Colonial heritage confronted: reflections about South Africa, Brazil and the United States

On March 9, 2015 hundreds of students began a movement at the prestigious University of Cape Town (UCT) for the campus retreat of the statue of Cecil Rhodes, representative of English colonialism in the nineteenth century. That same year, in November, Princeton University students occupied the rectory demanding that the name of Woodrow Wilson, a defender of black segregation in the southern US, was removed from one of the campus buildings. In May of that year, the Federal University of Goiás (UFG) was the first university to implement vacancies reserved for indigenous, afro-descendants and disabled people in postgraduate courses. The objective of this article is to understand and analyze the strength of these phenomena, which are understood in this reflection as decolonial demands with global and local dimensions.