Adam Habib’s book Rebels and Rage is a personal assessment of the #FeesMustFall movement and the interwoven issue of university transformation. The focus of the book is the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg though it ventures beyond, particularly regarding the funding of tertiary education in the country.

Professor Adam Habib became Wits’ Vice-Chancellor in 2013. The previous VC had left the post at daggers drawn with almost every institutional stakeholder. Prof Habib, a smart man with incredible energy, offered a fresh start and there was enthusiasm for his apparently open approach to governance. We had packed “Town Hall” meetings and were proffered promises of a “university pact” that would bring us together and take us forward. The honeymoon ended as it became obvious that, democratic rhetoric notwithstanding, we were to follow Adam’s Way, like it or not.

Colleagues have pointed out that Prof Habib over-reaches in claiming to write the historically accurate account of #FeesMustFall. However, given the size of Prof Habib’s personality, the highly personal nature of Rebels and Rage is not surprising. Nevertheless, the jibes and conjecture over those who are not walking Adam’s Way, liberally sprinkled across the pages of this book, have the danger of making the Vice Chancellor look petty and small.

Disclosure: I appear on a number of occasions in the book. To claim that these references are disparaging would be an understatement. In particular, Prof Habib takes umbrage at the role I played serving on council and the reports I wrote as the elected representative of Wits academics. I am lumped by Prof Habib in an entity he refers to as “Far Left”. Inaccurate as this description is for the range of academics who sided with the students over the issue of fees, free education and transformation, I can live with it.

Unacceptable is reference to the “Pol Pot brigade”. Lest we forget, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime was responsible for the murder or starvation of millions of Cambodians. It’s unfortunate that this juvenile comparison wasn’t edited from the book. The same goes for a xenophobic sneer at foreign academics, especially coming from a man vocal in arguing for Wits to be a “cosmopolitan university”. With that off my chest, let’s continue.

The book pursues a chronological path starting with events at Wits in the concourse of Senate (now Solomon Mahlangu) House on 16 October 2015, the eruption of student protest in full-swing and the VC sitting on the floor. The protest was sparked by a 10.5% fee increase approved by the Wits Council (the student representatives and myself dissenting) adding to the R100,000 or so a year (total) cost of studying at Wits and elsewhere, costs that were closing the doors of learning for many.

There follows a well-organised series of chapters that provides a sometimes page-turning account of developments and a quick dip into the key issues that accompanied the #FeesMustFall protests: the insourcing of service workers; transformation at Wits, a historically white, colonially-rooted university; violence; and, university funding models.

Prof Habib takes a strident tone, particularly when recounting events at Wits, though this mellows as the book progresses. Having figuratively slain his opponents in the student leadership, and the “Far Left” (largely through assertion), he relaxes and provides some considered analysis – though there is a shrill relapse in the final two chapters of the book, as his dispatched foes appear to still twitch.

Some of his criticisms of others are on point. It was difficult not to despair at times over the student leadership; the machismo; the internal divisions; and their limited repertoire of action, particularly as the momentum of the protests ebbed. And the academics, myself included, who actively sided with the students’ cause? Yes, we made mistakes, individually and collectively. With hindsight, some right cock-ups; the Peace Accord initiative, covered in Rebels and Rage, is a fair example. To err is human… though Prof Habib, it would appear, is the exception. You’ll struggle to find where he puts a foot wrong as you turn the pages.

A full-page organogram in the book’s preface locates “major roleplayers”, primarily individuals associated with Wits, on either side of #FeesMustFall. The division says much: the Wits establishment on top (of the page), below, student leaders and sympathetic academics; the rebels, I assume, of the book’s title. But why were we squaring off if, as Prof Habib repeats in the book, the students’ concerns over fees were legitimate?

The book doesn’t address this question. But if you turn the pages slowly the twists and changing angles of argument are apparent. This is classic Habib. Regular attendees at Wits’ Senate have come to realise that what the VC says one day isn’t what he may say the next. This reflects a sharp mind: when it comes to thinking on his feet Prof Habib has few peers. But it’s still footwork.

Take the student leadership for example: depending on which page you’re on they have legitimate demands or they are being manipulated and can’t think for themselves. Which is it? It depends on what point the prof is making.

In the world of university education, if you follow the footwork, you’ll get into the top half of Prof Habib’s organogram, a mention as a “sensible leader” or commended as being trusted to do “the right thing”. The rest of us get things wrong. Not because the rebellion against double-digit fee increases, and outsourcing, was without cause, but because we went about it in the wrong way. Rebels and Rage has opinions aplenty on others’ shortcomings. What these boil down to is that those in the bottom half of the organogram don’t understand “trade-offs”.

Trade-offs provide the central concept of the book and appear in one way or another in every chapter. The point that Prof Habib is making is that Prof Habib understands trade-offs, and the rest of us don’t. Trade-offs are, we are told, about balance and compromise. But, the point that Prof Habib fails to understand, or doesn’t want to admit, is that without the student protests there would have been no opportunity for him, or anybody else, to propose trade-offs. By his own admission, the student protests achieved what the country’s vice-chancellors had failed to achieve in 10 years. Yet, when the protests erupted, he led management’s attempt to sweep them away. The protesters, we were told, were trying to hold us to ransom and would be dealt with. This puts Prof Habib, metaphorically speaking, in a deep hole: he sought to squash student protest in favour of a 10-year conversation that failed to achieve anything.

The furious energy of Rebels and Rage may distract from this inconvenient truth. But, like it or not, #FeesMustFall protests achieved results. This was despite the efforts of Prof Habib and the majority of the Wits Council. Ironically, although a scholar of social movements, Prof Habib missed this protest train. Instead, he insisted on standing between the protesters and the government where the power to resolve the problem lay. Insisting that the rights of those who could afford university education be put above those who could not, he made the Wits campus a battleground. That the student leadership was provoked to contest control of campus was a mistake. Yet, if they, inevitably, lost the battle that followed, the war is not yet over. Almost four years later, the corridors of Wits are saturated with leather-jacketed men of a certain build whenever there is the slightest whiff of student protest somewhere in the country. This is no solution.

Rebels and Rage evaluates various proposed funding models that were in play in the aftermath of the protests in seeking a permanent solution to student funding. This is where Prof Habib’s sharp mind comes to the fore over trade-offs that any funding model must entail. But these efforts bore no fruit. Instead, as the book outlines, then President Zuma opportunistically cut the Gordian Knot of student finance, or at least part of it, by decree. A decree based, we are told, on advice from a previous President of the Wits SRC and one-time suitor of Zuma’s daughter. Prof Habib missed the second train out of the #FeesMustFall station; it must have been galling. It is then these missed tickets of destiny to which the “rage” of the book’s title perhaps best refers.

And the next train to leave? As Prof Habib rightly points out, student funding problems remain, particularly over the “new missing middle”; families with incomes over R350,000 a year, as too does the larger question of university finances. There also remains the question of university transformation. The changing racial profile of Wits students over the past 25 years is a real achievement and the book details some of the attempted reforms initiated by Prof Habib at Wits.

Yet, on reforming Council, the governing body of the institution, there is very little. Prof Habib rejects calls for its reform on the basis that university councils are statutorily bound to have a majority of members external. This is a lame excuse; Council has enormous de facto control over who is invited to join. It is, as I found out when I started to speak out at Council meetings, a club with Fiofo rules (Fit in or “depart”). If you want an invite, you’d best be someone who can be trusted to “do the right thing”. Other than cosmetic changes, Wits Council remains unaltered and it remains distant from the students who are the very point of the university. That it has survived #FeesMustFall intact is in no small part due to Prof Habib and his men in leather jackets.

How will Rebels and Rage finally be evaluated? I hope the good will be salvaged from the bad. But likely it will be primarily remembered as one man’s defence of the status quo in a time that demanded change. DM