Grappling With Curriculum Decolonisation in South African Primary Schools: The School Managers Perceptions

This study aimed to explore the South African school managers (principals) perceptions of how they cope with the contested view of curriculum decolonization. Situated in the pragmatic and phenomenological paradigm, the study adopted a mixed approach and utilizes a descriptive phenomenological design to examine the school managers lived experiences of the curriculum decolonization agenda in their schools. A total of 20 participants was sampled for the data generation process, which followed the completion of unstructured questionnaires. The qualitative data were analysed thematically, while quantitative data was analysed using inferential statistics. The key conclusion arrived at was that true freedom has not yet been obtained in South Africa given that genuine curriculum transformation towards decolonization has not happened at the required rate and the country is still reeling in a state in which the non-achievement of goals set out at the dawn of the democracy really need a critical re-examination. Even though the South African government has made several commitments towards free education, the issue of curriculum decolonization or a decolonised education system has remained a gray area (Sathorar & Geduld, 2018). The demand for curriculum decolonization has been directed specifically at the tertiary education level where students have been raising some red flags owing to the lack of curriculum transformation in higher and tertiary education particularly at university levels (Mutekwe, 2017). Part of the claims for a decolonised school curriculum include that some out-dated colonised content continues to be window-dressed as the decolonised curriculum (Sathorar & Geduld, 2018). Proponents of a decolonised curriculum, for example, Mbembe (2016), Le Grange (2018) and Mutekwe (2017) agree that school curricular pedagogies tend to resemble Western strategies most of which are foreign to the student population and this often hampers not only their progress but also makes them endure the effects of racism in their schools and lecture halls. As a result, they have called for real