Decolonizing the ‘French as a Foreign Language’ University Curriculum through Literature, Interpretation from a South(ern) African Perspective

In this article, the authors examine the decolonization of the FLE (French as a Foreign Language) curriculum in South Africa. More specifically, they concentrate on how literature in the French language has been taught and what transformations can be introduced in order to meet student demands—in 2015 students from the University of Cape Town (South Africa) demonstrated against the colonial spirit which, according to them, still reigned on their campus and in South African universities. Their protest, Rhodes must fall, quickly led to a national movement inspiring students across South Africa to insist on the decolonization of all universities (Knudsen et al. 2019 and Ahmed 2019). A survey (questionnaire and interviews) conducted in 2020 among 10 South African universities sheds light on how to address the decolonization of the FLE curriculum in South Africa. The results provide possible approaches to establishing a decolonized curriculum as well as works and themes to be studied in the literature component. Decolonizing the curriculum is interpreted in two different ways: some stakeholders have a rather extreme view wanting to remove all information originating from Europe and the West from the program. Others feel that content from the West can no longer be at the centre of the curriculum, but should not be left out completely (Luckett et al. 2019; Senekal and Lenz 2020)