Dr Lwazi Lushaba told the Steve Biko memorial lecture at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha on 11 September 2026 that South Africa remains trapped by colonial structures, particularly in its knowledge systems, thirty years after apartheid ended.
SABC News reported Lushaba’s remarks from the lecture. CapeFlats.co.za has not independently verified a second source confirming the event’s date and venue.
“The project of re-Africanisation quite correctly holds colonialism to be its reason. The necessity for re-Africanisation emanates directly from the logic of colonialism. And as such, a proper understanding of what colonialism is and what colonialism means is a precondition for a successful re-Africanisation programme,” Lushaba said.
Lushaba, a scholar specialising in decolonisation studies, argued universities continue to privilege Western epistemologies while treating African knowledge as supplementary. This persists despite the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student protests that rocked campuses across the country in 2015 and 2016.
His criticism follows blunt remarks made on the Thabo Mbeki Foundation podcast on 13 July 2026, where Lushaba called much of South African decolonisation scholarship “mediocre” and driven by academic careerism rather than genuine transformation. He suggested scholars often perform radical critique while remaining comfortably embedded in the institutional structures they claim to oppose.
The memorial lecture, held annually to honour the Black Consciousness leader murdered by apartheid police in 1977, provided a platform for Lushaba to tie historical struggles to present failures. He told attendees that dismantling coloniality requires more than demographic change in lecture halls or the renaming of buildings.
An academic article, ‘The Lingering Coloniality of Knowledge,’ published on 26 November 2025, had already positioned Lushaba as a key thinker contextualising the stalled decolonisation movement in post-apartheid higher education. Research cited in the article points to policy shifts that remain largely performative.
What remains unknown is whether the university administration formally responded to Lushaba’s critique, and whether any new curriculum reviews will be announced in the coming weeks. A CapeFlats.co.za reporter will check for updates by Monday. Unconfirmed, we are checking with Nelson Mandela University.