Earlier this month (4 September 2025), the University of the Witwatersrand held a colloquium on ‘The Borders of Transformation: The Continent and the South African University’. This colloquium considered competing and complementary approaches to race and nationality in South African higher education, at a moment that marks ten years since the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall protests, as well as being characterised by the increasing visibility and weaponisation of national and international xenophobia.
Opening the colloquium, Wits University’s Head of School of Social Sciences, Lorena Núñez Carrasco posed the following provocation:
“So what can we do? Yes, we must keep speaking out against politicians who use fear and division to gain power. Yes, we must push for sound evidence-based policies on healthcare, taxation, education and more. But is that enough? Today is about going further. We are here to restart the conversations students began a decade ago. We are asking ourselves what role should we, as academics and institutions, play in shaping a fairer future? What are our goals? What stands in our way, and what tools and resources do we have to work with? This won’t be an easy conversation. We hope it will be an honest and respectful one. Since the Fallest movement, it sometimes feel like we’ve been becoming a bit like a family that avoids difficult topics just to keep the peace. But today is not the day to stay silent. Today we speak.”
These questions were not only a reflection on the Fallist movements, but on a three-decade-long history of contentious post-Apartheid efforts to align the country’s universities with broader commitments to equity and progressive social change. This colloquium also considered future institutional trajectories in an era of resource scarcity, persistent domestic and global inequality, and rampant populist anti-intellectualism.
The colloquium was split into two panels. The first panel focused on “transformation after the ‘decolonial turn'”. Its speakers were Mxolisi Makhubo (University of Johannesburg), Fikile Masikane (University of Pretoria) and Srila Roy (Wits University), and was chaired by Nicky Falkof (SARCHi Chair in Critical Diversity Studies).
The second panel discussed “the future of the South/African university”, and featured Salim Vally (University of Johannesburg), William Mpofu (Wits University), Samia Chasi (Wits University), whilst being chaired by Loren Landau (SARCHi Chair in Mobility and the Politics of Difference).
At its heart, the colloquium asked how universities, and the scholars and activists housed within them, can respond to stormy political waters and to potentially competing visions of justice and transformation. What it might mean to be an African university in South Africa, and what it would take to realise that vision.
Catch up with this riveting conversation by watching the videos below:
