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This article discusses the South African student movement of 2015/2016 through the lens of fire. At the peak of the movement, campuses were literally burning, and the universities became a major site of struggle over decolonization and social justice. These protests have drawn together matters of knowledge, representation, and memory with issues of inequality, discrimination, and race. Zooming in on fire as a contradictory force - destructive and generative at the same time - helps us to rethink the dynamics of protest and the politics of knowledge more broadly. Taking fire serious means keeping the tension between multiple positions in place. By not brushing over contradictions but rather emphasizing their discomforting co-presence, fire invites epistemic disconcertment that denies the comforts of anterior or predictable knowledge and thus allows for newness to emerge. It is a space where activist practice becomes a form of theorizing in its own right.

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