This paper presents preliminary findings, and offers a theoretical discussion on experimental methodologies, around a newly funded research project being conducted in rural South Africa. For 3 years, initiated men working for a non-governmental organization (NGO) in the Vhembe district of Limpopo Province in South Africa, have been holding workshops on the ‘fringes’ of male initiation ceremonies. In these workshops, the NGO workers 'teach' initiates about the connections between sex, sexuality, HIV/AIDS and 'rights' in general. With the full consent of the ritual experts involved in teaching the ritual curriculum, the research project (currently in year 1 of a 3 year funding cycle) has as its aim the translation of this ‘Human Rights’ information into the actual ritual curriculum of the initiation ceremony. Drawing on the broad body of literature on the Anthropology of Knowledge – and intentionally engaging with what has become known as the ‘Decolonial Turn’ in African Studies and specifically in Anthropology, the paper charts how the two groups have negotiated their interactions over the last 3 years, focusing on continuities and contradictions between the Bill of Rights, as it is ‘taught’ on the fringes of initiation ceremonies, and the actual ritual curriculum which, like many bodies of knowledge (from Madagscar to South America, to ‘science’ as a system of belief), maintains legitimacy because of certain claims to association with an unchanging past, whilst remaining relevant because of the ways in which ritual experts weave contemporary concerns into the ‘ways of the past’ through the production of knowledge and ritual process. The paper is thus based on first hand ethnographic research from expremental methodologies, but also seeks to encourage discussion around the way forward for this new, and methodologically innovative research project.