The introduction to this book opened in the present, on the scenes of student protests at Turfloop in 2016 when the campus joined nationwide student strikes as part of the FeesMustFall Movement that had been sparked on other campuses. But the body of the text has argued that Turfloop – and Limpopo as a whole – has a much deeper history of student protest, and youth-driven change. In fact, even FeesMustFall had earlier precedents at Turfloop and its fellow former ‘bush’ colleges; students on these campuses led calls for the institution and improvement of aid schemes like the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) in the 1990s and early 2000s. As one protesting student told researcher Musawenkosi Malabela,

Turfloop, then, has remained an important site of ideological and political formation, even as it has faded from the front pages of South Africa's papers. But as in the 1960s and 1970s, students on this perirural campus are raising some of the key political issues of their time, often before their national counterparts do so. I have tried to argue here for its crucial place – and for the place of Limpopo as a whole – in the historiography of South African struggle.

Who is remembered? Associational legacies in Limpopo

This book has chronicled three major periods in the history of student and youth activism in the Northern Transvaal over the latter decades of the twentieth century: from the relatively elite-led, university-oriented ideological protest of the Black Consciousness movement, to the locally rooted regional expansion of protest politics under COSAS and youth congresses, to the congregation of those once-disparate groups under the banner of the unbanned ANC Youth League.