Coloniality in motion: African international students as epistemic agents in South African higher education

Abstract

This study examines the experiences of international students (IS) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), interrogating the intersections of internationalisation, transformation and decolonisation within South African higher education. While internationalisation is often framed as evidence of institutional diversity, the research showed that it reproduced epistemic exclusions rooted in colonial hierarchies of knowledge. Drawing on a qualitative, narrative-based and critically interpretive approach, grounded in decolonial and postcolonial epistemologies, the study foregrounds the lived experiences of IS, particularly those from Africa, as epistemic agents navigating cognitive dissonance, hidden curricula and structural marginalisation. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews, participant observation and informal conversations, capturing how students experienced, internalised and resisted institutional norms that privileged Eurocentric knowledge systems. The study advances a novel conceptualisation of African international students as epistemic agents operating within institutional borderlands, offering an Africa-centred framework for rethinking internationalisation beyond assimilationist models. This article exposes contradictions within institutional internationalisation discourses and argues for a reimagining of universities as sites of cognitive justice, pluriversality, and co-produced knowledge. Contribution: This article makes three interrelated theoretical contributions to scholarship on internationalisation and decolonisation in higher education. Firstly, it reconceptualises African international students not as marginal or deficit subjects within global mobility regimes, but as epistemic agents who actively produce, contest, and re-signify knowledge within historically colonial universities. Secondly, by bringing theories of internationalisation-as-coloniality into conversation with borderland and contact zone frameworks, the study theorises the university as a cognitive borderland: a space in which epistemic hierarchies are simultaneously reproduced and disrupted. Thirdly, the article advances an Africa-centred conceptual lens that foregrounds epistemic disobedience, cognitive justice, and pluriversality as analytic tools for understanding how internationalisation can function both as a mechanism of colonial continuity and as a site of epistemic possibility. In doing so, the study extends existing debates beyond descriptive critiques of exclusion, offering a theoretically grounded account of how African international students contribute to epistemic transformation within higher education institutions.