This paper considers the black student as an emerging representative of the public intellectual's confrontation with history, institutional culture and language in the #FMF student protests. It pursues the manifestation of this confrontation through an analysis of specific episodes of articulation and events where the student as public intellectual encounters an academia that is incapable of comprehending or conceptualizing their demands. The protests animated the emerging black student public intellectual's projection into being and their confrontation with history, violence and academia. This paper examines the collaboration between the state and university as mechanisms of control to preserve the system and structure of neo-apartheid in a post-1994 South African society. I argue that the fixation with subjective violence, detracted from the greater, yet hidden narrative—that of the possibility of violence as ubiquitous in human social relations. Violence is also used to negate power. In confronting a powerful racist history and systems of racism, the #Fallists reference to the on-going complex levels of violence lived as a reality by black South Africans, could be understood as a form of social power to unchain the forced consensus that has been perpetuated around black violence and black ineptitude.

Nyamnjoh's #RhodesMustFall is a timely release that unapologetically incorporates through a critical discourse analysis, the nuances and debates buried in the mainstream analysis of the various Fallist Movements. Nyamnjoh follows pertinent narratives about the #RhodesMustFall protests and of the need to re-evaluate transformation beyond the obsession of symbols (pp 84-85). The protests are about "revolting against the terms of engagement dictated to them" (p 84) and about deep seated frustrationswith the nature, extent and type of transformation that had been taking place (p157).

The #FMF protests at the University of Pretoria (UP) and universities across South Africa reflected a confrontation with power and an exhibition of distrust in democratic institutions. #Fallists consciously chose to challenge pre-determined notions of 'the right to education' and the pervasiveness of gatekeeping and access. These were questions intricately linked with their past. On all campuses, including UP, the #Fallists encountered many challenges. At UP, students who had affiliated themselves with the AfriForum Jeug student society contested very specifically the 'rights' that the #Fallists were demanding. This paper involves a modest attempt at formulating the possibilities that have been opened up by considering the #MustFall events in light of the responses by white Afrikaans speaking students. In this case study, one of the challenges faced by the #Fallists at UP was the opposition they encountered from AfriForum Jeug. How was this tug-o-war to be read and understood? The AfriForum case study is particularly relevant since it has been significantly argued that a dominant motivation and rationale for participation in the #MustFall protests included a pushback against persistent inequality and racism.

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In order to know how to change one must be able to acknowledge what one does not know. Central to knowledge production of relevance is humility and an understanding of the realities of one’s own environment. From a decolonial perspective, knowledge production is affected by the development and creation of the actual physical spaces of the university and its pedagogy. The Covid_19 pandemic has tested the functionality of the physical space of the university as well as the organization of the city space. This paper considers these issues, their impact and effect on the mental well-being of both academics and students by exploring the idea of the university as a virtuous city. We draw on Al-Farabi’s treatise of the Virtuous City because physical and conceptual architectures reflect a way in which the world is structured. In South Africa, the violent design of the fragmented spaces has been planned according to the colonial, cartographic imagination which destroys and distorts memory and ruptures tradition. The architecture of the cities and universities, it can be argued, effect a similar process, and serve as an affirmation of the pre-dominance of the white-supremacist power structure in South Africa. Cities are created by people and each city is a creation of the interaction of social, economic, cultural, and political imperatives. The university is a micro-manifestation of the cosmopolitan city that adopts different approaches to knowledge, decolonisation and transformation. In re-imaging and reconstituting the westernised South African university an appropriate approach to reaching the ideals of well-being and harmony would require the shedding of the ego and the Cartesian “I”. The process of decolonising the university should occur by deconstructing and recognising colonial methods, theories and practise in our pedagogy and spaces in order to begin the process of reconstruction.