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PUBLISHED: 26 September 2019 Since the era of European exploration, the world has been conquered and nations subdued by imperial powers.1 The evidence of colonisation is explicitly seen in the territorial demarcations on the global map, borders that at times seem to follow little more than natural boundaries chosen to divide territories between competing powers. The borders that demarcate African countries and separate its people are a clear illustration of this. It is within these borders that sovereign states now function and across these borders that international interactions occur. Geography, as an academic discipline which is concerned with both the physical environment and human interactions that occur within and between the borders of nation states, cannot ignore the politics of space. To date, the understanding and production of geographical knowledge continue to be informed by the European colonial modalities of power.1,2 Even though decolonial scholars acknowledge that the modern episteme is saturated with coloniality1, the geography curricula in African higher education does not show or encourage a different way of imagining or describing indigenous places3. One example of this is how indigenous knowledge, and African and indigenous scholarships, continue to be erased or subsumed.4 Much of the current curricula content continue to exclusively credit only international explorers, e.g. Admiral Antonio with Table Mountain, yet most explorers used local field guides who introduced them to most spaces on the continent. Another example is how the curricula are still referring only to colonial names of places despite many indigenous names of places being known in local languages. Curricula also have a long way to go to sufficiently incorporate local ecological knowledge and practices that have wider implications and practical application, especially in topics of relevance to the higher education geography curricula. Evidence already exists that supports that African mythology can be credited for conservation5,6, yet this is not adequately reflected in African geography curricula. It can, however, be justifiably argued that this omission may be a mere consequence of the mediation of knowledge by different communication technologies, which have uneven power dynamics, especially at the global scale.5 It is therefore imperative that geography as a discipline, and geographers as scholars, take it upon themselves to understand the centrality of this discipline within the call to de-colonise higher education and make an ardent effort towards building de-colonial curricula.7 Such acknowledgement, however, can only support the proposition of Bloor8, which is to interrogate popular discourses and established bodies of knowledge through careful historical geographical scholarship to the African geography higher education curricula. One way of doing so, could be by considering the application of post-colonial theory in tackling the decolonisation of the geography curricula.

Shifting sands: The decoloniality of geography and its curriculum in South Africa