On 19 October 1977 the apartheid government banned 18 organisations, including:

Black People’s Convention

South African Students Movement

Union of Black Journalists

Black Women’s Federation

South African Students Organisation

Soweto Teachers Action Committee

The Christian Institute

Soweto Students Representative Council

It is important to remember that the early Gandhi had little contact with Africans and did not understand their sensitivities.

The voice on the other side of the phone was crackling with fear:

“UFezeka lona. Lestory enesibhalayo asilona iqiniso. Amanga wodwa [This is Fezeka. The story you are about to write is not true. It is a total lie].”

The hysterical person went on to insist that Jacob Zuma had not raped her and if the Sunday Times published the story, she would sue our heads off.

After a long and rapid monologue in which she stressed that no rape charge bearing her name existed, she eventually let me get a word in.

THE South African higher education system, despite all the challenges that it faces, remains the envy of the African continent. Of the 16 founder members of the recently established African Research Universities Alliance, six are from SA.

Our universities attract students from across the globe and, in particular, from the Southern African Development Community. In 2013, 53,800 students from the region were studying at South African universities, with a further 11,922 coming from elsewhere in Africa.

Jeremy Cronin says the former President badly misread the global and indeed domestic conjuncture of the post-Cold War decade

Yes to the struggle against corporate capture, no to Mbeki nostalgia

It has been a turbulent two weeks at South African campuses as the fees issue re-emerged with vigour.

Universities have pointed fingers at the state, which has under-funded higher education for the past 20 years.

Establishing a Fees Commission is a waste of time.

It is self-evident that the average South African household cannot afford to send a child to university at an annual cost of R80000 – whether by going into debt or by some other means.

It is hard to overestimate the impact of the French student uprisings of May 1968 on the philosophy of the so-called post-68 generation, that group of politically awakened academics that included, among many others, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere.

In a little-heralded move in 2015, the Nelson Mandela Foundation released a “position paper” on race and identity. It was written by the Foundation’s CEO Sello Hatang and archivist Verne Harris.

Sadly, it triggered little debate, possibly overtaken by #Rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall, the subsequent political fallout and rise of Fallist movements. This is ironic, given that the purpose of the paper seemed to be re-positioning the Foundation to be a part of the segment of civil society that regards 1990-1994 as a moment of failure.

Sembene Ousmane’s harrowing novel God’s Bits of Wood has been on my mind a lot lately. It explores the political dynamics underpinning the 1947 railway workers’ strike in Dakar, Senegal.

The novel’s potency lies in more than its analysis of the workers’ oppression. Ousmane crafts an intersectional examination of the strike’s socioeconomic implications. He weaves his plot cleverly around the themes of gender and sexual relations as well as the dismantling of patriarchal arrogance and complacency. All of this means that you can’t read the novel from a single perspective.

In April 2015, the statue of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in Gandhi Square, Johannesburg was almost covered with white paint by a young protestor before he was arrested. The previous months had seen a sustained agitation at the University of Cape Town for the taking down of the statue of Sir Cecil Rhodes - the imperialist and racist benefactor of the University. The statue came to stand in for a colonialism yet to end.