Xolela Mangcu, one of the strongest supporters of the student movement during the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, has warned that the type of violence that rocked the country in the 1980s could rear its head again. Mangcu, a sociology professor at UCT, was recently shunned by UWC students who called him a sell-out when he tried to calm them during an event at which they seized the microphone and shouted down the panel and audience.The students wrote an open letter in which they accused him of "trying to appease" the "whites in attendance" while antagonising the "already frustrated black students".Critics of Nelson Mandela levelled similar charges at him and, ironically, Mangcu is working on a biography of Mandela, assisted by a R1.5-million post-doctoral research grant awarded last week by the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust.Mangcu told The Times that campus violence, in which buildings, buses and offices worth millions of rand have gone up in smoke, is "outright lunacy" and is being fuelled by a small group of students with political parties pulling their strings."I don't want to go into which parties are behind the violence . but certainly there are groupings stoking it," he said.For him, there has been disappointment on both sides. He wanted support for transformation from fellow academics, and intellectual engagement from students on how to achieve it."That is why Rhodes Must Fall was so glorious - it was a classic protest movement, the kind from the 1960s or 1970s: mass action towards a defined goal with much intellectual discussion going on."After this, he hoped, there would be "something equivalent to what Steve Biko and the black consciousness movement did in the 1970s".Instead, "the movement veered from that project and took a much more political approach", and with it came "negative and destructive" violence.He witnessed the same problem in the 1980s - Biko's approach was soon replaced by one that "led to some very serious and deadly violence in the black community".Political parties had now "entered the space" and the possibility of a replay of that situation chills him."Some political parties adopt more violent language than others. I don't know if this is to do with elections coming in August," he said, claiming that factionalism had taken hold of the student movement.He said we still live in a "deeply flawed democratic society", but we are "not living under a jackboot system" and "do have space in which to criticise without being arrested or shot".When the Rhodes Must Fall movement was at its height, said Mangcu, "I begged them. I said 'I have been here before. When the dust settles they will come after you one by one . don't give the people you're fighting against a chance to victimise you'."When I was at Wits during the struggle, they would single out certain students and expel them. I have seen the booby traps."After the attacks on him Mangcu said he was "not interested in a tit-for-tat with the students. These are people I love and care deeply about."But one needed to look at the contradictions in their rhetoric, one of which was that the students who turned on him called themselves Pan Africanists but used "very Euro-American language".Although respect for elders was a "deep cultural principle in African society" the students accused him of ageism."That language is one that comes from their own Western education," he said, warning of a political culture in which "those who shout the loudest can bully others".He said he was now "pulling back" to return to fighting his transformation battles in the halls of academia.That said, he had no regrets about supporting the students."There are some really fantastic young people out there with great minds who will emerge as leaders . But when you've been hit the way I have, you say 'I have been burned - I don't want to go there again' - you become cynical."What is the future?"Maybe in time, after all the violence, cooler heads will prevail and this project will go on because this issue of transformation and decolonisation is going to be there for a very long time."You can't exhaust yourself in the starting blocks through a violent approach. It makes no sense."..