The need for the disruption of the hegemonic Western knowledge systems (WKS) in South African university has heightened in the last decade. The university has responded by encouraging transformation of curricula and, specifically, the rethinking of the postcolonial intellectual project that advances ideas rooted from African experience

There is growing academic discourse on the role of the African language literary archive in the reclamation of African knowledge systems (AKS) that have been undervalued through colonialism.

The value of a textual African language archive is two-fold: it provides a framework for the investigation  of social, philosophical, political and related issues and, secondly, the lexicon of a language provides  insights into word meanings and therefore gives a glimpse into a society’s conceptualization about phenomena at the time of writing. This is significant in the recovery of knowledge that was deliberately obliterated in institutions of power, and epistemologisation of African experience, as an integral part of decolonisation of education in South African context .

This contribution is a reflective account of the republication of archival texts written in the 1880s by selected isiXhosa-speaking African intellectuals who wrote just after the acquisition of writing and at the early point of native contact with Europeans. It discusses strategies used in their diplomatic presentation, and their translation into English. I end off by illustrating how these texts can be a response to the curriculum decolonization project by inserting the thoughts and knowledge of their authors in the intellectual debates in the academy. The intention is not to displace WKS, but to validate AKS and present them as “legitimate” knowledge in curriculum transformation.