Where African universities were conceived as utopian spaces for creative work and nation-building in the post-independence period (and earlier), the opposite has become apparent following structural adjustment policies of the 1980s, rising youth unemployment, and chronic under-investment over the past thirty years. This paper will present work-in-progress on the representation of African universities in cultural texts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, drawing on examples from Austin Bukenya’s The People’s Bachelor (1972) to Jérôme Nouhouaï’s Le Piment des plus beaux jours (2010). It will ask how African campus fiction engages literarily with institutions of higher education on the African continent and how analysis of this loosely assembled network of texts might inform ongoing epistemological debate concerning history and time, in particular the nature of ‘free time’, in a neo-liberalised global South.