Curricula should not be decolonised based on partial historical knowledge

If you are going to hide behind a pseudonym, do not address me by my first name. The talk of 'epistemologies and ontologies that have been erased, denied, destroyed' is just performative rhetoric, like various of the claims in Arshad's article. If you want a constructive response, you should provide specifics, and do so in a manner which accords with established meanings of the philosophical concepts of 'epistemology' and 'ontology'. Constructive engagement is all-important for both academics and students, however much you dismiss it, if we are to be educators and thinkers, not just carriers of dogma. For those only interested in the latter, I would suggest some activist organisation is a better home than a university, which is a place of intellectual inquiry.

It's definitely a genuine and valid question. The very fact of grouping people by nation-state is itself questionable and historically a relatively recent phenomenon. Determining collective responsibility/guilt on this basis is no less questionable. Are the children to be punished for the sins of the fathers (or great-great-great grandparents)? Ultimately, I don't really see what collective guilt and atonement on this basis really achieves, other than a type of catharsis. When the King (when he was Prince of Wales) spoke of 'The appalling atrocity of the slave trade, and the unimaginable suffering it caused', which 'left an indelible stain on the history of our world', I think this was meaningful, as he was speaking as one of the leading representatives of that nation (whatever one thinks of the hereditary principle of monarchy, nonetheless at the moment he has assumed this role, and monarchs will continue unless there is major constitutional change). But ultimately we cannot erase history, and what is most important is surely (a) to ensure something like slavery does not happen again and try to halt it when it does (alas forms of less formalised slavery and people trafficking do continue to happen in various parts of the world); (b) to try and address global inequities which are part of the legacy of colonialism and slavery. The lack of global political authorities with real power hinders this (though the creation of more such things would likely cause as many problems as it would solve), so that the division of the world into nation states tends to mean that the citizens of such nation states will expect their governments to prioritise their own interests, not those of citizens elsewhere. This process is not absolute, for sure; Angela Merkel's decision to allow a million Syrian refugees to come to Germany was motivated as much by a sense of global responsibility (and awareness of perceptions of her own country) as necessarily because of the will of German citizens. The same can be said of programmes of international aid and development, or for that matter of nations to intervene militarily in conflicts where they may not have any interests of their own directly involved (though this is relatively infrequent). And some forms of global inequality do have geographical reasons too - some nations are rich in natural resources, from which they can profit; others are not. This is, combined with the size and impregnability of his country, a factor (though by no means the only one) in Vladimir Putin's having the power he does, or why there are some Nigerian citizens who are amongst the world's super-rich. In some cases those who through a mixture of good fortune and also seizing opportunities have been able to amass great wealth are prepared to use some of it to alleviate poverty elsewhere. But I cannot really imagine a situation in which the citizens of any developed country would collectively agree to a marked drop in their own average standard of living to alleviate the fortunes of those elsewhere in the world. Especially not in a democracy, for the reasons of grouping by nation-state mentioned before. To do so would be, I believe, the only meaningful outcome of collective guilt. Unspectacular efforts by inter-governmental organisations and some private benefactors to help those whose plight is at least in part a legacy of colonialism and slavery (at the behest of many powers over history, not just those in the West), through aid, infrastructural improvements, help with building trade, and so on, may be the most which can be realistically hoped for at present. Simply expressing a sense of collective guilt achieves very little in this respect, and can be little more than a performative ritual.