The South African ‘miracle’ transition to democracy has failed to deliver on the promise of a free and equal non-racial society. Protests in South African universities over the neoliberal and colonial nature of tertiary institutions emerge as one iteration of responses to those failed promises. The South African university has always been a centre for politics both during the liberation struggle and in the post-apartheid dispensation. The 2015-2016 FeesMustFall student movement in South Africa invoked both liberation intellectual traditions and new forms of emancipatory theory to argue for ‘free, quality decolonised education’. This paper looks at the way the FeesMustFall student movement remembers, reinvokes and reinscribes South African liberation theory to resolve the crisis and consequences of the 1994 compromise. It focuses on the ways race, class and sexuality become articulated, in the movement, through a coherent and non-contradictory articulation of what I’m calling intersectional emancipatory theory.