When the critical eye turns toward the space of the university, it is apt to detect anomalies and to rest on places where things do not join up, or at which they terminate abruptly. This disjuncture and incompletion can be physically palpable on campus—as with the flight of steps at the University of Zambia in Lusaka, which ascends into thin air, only to be blocked by a wall. The story has it that the Israeli builders, who stopped work after Zambia severed diplomatic ties with Israel in 1973, the year of the Fourth Arab-Israeli War, took the architects’ plans with them when they left the country, leaving their successors with no idea where those stairs were meant to go.Footnote ¹

Having grown up in Cape Town, where a freeway flyover ends in space a couple of stories above the ground, its construction having been suspended in 1977, I know how such structures can become unintended monuments to plans and ambitions thwarted or curtailed.

The anomaly need not, however, be physically palpable. It can be a deviation of a more abstract order—say, in the conventionalized ordering of space—that arrests the critical eye, which then, noting the anomaly, and powerless before it, moves off, in a train of association, to a topic for which criteria are more readily available.

This is what appears to take place when the narrator of Thando Mgqolozana’s 2014 novel, Unimportance, observes: “There is no I-block; from H you tunnel through to J. Whoever planned this university wasn’t well acquainted with the alphabet, and it is safe to assume that it was a ‘he,’ since we are not told of women building apartheid universities in the sixties, although they might have been.”Footnote ²

The University of the Western Cape (UWC), although not named in the novel, is where Unimportance is set. Zizi, the narrator of the novel, is describing the Ruth First residence where he lives. Ruth First, in fact, does not have an I-block.Footnote ³ Less easily established than this fact are criteria for judgment—in other words: What to make of the elision of “I”? An architect could tell you that the letter “I” is customarily omitted from alphabetical series in plans and on scale models because it is easily mistaken for the number “1.”Footnote ⁴ It is not impossible that at UWC the architect’s plans were executed to the letter.

Zizi displays no knowledge of architects’ practices, however. And his quip about the planner of the university not knowing the alphabet is unconvincing, absurd, even to him. So he moves to another terrain: “it is safe to assume that it was a ‘he,’ ” and a received narrative—acceptable to his audience because its underlying criteria are hegemonic—but the veracity of which is in doubt: “although they might have been.”

Unimportance is a novel about men and women, in which “he” is under constant interrogation by Zizi, who, as his organization’s candidate for Student Representative Council (SRC) president in the upcoming election, faces possible exposure for assaulting his girlfriend, Pamodi, and possibly even a criminal complaint; at first, he fears exposure, then he realizes that he has to tell the truth and to let the voters make their choice.

The novel itself is the extended speech that Zizi delivers as candidate. The lesson toward which it builds is his own unimportance, which is comprehended and realized through the process of writing and giving his three-hour address: “But it is not the consequence of truth-telling that matters, it is the act itself. I don’t matter (although before last night I did): it is what I have done that does. We will soon find out what the function of truth in politics is.”Footnote ⁵ In a story about an “I” ceasing to matter, it is not insignificant that, when the speaker’s eye turns to campus space, of all the letters of the alphabet, it is “I” that is elided.

An elision of the “I” can lead to fundamental questions about the university, as an institution founded on the principle of reason—which demands that reasons be given, and consequently occasions an inquiry into origins, and an investigation of cause and effect—although that inquiry can stop short of asking about the origin of that demand itself.

Referring to Heidegger in “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils” (1983), a meditation inspired in part by the unique topography of Cornell University, with its steep ravines, Derrida observes that “[t]he modern dominance of the principle of reason had to go hand in hand with the interpretation of the essence of beings as objects, an object present as representation (Vorstellung), an object placed and positioned before a subject. This latter, a man who says ‘I,’ an ego certain of itself, thus ensures his own technical mastery over the totality of what is.” On the other hand, according to Heidegger, “nowhere [within the university] do we find this principle thought, scrutinized, interrogated as to its origin.” The university’s activities are thus “elaborated above an abyss, suspended over a ‘gorge’—by which we mean on grounds whose own grounding remains invisible and unthought.”Footnote ⁶

In this light, Zizi’s musings, although they reveal a curiosity about his own university’s origins, also suggest how the self-certainty of the inquiring ego can be undercut by the topic of those musings—a physical topos that reveals, symbolically, both that the subject’s objects are not “before” it and that the masculine subject “I” is itself not grounded.

In Unimportance, campus space is being read like a book, and it is full of mistakes. The culprit needs to be identified, although “his” mistakes may never be corrected. In an ekphrasis, what is before the critical eye leads the viewer to invent a narrative. The stones speak, and space is turned into time.

Who is the culprit? It is “he,” and it is apartheid—because this is one of the “apartheid universities.” The university was erected by the government in the early 1960s at a site adjacent to Bellville South, an urban area near Cape Town reserved for Coloured people under apartheid “group areas” policy.Footnote ⁷ It was part of a “nearly realized attempt . . . to create a self-governing homeland for Coloureds,” Zizi tells his audience, “a college that was meant to be exclusive to that group of people.”Footnote ⁸ Zizi free associates from a pair of mating cats on the roof of a student residence to the fact that some of the original land for the college was annexed from the Cape Flats Nature Reserve. Part of the reserve remains, abutting the campus to the southwest.Footnote ⁹ “Thus,” Zizi observes, “we find ourselves in a nature reserve in search of higher learning.”Footnote ¹⁰ For a long time, UWC was known colloquially as “Bush,” which explains why, in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, Zoë Wicomb would write about UWC as a “clearing in the bush.”Footnote ¹¹ Key signifiers in a continuum of negative ones, including the bush and the animal, both he and apartheid are terms stemming from criteria that Zizi can “safe[ly] . . . assume” to be hegemonic, even if the relevant facts remain in question.

By concentrating solely on its founding moment, Zizi’s history of UWC elides developments of enormous importance. When, in 1987, in his vice-chancellor’s inaugural address, Jakes Gerwel (1946–2012), a scholar celebrated for his work on race in Afrikaans literature,Footnote ¹² issued a plea for UWC to provide an “intellectual home for the Left,” and declared that “in our orientation we are involved in the creative conceptualisation of a future community beyond the destructiveness of an apartheid order,”Footnote ¹³ his was the latest in a series of challenges made by students and academics at the university to the apartheid state’s rationale for its founding.Footnote ¹⁴ According to Premesh Lalu:

The UWC student residences named in Unimportance reflect the attempt at remaking the university as a home for the nonracial democratic left: Ruth First, Basil February, Chris Hani, Cecil Esau, Colleen Williams, Eduardo Dos Santos. In Zizi’s speech, however, the university is represented as if nothing changed between its founding moment in 1963, and 2007, the year in which Mgqolozana’s novel appears to be set.

This is a view that may reflect changes since the advent of nonracial democracy in 1994, in which political polarization increased in the Western Cape between Coloureds and Africans; Coloured voters helped to deliver the National Party a majority in the elections for the Western Cape provincial legislature in 1994.Footnote ¹⁶ It may also reflect a resurgence of Black Consciousness on campus in a form not as racially inclusive as in the 1970s, when Indians and Coloureds affirmed themselves as “Black”—what I think Lalu means when he writes that Black Consciousness shook the foundations of the racial logic of the university. As Lalu also notes, then a lecturer in Afrikaans and Nederlands, “Gerwel himself had participated in the movement’s meteoric rise on the UWC campus in the mid-1970s.”Footnote ¹⁷

If Unimportance shows how student politicians read history selectively, Becoming UWC, the book in which Lalu’s reflections appear, also presents an incomplete account of the university’s history. Published to commemorate UWC’s fiftieth anniversary, it looks back mainly to the 1970s, and especially to the 1980s, the years that another contributor to the volume calls a “heroic, mythic decade.”Footnote ¹⁸ The subsequent two decades are referred to in a cursory way, as if giving a nod to those already well informed,Footnote ¹⁹ but they are never the object of the kind of sustained analysis directed at the seventies and eighties. The silences and elisions, in Becoming UWC, as well as in Unimportance, are signs of a contest, ongoing and unresolved, over UWC’s history.

What would an analysis of the years after the 1980s show? One such analysis contends that, perhaps by the late 1980s, and certainly by the early 1990s, the democratic nonracialism espoused by Gerwel had foundered on the realities of campus politics—realities surely shaped in part by the view, accepted by Gerwel and guiding his ideological alignment of the university, that “in the Congress tradition . . . non-racialism in South Africa implies ‘non-racialism under the leadership of the African majority.’”Footnote ²⁰ When Lalu tells us that nonracialism diminished the appeal of Black Consciousness,Footnote ²¹ what he does not explain is that the former effectively reintroduced and reinforced a racial division between Africans and Coloureds that, in the 1970s, the latter had done something to address. In addition, African students, who constituted a majority at UWC by 1994, had begun to advocate for issues that were, in general, understood as distinct from the main material concerns of Coloured students.Footnote ²²

One of these issues was fees, which, for African students studying far from home, included the cost of living in campus residences; new ones were built in the late 1980s to accommodate the increase in student numbers after the university adopted a policy of open admissions in 1982. It is thus no accident, assuming that this situation persists more or less unchanged into the new millennium, that, in the space of the university as described in Unimportance, the student residence is the locus of maximum investment, socially, politically, and psychically. At one level, this is typical: the division, in South Africa, between town- and hostel-dweller, produced by the migrant labor system, but in this case also by the particular geographical location and admissions policy of the university. The division, which, at UWC, is broadly a division between African and Coloured students,Footnote ²³ does not disappear with the naming of the residence buildings after Coloured, African, and White struggle heroes. A reduction in the apartheid government’s subsidies in reaction to UWC’s open admissions policy led to a fiscal crisis and the raising of fees by the university administration, resulting in the exclusion of students unable to pay, which in turn led to protests, including a series of class boycotts in 1992. Under the leadership of African students, and broadly opposed by Coloured students, despite boycott having been used as a strategy in the 1960s and 1970s against the white-dominated university administration of those days, the boycotts further deepened racial divisions on campus.Footnote ²⁴

Mgqolozana’s Unimportance, insofar as it is aligned with Zizi’s perspective, depicts Coloureds as controlling the upper levels of university administration, and Africans as dominating student politics.Footnote ²⁵ This depiction may be broadly accurate in fact, given what is known about UWC, and, although Zizi’s interactions with university administrators are by no means confrontational, it may also serve the political need for a clearly defined adversary, especially in contemporary politics in the Western Cape, where the African National Congress was in power from 2003 to 2009 before the Democratic Alliance began its current period of dominance. Whatever its motivation, when Zizi’s speech highlights UWC’s founding as an “apartheid university” for Coloureds, without mentioning subsequent changes in its orientation, including a questioning of its act of foundation, it oversimplifies the history that has made it distinctive among South African universities, and continues to complicate any assessment of its achievements.

A reference to the past automatically provides criteria for decisions in the present, even as that reference draws on current criteria. But there is a nagging suspicion that the spatial anomaly noted by the critical eye is not explicable by them, or at least not convincingly, because the narrative to which they give rise may not be accurate.

The years 2015 and 2016 saw the rise of the South African campus movements #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) and #FeesMustFall (#FMF). Emerging at the University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand, respectively, they soon spread to other universities, gaining differing degrees of support and influence.Footnote ²⁶ In contrast to the SRCs, and the existing student political organizations from whom many of their participants came, they were loose in structure and leaderless after the style of Occupy Wall Street and similar movements.Footnote ²⁷ For mobilization and publicity, they employed social media in distinctive ways. The actions of participants in the movements were at times violent, notably in the destruction of university buildings, but on occasion also included intimidation and assault.Footnote ²⁸ Some justified the violence by referring to the writings of Frantz Fanon.Footnote ²⁹

Unimportance was published the year before these movements emerged, and, in fact, appears to be set earlier than 2014, perhaps in the second half of 2007, as the Jacob Zuma-Thabo Mbeki African National Congress (ANC) succession struggle was at its height.Footnote ³⁰ It is therefore fascinating how Mgqolozana’s novel anticipates some of the profound questions raised about the university in South Africa by #RMF and #FMF,Footnote ³¹ and, in so doing, also helps its readers to place the hashtag movements in historical perspective.

Reading campus space, Zizi divines something about time, producing a historical narrative as a linear succession of causally related events, although he has doubts about the ultimate veracity of the history that he asks his audience to entertain.

#RMF also cast a critical eye toward campus space, turning a monument into a history governed by criteria as hegemonic as those Zizi applies to “I-block.” A difference is that Zizi’s musings do not mandate change, whereas #RMF was clear about the ekphrasis voicing an imperative: the statue of Rhodes is a sign and synecdoche of colonization; if there was colonization, there must be decolonization; if the university is a colonized space, it must be decolonized. The call is for the reversal of a linear causal sequence. That reversal, so the story goes, began in March 2015, with the throwing of feces at, and removal a few weeks later, by the University of Cape Town, of the statue that it had erected in 1934 in honor of Cecil John Rhodes.Footnote ³² But there is a twist in how this reversal gives rise to “history.” When criteria are applied retrospectively, “colonization” and “colonialism” are given meanings dependent on what policies and actions are styled as “decolonizing” for those who advocate and strive to define them. The danger is that, even if what is being advocated is just, the history that ensues may turn out to be flawed or false.

After #RMF, according to the restricted chronology of the first draft of history, came #FMF. At one level, this was simply a verbal repetition, a play of hashtag witticism that would produce other “MustFall”s in 2015 and 2016,Footnote ³³ urging the coinage of the new political terms Fallism and Fallist so that the flux of ideas and events could be given a name. At another level, however, the meaning of fall changed from being a spatial metaphor (applied to another metaphor: Rhodes) with a mandated finality, to a spatial metaphor applied to change according to a measurable periodicity.Footnote ³⁴ In other words, as “Rhodes” gave way to “fees,” linearity gave way to cyclicality.

Much debate has occurred as to the relationship between #RMF and #FMF. We are probably beyond the simplistic idea that #FMF developed out of #RMF, based on the fact that #RMF was chronologically first in the restricted timespan of 2015–2016. More seasoned commentators point to the fact that, at the campuses that Unimportance refers to as “apartheid universities,” protests against fee increases and the financial exclusion of students long predated 2015.Footnote ³⁵ At UWC, as we have observed, they date back to the late 1980s. An annual occurrence, they assume a cyclicality, and even a seasonality.Footnote ³⁶ This cyclicality is now understood as a general feature of the campus movements.Footnote ³⁷

For more astute political analysts, the question then becomes: At what point do events that occur with this cyclical regularity move off at a tangent—which then has the linear effect of “making history” by, for example, confronting neoliberal tendencies in ANC governance? These effects are at the heart of the published academic debate about #FMF.Footnote ³⁸ Answers include: forcing President Zuma to declare a 0 percent fee increase in October 2015; an increase in government subsidy for higher education; successful opposition to outsourcing of campus support staffing, and so forth. There is a degree of consensus among the participants as to what kind of outcomes need to be monitored and measured. And comparisons are drawn with the politics of student uprisings in North Africa and other sub-Saharan African countries.Footnote ³⁹

I would maintain, however, that the temporality of the events has not been correctly analyzed in terms of the relationship between a linear time of cause and effect, and a cyclical time of periodicity. The weight falls for analysts on the tangent, when it is the circle itself that, like a planet, provides, at certain points, the energy needed for the tangent to overcome the force of gravity that would lead, otherwise, to simple periodic repetition.

It is the energy of the cyclicality, of the periodicity, that I wish to explore. If there is a space that is distinctly of the university, then that space is “com-possible” with this cyclical time. It is what has the potential for making the space of the university dynamic.Footnote ⁴⁰

Unimportance anticipates the terms and problems of on-the-fly and after-the-fact analyses of #RMF and #FMF. As a narrative, the novel has a circular structure; it begins near the “end,” and, through a series of analepses, relating to a three-week period leading up to the time of narration, and to earlier events, on campus as well as from Zizi’s childhood and Pamodi’s youth and early adulthood, circles back to its beginning. A few pages from the end, we learn that the narrative we have been reading is, in fact, the speech—unusually long, to be sure—that Zizi has just given as candidate for SRC president.

As Unimportance informs us, at South African universities, the SRC has a statutory role, underwritten by national legislation, in university decision-making,Footnote ⁴¹ along with the university administration, senate, council, and other executive bodies. It is therefore a key site of party-political organization and campaigning—for students, as well as by academics seeking election to university bodies on which SRC members have a vote.Footnote ⁴² Mgqolozana himself twice served on the executive committee of the South African Students Congress and on the SRC at UWC,Footnote ⁴³ where he studied nursing.Footnote ⁴⁴

The main cyclical process described in the novel are the SRC elections, which take place each year. The novel associates them with the coming of spring, an association reinforced by the gift from the outgoing SRC president to Zizi of the poetry anthology, Seasons Come to Pass.Footnote ⁴⁵ The title of this anthology, designed for students, comes from a phrase taken from a short poem by Mongane Serote, “For Don M. –Banned,” which was also the source for the title of André Brink’s 1979 novel, A Dry White Season.Footnote ⁴⁶ Addressing “Don M.”—the Black Consciousness poet Don Mattera, who was subject to a banning order from 1973 to 1982—the poet-speaker concludes: “it is a dry white season/ but seasons come to pass,”Footnote ⁴⁷ in other words that, just as the winter, a cold and dry season in much of the country’s interior, will pass, white rule will someday come to an end. The election about to be held in Unimportance, however, takes place outside of the ordinary cycle.

Other significant cyclical processes described in the novel are the alternation between term-time and vacation-time,Footnote ⁴⁸ and the annual pleas for readmission, by, and on behalf of, failing students—which emerges in one of the longer episodes in the book.Footnote ⁴⁹ The annual negotiations by the SRC to have the university admit or readmit students who don’t have money to pay their fees are mentioned briefly.Footnote ⁵⁰ Unimportance does not, however, describe the customary annual negotiations between SRCs and university administrations to set fee increases, a cyclical process that drew considerable attention in 2015–2016.Footnote ⁵¹

Unimportance is troubled by repetition, and by the question of how a cycle might be broken: a cycle of partner-violence, in Zizi’s own case, and how breaking it, and breaking with it, assumes greater and greater importance. The telling of it, however, uncovers a secret from the past—from the “homeland”—as if the players are locked into a painful pattern of repetition with which leaving home does not break.Footnote ⁵² We find a similar scenario in another notable post-apartheid South African campus novel, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001)—in which rivalries and suspicions originating in the rural heartland continue to play out in the city and on campus, in South Africa as well as overseas.Footnote ⁵³ If the South African narrative genre par excellence used to be the “Jim Comes to Joburg” story, in which the country bumpkin is corrupted by the city, it now appears to have been displaced by the story of somebody who has come to town being haunted by the unfinished business of the rural homestead, village, or township. Like Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Unimportance views truth, and its disclosure, as the way to end an injurious cycle of repetition.

Yet there is also the sense that, even if cyclicality can mean the repetition of violence when things are kept secret—or when euphemism conceals fact, as in Mpe’s masterpiece—the cycle of the university year has, at key points, the energy to launch acts and events at a tangent—to “make history,” in other words, in a linear fashion.

Unimportance consequently agonizes about how, having been students, young men and women will conduct themselves following graduation—or after leaving before graduating, as Steve Biko did.Footnote ⁵⁴ In one version, the tangent launches the graduate into an ambiguous trajectory of upward mobility: “when one graduates [one] can afford to run away from home forever. It seems as though successfully escaping from a township is an accomplishment. You’ve made it if you’ve run as far away from yourself as it is possible.”Footnote ⁵⁵

“[W]e are youth in transition,” Zizi observes, “we are an emerging elite, aspiring bourgeoisie—that’s why we’re at university.”Footnote ⁵⁶

In Unimportance, the trajectory of upward mobility can, however, circle back in aberrant fashion—the planet’s force of gravity reasserting itself, as it were—as certain graduates return, not to get a degree or diploma, but to capitalize on their ties to the university. The wealthy “twins who had graduated in the nineties” lurk about campus trying to corrupt the tender process: “They were the self-indulgent ex-comrades who found it impossible to outgrow the campus, even with their elephant-size pockets as businessmen in the ‘real world.’ . . . They had been counting on Sindane [Zizi’s chief political rival] to be elected Chair, and later President of the SRC, so that they would get the student service tenders for their businesses. . . . They are always trying to infiltrate our ranks. On any random evening, you could find their BMW X5 parked outside Chris Hani, and there’d be fly girls buzzing around it.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The juxtaposition of a luxury SUV and the name of the assassinated leader of the South African Communist Party, after whom this student residence is named, is supposed to be jarring. The “twins” are out of place.

Different, and more favorable, outcomes are alluded to briefly, such as the fact that the outgoing SRC president has been “recruited by the Institute for Democracy and Governance”—which is why the election is taking place out of its regular cycle.Footnote ⁵⁸ More generally, the idea of a trajectory taking students along different paths emerges in Zizi’s account of how “[t]ogether with the Youth League, the Young Communists and the Congress of the Pupils, our organization forms the Mass Youth Alliance of the Mass Democratic Movement as led by the mother body. If the Youth League is sons and daughters, we are the bastards.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Zizi’s organization is not considered dependable because “we reserve the right to criticise the mother body, our membership does not have to join or vote for the mother body; and finally, because our constituency grows up and becomes labour force for which we cannot account.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Reserving the right to criticize, to withhold one’s vote, and to decline to account to the party, are assertions of democratic right. It is telling that the former SRC president has joined, presumably, a think tank with Democracy in its name, just as Zizi refers to a “Mass Democratic Movement,” which in the late 1980s was an alliance between the United Democratic Front and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, but which in the new millennium can probably be read as a placeholder for a set of ideas, among which is a reserve in relation to a future “for which we cannot account.”

Although its chief emphasis is on elections, and the contest between the tendencies within Zizi’s organization, read along with the ensuing published commentary the events of 2015–2016, Unimportance brings into relief how on those events, especially the emergence of #FMF, emerged at a cyclical node of energy specific to South African universities, and of greater force at some than at others—namely the annual fees negotiations and protests over fees and the financial exclusion of students.

The space of the university—as Zizi’s attempt to read it shows—not only reveals anomalies, but misleads the critical eye by making it look for criteria in stories about the past that, although the criteria informing them are hegemonic, are not necessarily true; or, if they are, in some measure, true, they are not necessarily relevant. Linear cause and effect prove absurd, especially when the eye turns from the past toward an unaccountable future. The self-certainty of the “man who says ‘I’” comes into question. And instead of insisting on a knowable linear cause and effect, the power of repetition is registered and space is raised to another level—the elided “I” beset by a secret that “he” is only gradually able to acknowledge. This enters into a cyclicality at the level of external events—truth-telling also has its season—which gives us insight into #RMF and #FMF by showing us how it is the very space of the university that, by being activated and dynamized (or not) at specific nodes in a temporal cycle that is typically annual, contains the possibility—not always realized—of historical effects. Time, and time again—let this be shorthand for the possibility.

But there is another element to consider—the cyclicality, or periodicity, of the fiscus, and of banks. These entities have no time—excuse the pun—for criteria relating to, or applied to, the past. They look to future return, or at least a manageable rate of future loss. Student loans and resulting debt are, as Unimportance emphasizes, structured as a spreading of risk against the future: “What you definitely come out with is heavy financial debt, so that when you eventually qualify and get employment, for a decade you are the least credit-worthy candidate.”Footnote ⁶¹

South African student loans and bursaries are administered under the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). It was observed in the wake of 2015–2016 that NSFAS “can only “mobilise [the close to R10 billion a year that it needs] . . . from the private sector [sic], from development finance institutions such as PIC [Public Investment Corporation], Development Bank [of Southern Africa] and so on, if there is a yield for those who put money in; they don’t want to put money into a bottomless pit. There needs to be some recycling of that fund.”Footnote ⁶² It is clear from this formulation how a cyclical concept of investment and return is powerfully operative.

A public asset manager, the PIC invests money from state-employee pension funds, unemployment insurance funds, and other funds, whereas the DBSA invests state funds in infrastructure and development projects, including higher education.Footnote ⁶³ Before recent policy changes, fees were paid with money from student bursaries and loans, for those who qualified for them,Footnote ⁶⁴ and, at a few institutions, partly also out of university funds.Footnote ⁶⁵ #FMF—which demands free education for all students—has, in this light, been a rebellion against what has increasingly come to be viewed, from the perspective of many students and their families, as a spreading of risk that is inequitable. If the periodic payment of fees would have been unsustainable without borrowing, how should the periodic repayment of a loan following graduation be any more sustainable in a climate of diminishing job prospects that, as Unimportance portrays it, makes repayment long and onerous? The government has now replaced student loans with grants for means-eligible university and technical vocational education and training (TVET) college students,Footnote ⁶⁶ a decision that keeps South African higher education within a cyclical logic of debt—even if it is now not the student but the state that has become the debtor.Footnote ⁶⁷

Whoever built it, the university—the space of the university, you could even say its halls and dormitories and libraries and common rooms—is wise to these economics, even if the sojourners within its walls are led to believe that study of the past, and of origins, will enlighten and provide criteria—and it is therefore the place to come to comprehend the periodicity and cyclicality that are sometimes elided in political analysis in favor of the linear—back- and forward, rise and fall. But the latter can also be conceived as an alternation.

Thando Mgqolozana’s Unimportance reminds us that the cycle is the time of democracy—the SRC election, and also the popular uprising in its season and seasonality.Footnote ⁶⁸ As with the fees protests of the past, with #FMF the cycles of democracy and debt touch. Tangent becomes cycle again, as the making of history in the form of a frozen fee increase and a new government grant scheme, which afford access for greater numbers of students to higher education, spins out into a new cycle of sovereign debt—meaning that, with the promise of democracy,Footnote ⁶⁹ without which there is no tomorrow—and not just for the university—also comes the danger that, with another turn of the cycle,Footnote ⁷⁰ what will have been gained will one day be lost.