Leadership in decolonising education: Navigating complexities and tensions in South African Universities

Decolonisation of education has been a topical debate globally. Previous research largely concentrated on the challenges of decolonising education, while leadership as a change mechanism remains fragmented and under-synthesised. Framed from the decolonial lens, this qualitative review adopts a narrative approach with some elements of PRISMA to map the complexities of implementing decolonisation initiatives by university leaders and then explores the strategies to abate them. We retrieved 18 documents published between 2015 and 2025 from Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, JSTOR, and ScienceDirect to generate data. Findings, thematically analysed, point to problems of decolonisation that revolve around issues related to resistance by staff to decolonise, policy-practice dissonance and the pervasiveness of the Eurocentric paradigms in knowledge production that are perpetuated by institutional cultures. These findings underscore the need for leaders to engage a decolonial mindset, employ a bottom-up leadership approach, reconfigure existing transformation policies, and shift the epistemic paradigms of academics. By understanding these convolutions and strains faced by leadership in decolonising education, educational leaders can open new avenues on how to effectively decolonise education in South African universities. Beyond South Africa, this study serves as a portal for further engagement on the decolonisation agenda across comparable contexts in the global south.