In short
What does decolonising the curriculum mean?
It means teaching empire from the evidence: naming what colonial states did, using the records those states produced themselves, treating the colonised as authors rather than subjects, and following the economic consequences into the present. It is not the removal of content, and it is not a substitute for chronology, sources or argument — it is stricter about all three than most national curricula currently are.
Most national curricula in former colonial powers spend more time on the wars empires fought with each other than on what those empires did to the people they governed. This hub is the practical remedy: five units, each anchored to one documented case, with the archive attached.
Licence
What you may do with this material
- Licence
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — copy, print, adapt, translate, teach
- Cost
- Free, with no registration and no data collection
- Level
- Ages 14+ — UK Key Stage 4/5, US grades 9–12, IB, A-level
- Languages
- The underlying case-study pages exist in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Arabic
- Citation
- Every figure on the linked pages carries its source and method
Curriculum
The five units
Unit 1 · Two lessons
Rubber and quotas: the Congo Free State, 1885–1908
- Enquiry question
- How can a country be owned by one man?
- Primary sources
- The Casement Report (1904); Alice Seeley Harris's photographs; company quota records
- Skills assessed
- Source reliability; corporate versus state responsibility; reading photographs as evidence
Unit 2 · Two lessons
Famine as policy: Bengal, 1943
- Enquiry question
- Can a famine be a political decision?
- Primary sources
- Famine Inquiry Commission (1945); wartime shipping and export records; Cabinet telegrams
- Skills assessed
- Causation; distinguishing scarcity from distribution; evaluating official inquiry findings
Unit 3 · Two lessons
The first genocide of the century: the Herero and Nama, 1904–08
- Enquiry question
- What makes a killing campaign a genocide?
- Primary sources
- Von Trotha's extermination order; German general staff reports; the 1918 Blue Book
- Skills assessed
- Defining genocide; continuity between colonial and later European violence
Unit 4 · One to two lessons
Camps and paperwork: Kenya's Emergency, 1952–60
- Enquiry question
- Why were the files hidden until 2011?
- Primary sources
- The migrated archive; the 2013 UK settlement; detainee testimony
- Skills assessed
- Archives and state secrecy; using court records as historical evidence
Unit 5 · Three lessons
Land and law: South Africa, 1652–1994
- Enquiry question
- How does a law create poverty that outlives it?
- Primary sources
- Natives Land Act 1913; Truth and Reconciliation Commission report; current land and wealth data
- Skills assessed
- Long-run causation; reading statutes; connecting past law to present data
Method
How to decolonise a curriculum in five steps
- Start from a documented case. Empire taught in the abstract invites opinion; empire taught from one archive invites analysis.
- Hand students the coloniser's own paperwork. Inquiry reports, statutes, orders and telegrams are harder to dismiss than any commentary.
- Teach the numbers as contested. Give the range and the method, and ask students to justify a choice between estimates.
- Include colonised writers as authors. Plaatje, Nehru, Césaire, Fanon and detainee testimony are sources, not decoration.
- End in the present. Land registers, debt schedules and museum catalogues show which colonial arrangements never ended.
Classroom
Answering the four objections students raise
Beyond the units
Where to take it next
- What schools skip, country by country — a comparison of what eight national curricula omit.
- Who colonized which country — a country-by-country reference for setting homework.
- The timeline and glossary — printable classroom reference.
- Documentaries and films — screening options with running times.
- Our methodology — how every figure in the archive is sourced, for students who ask.
Questions
Frequently asked
- What does decolonising the curriculum mean?
- It means teaching the history of empire from the evidence and from all sides: naming what colonial states did, using the sources the colonisers themselves produced, including the perspectives of colonised peoples, and treating economic consequences as part of the historical record rather than an optional debate topic. It does not mean removing content or replacing history with opinion.
- How do I teach colonialism in the classroom?
- Start with one documented case, give students the primary sources, and ask them to weigh competing figures. The five lesson units on this page each pair a case study — the Congo Free State, the Bengal famine, the Herero and Nama genocide, the Kenyan Emergency, apartheid South Africa — with the archival evidence and a set of questions that require the evidence to answer.
- Are these lesson plans free to use?
- Yes. Everything in this archive is published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, so teachers, parents and students may copy, print, adapt and translate it for classroom use provided the source is credited.
- What age group is this material suitable for?
- The units are written for roughly ages 14 and up (UK Key Stage 4, US grades 9–12, IB and A-level). Some archival photographs are graphic; each unit flags where teacher discretion is needed and suggests a written substitute.
- How do I answer 'but the empire built railways'?
- With the accounts. Colonial infrastructure was financed by taxing the colonised, routed to serve extraction rather than internal trade, and paid for at rates set by the coloniser. The comparison question to put to students is not whether a railway existed but who paid, who profited and who was permitted to use it.