In May 2002, Minister of Education Kader Asmal announced a restructuring of South Africa's higher education system. The sweeping changes – which involved streamlining a bloated university system created by the architects of apartheid to promote separate development – were designed to redress past inequality, promote growth in student numbers and establish institutions better able to meet job market demands. Asmal's plan followed years of extensive debate over the future of Fort Hare and other historically disadvantaged universities. With apartheid dead, was it time to dismantle the institutions the government had concocted to entrench its power?

The future of the University of Fort Hare appeared bleak. Rumours circulated that nearby Rhodes University would swallow it up. Yet in the end, while Asmal called for many of the historically disadvantaged universities to merge with other institutions, he left Fort Hare alone. ‘The University of Fort Hare, which has come to symbolise our history of struggle, will be retained,’ said Asmal in an Education Ministry release. Fort Hare's own website attributed the university's continued existence to the vital role it had played in educating leaders of the fight for majority rule in South Africa.

In 1997, while a junior at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, I spent a semester at the University of Fort Hare, in the Eastern Cape town of Alice, and quickly became aware of this history for myself. A university driver fetched me from the airport in nearby East London, and we made the one and a half hour drive inland. After dodging goats and cows on the narrow road between King William's Town and Alice, and trying unsuccessfully to acclimate myself to driving on the ‘wrong side’ of the road, we neared the university. A hill with a stone tower perched on top appeared on our right. The tower, I’d find out, was a memorial to James Stewart, a former principal of Lovedale and one of the missionaries who influenced the founding of Fort Hare.