Unearthing the invisible: A critical realist–decolonial framework for reimagining private higher education in South Africa

South African higher education continues to grapple with coloniality as a structuring force that shapes how knowledge becomes legitimate and how curriculum transformation is imagined. While decolonisation has received sustained attention in public universities, private higher education remains less theorised within South African transformation scholarship. This conceptual article addresses that gap by developing a critical realist–decolonial framework for reading private higher education as a site where marketisation and coloniality operate through deeper generative mechanisms. The article draws on published scholarship and policy literature, using theoretical synthesis rather than empirical fieldwork. Critical realism offers an analytical lens to examine how visible institutional practices are generated by less visible causal structures. Its stratified ontology helps explain how curriculum discourse and quality assurance may reproduce epistemic dependency through legitimacy-seeking practices. Dialectical critical realism further sharpens attention to absence and contradiction, especially where African epistemologies and multilingual pedagogies remain weakly institutionalised. Contribution: The article makes six contributions. It brings private higher education into the South African decolonial debate. It shows how coloniality and marketisation quietly shape the legitimacy of the curriculum. It shows how critical realism can deepen decolonial analysis without reducing transformation to policy compliance. It offers a conceptual language for reading absence as a site of unrealised epistemic possibility. It proposes a critical realist–decolonial praxis that connects curriculum transformation to the institutional conditions that enable epistemic justice. It also creates a pathway for future empirical work to assess the framework’s usefulness across postcolonial higher education contexts.