Between Inheritance and Emancipation: Decolonizing Curriculum and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy in Anglophone African Higher Education
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Abstract
Despite six decades of post-independence reform, Eurocentric epistemologies continue to structure teaching, learning, and knowledge production in Anglophone African higher education. The decolonial turn catalyzed by the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall movement has remained geographically skewed toward South Africa and the Global North, leaving the experiences of East and West African institutions significantly underrepresented in the literature. This paper synthesizes evidence on how decolonizing curriculum and culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) are understood, enacted, and constrained across four Anglophone African countries: Kenya, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Botswana. A critical literature review was conducted, drawing on 40 peer-reviewed and institutional sources published between 1986 and 2025. The analytical framework integrates Shahjahan et al.'s tripartite decolonizing curriculum and pedagogy (DCP) model with Gay's culturally responsive teaching theory. Three cross-cutting tensions structure the literature: the tension between cosmetic curriculum diversification and genuine epistemic transformation; the tension between international accreditation requirements and locally grounded knowledge systems; and the tension between individual faculty agency and institutional inertia. Decolonizing curriculum and embedding CRP require not only policy declaration but structural reform of assessment frameworks, faculty development systems, language policy, and research incentive structures. The paper proposes four institutional pathways for translating decolonial intent into pedagogical practice across Anglophone African higher education contexts.
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