It has been?10 years since South Africa was first shaken by the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements, but the reverberations continue to be felt ¨C and argued over.

A movement that began with the specific demand to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town morphed into a campaign for proposed tuition fee rises to be cancelled, service workers to be insourced and universities to be decolonised.

Eventually, #FeesMustFall grew into the largest protest movement the country had seen since the end of apartheid, and it came to be seen as a more general rejection of what the ANC government had offered since 1994 ¨C the idea of South Africa as a multiracial democracy or ¡°rainbow nation¡±.

There were some significant wins. The Rhodes statue was indeed removed. Fee increments were capped, and outsourcing was ended at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), while the clamours to decolonise the curricula and remove colonial iconography reverberated elsewhere, including in the UK.

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A series of anniversary events are taking place in the name of remembrance ¨C even mourning, given the violent stand-offs that occurred between students and police and private security. The securitisation of our campuses is one of the lasting legacies of these movements.

Another is what we might call their South-Africanisation.

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In 2017, I taught a graduate course on feminist theory, inspired by student demands for decolonisation. I drew exclusively from feminists of colour to offer an intersectional and transnational lens (there were no white authors on the syllabus, as students had often demanded).

Yet a student still called me out. They said I had erased local South African feminist scholarship in favour of African American black feminist thought. South African experiences could not be understood through that lens alone.

They were right, of course. White, Western epistemologies could hardly be swapped for African American ones. And US knowledge, even when counter-hegemonic, in being black and feminist, is still hegemonic.

But while my student asked whether the black American could speak for ¡°Africa¡±, others questioned whether even the black African could stand in for the black South African. Indeed, during the Fallist movements, some students aggressively opposed the hiring of Africans from elsewhere on the continent ¨C prompting universities to harden agendas to secure greater equity and representation rooted in race and nationality ¨C so much so that some have termed it .

South Africa has a well-established trend of scapegoating African migrants for the shortcomings of the government, especially when it comes to jobs and poor service delivery. Now we are witnessing the catapulting of this agenda from the streets into parliament. ¡°Afrophobic¡± rhetoric informs the direction of mainstream political parties, while emergent ones have entire platforms devoted to anti-immigration.

These newer political formations, and their army of Twitter/X trolls, routinely target higher education, attempting to generate a moral panic around the (alleged) hiring of foreigners over eligible black South African PhDs. Rather than responding to such allegations, universities have so far chosen to ignore them, while continuing to fetishise internationalisation.

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In 2015, South African university staff were too white. Black Africans were under-represented and Coloureds were the worst off. Core to the Fallist demand was greater racial and gender diversity among university staff (in line with a majority-black student body). The common view now is that the necessary ¡°transformation¡± can only be met through the greater representation specifically of black South Africans.

The 1998 Employment Equity Act stresses race, South African birth/descent and even the direct experience of apartheid. The more protectionist measures of the act, such as the provision that foreign workers should only be employed based on evidence that no national can do the job, are enforced with more regularity than ever before. Even if an international applicant passes this test, getting a work permit has become such a nightmare that many end up refusing the job (leading universities to be even more reluctant to hire foreigners).

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It is not just the Department of Labour promoting locals over foreigners. In a well-known incident at UCT, a member of staff vehemently opposed the hiring of an African woman over a black South African woman. The candidate was not appointable, he claimed, as she was naturalised after 1994 and had not experienced the horrors of apartheid. Indian and Coloured people had also suffered less harm, he insisted.

In the immediate post-apartheid years, the South African government welcomed postgraduate students and qualified faculty from elsewhere, but internationals still account for?only 11.2 per cent of the total staff body, and most of those hail from neighbouring African countries, such as Zimbabwe. Only Wits and UCT have larger numbers of international staff ¨C at 24-25 per cent ¨C and appear to attract academics from a wider range of countries.

Indeed, the current higher education minister, Buti Manamela, plainly stated in May, when he was deputy minister, that South African universities . International staff make little difference to the problem of the ¡°untransformed¡± university, except for acting as easy scapegoats for underfunding, institutional inertia and a lack of coherence in building academia.

South African universities, then, face a tension between the ideals of internationalisation and Pan-Africanism, on the one hand, and decolonisation and deracialisation (changing the racial demographic of the academy), on the other.

A truly decolonial university cannot simply recruit educators of a different colour and gender from those in the apartheid era. While this might meet the conditions for demographic justice, it does not necessarily speak to epistemic justice, as Suren Pillay, director of the Center for African Studies at UCT, argues in a recent .

To meet that latter goal, South African universities need to draw on a diverse set of intellectual traditions ¨C especially from the Global South, but not Africa alone. After all, as Pillay notes and my own experience illustrates, it is entirely possible to have a Eurocentric course filled with African authors. Decolonising the university surely involves going further than this.

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is professor of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand.