Where Angels Fear to Tread: Teachers Working Towards Decolonising the Life Sciences Curriculum in the South

Indigenous knowledge is one epistemology that has been marginalised by oppressive policies worldwide. Post-apartheid South Africa sought to address this by proposing a multitude of changes to craft a curriculum that addressed the social justice agenda. More recently, an overt call specifically for the decolonisation of education in South Africa emerged as a response to the exclusion of black African people and their knowledges. We seized this curriculum moment to buttress contestations of the hegemony of the global North by tapping into indigenous knowledge from the African continent as one source of Southern theory. We explored how teachers could practically work towards the decolonisation of a unit of work in the Life Sciences Grade 11 school curriculum, based on the topic Tuberculosis, a disease that continues to manifest as an enormous burden in the global South. Two black African teachers and an indigenous spiritual healer (Isangoma) were purposively selected to participate in this qualitative study. Data from document analysis, teacher reflections, interviews, and observations, were analysed thematically using concepts of mourning, dreaming, and commitment, as constructed by Chilisa, as part of the decolonisation process. This study is significant to policymakers and educators who work towards disrupting the single epistemic underpinnings of science education.