South African Higher Education: At the Center of a Cauldron of National Imaginations

South Africa's university system is by far the most developed on the African continent. 18 years after the fall of apartheid we must ask whether there is anything approaching a national consensus about the place of university in development. This is still an open question. The legacies of apartheid continue to shape debates about how to think of the place of higher education in this society that is at once an exciting new experiment in democracy and the most unequal society in the world. South Africa's flirtations with the knowledge economy have implications for the way in which we think about its universities. Its status as being 12rd in the world in terms of the Human Development Index has other implications for this. In this paper we examine the tensions that undergird the higher education policy debates - the most often reflect conflictual imaginations of the "new" South Africa.