‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk,’ wrote Hegel in The Philosophy of Rights (1821). Like Hegel's owl of Minerva we might only gain our full understandings much later in our processes of probing, in our case, South Africa's #FeesMustFall revolt of 2015– 2016. The chapters in this book are offered with a view to optimising our understandings at an early point in time, roughly a year since the first explicit manifestations of #FMF in October 2015, and just over a year from the point of renewed worker struggles at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in May 2015. We have no illusions; we do not want to pre-empt Hegel's owl – we do not fully understand as yet, but we hope that both individual contributions in FeesMustFall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation and Governance in South Africa, and the book as a collective constitute one substantive step towards the full understanding.

Many questions remain about South Africa's 2015–2016 higher education war on fees, funding and outsourcing. It will only be with hindsight that we shall know whether #FeesMustFall is a case of ‘Aluta continua, victoria ascerta’, or simply ‘Aluta continua’. Only history will bring the confirmed answers to the questions of ‘who won and who lost’, ‘what was won and what lost’ and ‘what were the exact configurations of causes and triggers?’ The answers, for now, depend on the lenses worn and the directed angle, and this volume offers a collection that opens the doors to stocktaking and further questioning. From whichever angle it is approached, however, it is evident that governance in South Africa and its higher education institutions has been irrevocably altered.

#FeesMustFall, along with #OutsourcingMustFall, changed aspects of government and sociopolitical culture in South Africa. Like other student uprisings, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, the rising did not expel the government (nor, probably, was ever intended to) but served notice of a powerful post-liberation generation that does not live a reality of liberation and rights. Students in sub- Saharan Africa had begun to act as the social conscience and voice of the broader society, responding to and shaping responses to externally driven and internally driven political and economic events in particular historical periods.