摘要：Reading any one of Jonathan Jansen’s books is like taking a slice of South Africa at a given moment in time. At the tip of the slice is a point. Knowledge in the Blood (UCT Press; 2009), took as its ‘point’ the experience of students in a period of profound change: captured still by the imaginary of a racialised past; that book described the experience of racism in a post-apartheid, but by no means post-racist, state. In attempting to understand what racist beliefs offered a generation of students (white and black), Jansen illustrated how identity politics and prospects could be shifted pending the intervention of a leader. So too in As by Fire, the ‘point’ of leadership in the #FeesMustFall movement becomes the focus of intense reflections, often beginning as personal, and then widening to a social focus on the fissures of an increasingly divided South Africa in which the fractures tearing universities apart are revealed to be symptomatic of the post-apartheid state’s approach to welfarism, the massification of education at the cost of limited and even declining expenditure on education in general, and higher education in particular.
