Navigating Colonial Legacies in Universities: Insights from Student Activism and Resilience in South Africa

Abstract

Notwithstanding the cruciality of the decolonisation project in decentring African perspectives and experiences in education, very few studies have explored the extent to which the Fallist Movements in South Africa have presented foundational pathways for academic staff to negate colonial legacies and recentre African thought systems. Through a systematic literature review of research from the public domain, this study couched within the decolonial lens explored university students’ concerns, embedded in the Fallist Movements in South Africa, and how academic staff could draw lessons from student actions to decolonise education. After screening the initial 65 entries, based on the exclusion and inclusion criteria, 19 research studies published between 2015 and 2025 were retained for analysis. Findings reveal three recurring concerns: disrupting positionality in colonial categories of universities, reasserting their Being, and agitating for a decolonised curriculum, of which these embodied the spirit of students’ resilience against cultural colonisation, epistemic erasure, and economic exclusion. Building on these findings, the paper argues that such resilience from students enlightens the strategies academic staff could learn to transform the decolonisation project into reality. Implications for the academic community in South Africa and comparable contexts are proposed to resuscitate the unfinished business of decolonising education.