The point is this: as much as elite university culture can leave black students struggling with feelings of alienation, it is not the primary locus of the problem. Fallist rage originates in prior humiliations - misrecognitions - that are raced, classed and gendered in complex ways. Shame, after all, is hardwired into the chronicity of everyday and structural violence: unable to exact revenge, the original trauma that is structural violence is forgotten - but the sense of injury remains. It is picked at compulsively, eventually exploding without warning onto unwitting secondary targets.

To begin with, proponents of decolonisation almost never acknowledge one basic fact - that most poor and working-class students have suffered the indignity of being miseducated for twelve years of their lives. South Africa’s schooling system ranks consistently amongst the worst in the world and by the time these students enter elite universities, they are hopelessly prepared for academic life and struggle to cope with the unrelenting institutional demands. But instead of acknowledging these difficulties as areas for personal development, like Aesop’s fox they conclude that the grapes must be sour because they are unreachable.

One can see the same happening in national politics as quasi-facist movements swim ever closer to the political mainstream. With the degree of cooperation between the two spheres increasing all the time - and with social inequality showing few signs of abating - it is only a matter of time before impotent rage - ressentiment - gets channelled into the creation of anti-democratic political movements.

Middle-class students in South Africa, that is, are becoming increasingly adept at identifying what we now call epistemological - or symbolic - violence, while appearing oblivious to the problem of real, concrete violence. We cannot blame them, of course, because the burden of responsibility rests with us as their bourgeois teacher.

And just as therapist and patient must negotiate their hopes in dialectical conversation with one another, we, too, have to nurture between us the most fragile of cargoes, with the retaliation that what each of us does in our lives on a moment-to-moment basis will ripple through the ages. There has to be a revolt and a sincere engagement with it - failing which there can be no shared hopes, only selfish ones.