Abstract
The decolonisation of knowledge and pedagogy is widely debated in South Africa, yet the debate has remained overwhelmingly focused on what can be considered formal academic institutions while neglecting other significant sites of knowledge production and pedagogic discourse. This article argues that cultural villages in South Africa constitute powerful but largely overlooked sites of colonial knowledge reproduction, transmitting a hidden curriculum that affirms and naturalises the dehumanising racial stereotypes of coloniality. Drawing on a qualitative comparative fieldwork study at PheZulu Safari Park in KwaZulu-Natal and Lesedi Cultural Village in Gauteng, and engaging substantively with the scholarly debates on representation and cultural tourism, the article demonstrates that the curricula and pedagogic discourses of many of the South African cultural villages are products of and producers of coloniality that reproduce essentialised notions of nationhood, primitivism, savagery, and the sexualisation of black women’s bodies. It further argues that any credible project of decolonising knowledge must extend its scope beyond the modern/colonial university institution to encompass all sites of knowledge production within which what Quijano calls the “colonial matrix of power” disseminates its scripts, including cultural villages, museums and the media. The article situates this argument within the most recent debates on decolonising tourism praxis, the politics of authenticity and the persistence of the colonial gaze in post-apartheid cultural representation.