South African scholarship, as a result of the colonial and apartheid context within which it developed, is disciplined by a hegemonic discourse formulated by a 'complex' with linked centres of persuasion interior or exterior to its desired true self. This complex spawns hegemonic limitations that are directly related to the inner beings of various scholar communities as they quarry new paths of intellectualism requisite for a democracy such as South Africa. This article examines this aspect of limitation. The axiomatic point of departure for this examination is the view that hegemony as, strictly speaking, with all things, is an inherently interpretative undertaking grounded in the mortal existentiality of an ideology (to be defended). In the South African context, apartheid and colonialism become a lived background against which scholarship and its hegemonic silences and nuances are foregrounded. The South African lived apar