segregation, and forced removals with ideology critique as decolonising pedagogy in teacher education curriculum spaces.

While recognising the contested nature of History as a school subject, this article explores the political context and practical implications of making History compulsory until Grade 12. After twenty one years of democracy, South African society lacks social cohesion, a sense of nationhood and is experiencing occurrences of xenophobia. To address these

This article expounds how a National Research Foundation (NRF) history project evolved into a transdisciplinary study. The article develops a case in favour of transdisciplinary research as a departure from strict discipline-based inquiry. The project involves collaborative research with Master’s students and researchers located at five South African universities. The aim of this article is to evaluate the project as a transdisciplinary case study, intending to focus on its emergence as a history-based discipline, evolving into a transdisciplinary project. It also explores the epistemological value of transdisciplinary research as a knowledge production methodology in the context of the demand for a decolonised curriculum in South Africa. The article is set in the context of a NRF project with a spatiotemporal focus on the District Six forced removals during the colonial-apartheid period. A qualitative instrumental case study design guided the data collection and analyses. Participants’ project proposal texts were used as data. The results show, firstly, that transdisciplinarity is manifested in a wide range of titles and disciplines; secondly, a myriad of conceptual frameworks emerged from the data; and thirdly, a broad spectrum of research approaches emerged, mainly qualitative. Transdisciplinarity focuses on the ‘subject’ and the ‘hidden middle’ as domain where alternative philosophical research orientations are explored. Transdisciplinarity can be regarded as ‘Ubuntu’ research, given the common concern to bring out the ‘voice’ of the subaltern and a rejection of separation of humans into ‘racial’ classifications. As ‘Ubuntu research’, transdisciplinary research rejects an atomistic understanding of reality that excludes the human subject and a separation between human and nature.