This past week, I found myself watching the 1985 adventure film The Jewel of the Nile. Somewhere between the drumming, dancing, wrestling and smiling “Nubian” villagers, I became uncomfortable.

It was not simply the stereotypes. The villagers are not portrayed as bad people. Quite the opposite: they are generous, joyful, spiritual and physically impressive.

But they are uncomplicated. They inhabit the background while other people think, decide and drive the story forward.

Watching them reminded me of something South African actor John Kani has said about the making of Wakanda. While filming Captain America: Civil War, Kani questioned why King T’Chaka would speak English to his son, T’Challa. He and Chadwick Boseman performed the exchange in isiXhosa. What began as a decision about a few lines of dialogue helped establish isiXhosa as the language of Wakanda.

The significance was greater than language. Wakandans did not simply look African. They governed in an African language. They debated, strategised, invented, mourned, disagreed and loved in it. African people were permitted something that earlier representations frequently denied them: complexity.

The thought stayed with me because it raises a question closer to home. For three decades we have spoken about transformation.

Our universities have spent years debating decolonisation. Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) have moved from the margins of academic discussion into legislation through the Protection, Promotion, Development and Management of Indigenous Knowledge Act.

Yet legislation cannot, by itself, decolonise the imagination of an institution. Perhaps that is where our difficulty begins.

Listen carefully to the language through which institutions encounter rural communities and a pattern emerges. People become beneficiaries, stakeholders, participants, target groups and recipients of services. None of the words is offensive. But together they reveal something about where we imagine knowledge and authority to reside.

The government brings policy. Universities bring research. Consultants bring expertise. Communities bring “local knowledge”. We have established the hierarchy before the engagement begins. It helps explain one of the great contradictions of community engagement in democratic South Africa: communities can be consulted and remain unheard.

Meetings can be convened. Attendance registers can be signed. Presentations can be delivered. Comments can be recorded. Reports can state, truthfully, that community engagement took place.

But there is a more difficult test. What changed because the community spoke?

If the answer is little, we should ask whether what occurred was participation or the administration of participation.

This becomes particularly important in rural South Africa because we continue to imagine the communities predominantly through what they lack: infrastructure, jobs, services, investment and development.

We are less practised at seeing what is here.

Rural communities govern land, negotiate conflict, maintain family and kinship systems, preserve ecological knowledge, produce medicines, manage livestock, transmit language and history,

interpret changing cultural practices and negotiate relationships between the living, the environment and generations that came before them.

They also disagree.

This is where our institutions become uncomfortable. The government likes clean lines. Bureaucracies require categories. Funding requires identifiable beneficiaries. Programmes require measurable outcomes. Consultation processes prefer recognised representatives. Reports require conclusions.

Indigenous peoples recovering themselves after centuries of colonial disruption do not necessarily come in clean lines. Nor should they be expected to.

Colonialism and apartheid did not simply dispossess people materially. They disrupted systems of authority, knowledge transmission, language, spirituality, land relations, family structures and identities.

Recovering from that cannot possibly be a neat administrative process.

People will remember differently. Knowledge holders will disagree.

Traditional leaders, healers, women, young people, researchers and community organisations may contest who has authority to speak about particular knowledge.

Practices will change. Some traditions will be defended. Others will be questioned. People will contradict one another while trying to work out what belongs to the past, what belongs in the present and what they want to carry into the future.

That is not evidence of incapacity. It is what it looks like when people are walking towards themselves.

Yet complexity can become the justification institutions use to assume greater authority.

When communities disagree, the government can become the parent: deciding which structures are legitimate, which voices are representative, which knowledge can be recognised and which version of Indigenous identity fits comfortably in an administrative framework.

The paradox is difficult to miss.

We tolerate complexity in the state.

Parliament disagrees. Political parties fracture. Courts overturn government decisions. Policies are amended. Departments contradict one another. Universities spend years debating their own transformation. We call this democracy.

Yet when Indigenous communities exhibit disagreement and contradiction, we can be quick to call it dysfunction. When communities force themselves into public consciousness through protest, disrupted processes or other forms of resistance, the disruption can reinforce the stereotype that justified paternalism: these people are unreasonable; they cannot organise themselves; somebody must manage them.

That is a dangerous circle.It leaves communities facing an impossible choice: remain orderly enough to be administratively manageable and risk being ignored or become disruptive enough to be heard and risk being characterised as incapable of constructive engagement.

This is why the conversation about IKS cannot end with recognising Indigenous knowledge.

Recognition is only the beginning. The more difficult question is whether institutions are willing to surrender some of their authority over what counts as knowledge, who represents it and how relationships with knowledge-holding communities are constructed.

The questions are becoming increasingly important in the Eastern Cape, where universities are beginning to explore what collaboration in the IKS space could look like and what meaningful partnerships with communities might require.

There is something important in the conversation.

But its success will depend on whether universities enter communities looking for knowledge to incorporate into institutional frameworks or whether they are prepared for encounters with communities to change the frameworks.

The distinction is everything.

Kani understood it in a different context. His intervention was not simply about inserting isiXhosa into Hollywood. It was about refusing an imagination of Africans that allowed them to be visible while denying them complexity.

Perhaps South Africa faces the same challenge beyond the cinema screen. The unfinished work of decolonisation may not be simply changing curricula, renaming buildings or recognising IKS in legislation.

It may begin with something more difficult: allowing Indigenous people the space to experience themselves in their complexity, contradiction and becoming — without interpreting the complexity as evidence that somebody else should speak for them. Institutions do not engage communities simply as they are. They engage communities as they imagine them to be.

Before the next policy is designed, consultation convened or Indigenous Knowledge partnership announced, perhaps the first question should not be what rural communities need from us. It should be the question Kani’s intervention forces us to confront: Who have we imagined them to be?

Busisiwe Madikizela-Theu is a lecturer in the department of social development professions at Nelson Mandela University and a final-year PhD candidate in social work at the University of Fort Hare.