Education – its epistemology, organization in schools and universities, its pedagogy – has been at the nexus of “project modernity.” This is equally true for seminal anti-colonial leadership. From Sun Yat-sen, leading China's first revolution in 1911, to Jomo Kenyatta leading the struggle for Kenya's independence from British colonial rule, most anti-colonial leaders were trained in Western universities. Or they received their education in colonial schools, often set up by Christian missionaries, based on Western pedagogic principles. And, so today, the debate on decolonization – as in the decolonization of history, or of the curriculum – takes place in our universities.

But the anti-colonial elites, by and large (with some exceptions, including possibly Franz Fanon), would have found much (but not all) of the decolonization argument in present-day Western universities puzzling. This is because in large part the anti-colonial elite embraces the project of modernity that has emerged in the West. They largely rejected their own traditional elite's rule and norms, from the Confucian literati in China to the tribal elders in Kenya. They embrace modernity's core concepts of science and progress, while of course rejecting the hegemony, conquest and racism of the imperial powers.

When reading of “decolonization” in today's universities, in public discourse decolonization is presented as a process in which colonized voices from Asia, Africa and Latin America have been sidelined, and in which historically the voices before colonization need to be retrieved (Newbigin 2019).