Decolonising rural music education in South Africa: curriculum inequality, contexts, and transformative pedagogical opportunities – a systematic review

This article examines curriculum inequality in South African rural music education, focusing on the urban bias embedded in the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS). While reforms emphasise equity and inclusion, rural schools continue to experience constraints, including inadequate infrastructure, limited resources, teacher-preparation challenges, and weak access to specialised music education. These inequalities are also epistemological: rural learners’ musical knowledge, developed through communal singing, oral-aural transmission, storytelling, dance, drumming, improvisation, and intergenerational participation, remains insufficiently recognised within curriculum and assessment practices. Guided by a decolonial theoretical lens, this study investigates how curriculum structures privilege forms of musical knowledge while marginalising Indigenous musical practices. A systematic literature review of 27 studies was conducted using PRISMA 2020 principles, with evidence synthesised thematically around rural musical inequality, Indigenous musical knowledge, transformative pedagogy, and decolonial assessment. Findings indicate that curriculum reform has not disrupted colonial epistemological hierarchies. Music education frequently privileges Western notation, formal theory, individual performance, and written assessment, while communal, embodied, oral, and improvisational competencies receive limited recognition. The review demonstrates that Indigenous music should be positioned not merely as cultural content but as a legitimate source of curriculum knowledge and pedagogy. The study proposes context-responsive approaches linking local musical practices with formal concepts such as rhythm, melody, form, composition, and performance, alongside multidimensional assessment. It concludes that decolonising rural music education requires epistemic plurality, strengthened teacher preparation, community participation, equitable resources, and assessment practices that recognise diverse forms of musical competence.