Imagination, decolonization, and intersectionality: the #RhodesMustFall student occupations in Cape Town, South Africa

ABSTRACT

South African students have since 2015 returned to the forefront of the country’s social movement struggles. Central to this wave of contention was the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) movement at the University of Cape Town (UCT), which coalesced with uprisings at universities across the country under the banner of #FeesMustFall, focusing demands on abolishing tuition fees, decolonizing education and society, and ending campus worker exploitation. In the process, students imagined how education and society could be different. In this paper, we discuss the relationship between social movements, occupations, and imagination, by examining a crucial event in the #RMF movement: the student occupation of an administrative building at UCT. Because social movement theory has an underdeveloped conception of the imagination, we draw on Sartre’s and Fanon’s understanding of the imagination and apply it to students’ activism. Based on original qualitative research we demonstrate how imagined futures guide movement activity, while their prefigurative practices in the occupation enacted these in the present. The #RMF occupation was seen as a break from reality that catalysed students’ imaginations, honing their critiques of society and shaping two central imaginaries of alternative futures, decolonization and intersectionality. The #RMF movement’s imaginaries and enactments were influential in reshaping the South African higher education landscape and even inspired movements internationally.

KEYWORDS:

• Imagination
• decolonization
• intersectionality
• occupations
• student movements
• South Africa

Acknowledgments

Josh Platzky Miller would like to acknowledge that this work is based on the research supported by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS), South Africa.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. It is vital to understand ‘race’ as a contextually variable, socio-politically constructed category. Rather than reify racist ideas, throughout this paper we adopt critical South African norms (see, Vally & Motala, 2018).

2. Access to university has remained largely been constrained by racial and class dynamics. South Africa’s historically white-dominant universities, like UCT, were opened more broadly to students racialized as black from the 1980s, expanding significantly since 1994 (Booysen, 2016).

3. Antje Daniel analysed #RMF as part of her research project titled ‘Aspiring to alternative future: lived utopias in South Africa’. As part of this research, she also investigates activism of the housing movement Reclaim the City and environmental activism of the Green Camp Gallery Project and Oude Molen Eco Village. She conducted more than 80 biographical and semi-structured interviews and used ethnographic methods such as participant observation. For further research from this project, see, Daniel (2020, 2021) or Daniel and Klapeer (2019). Josh Platzky Miller researched #RMF as part of a doctoral dissertation entitled ‘Politics, Education and the Imagination in South African and Brazilian student-led mobilisations (2015–16)’. This involved roughly 50 participants across 30 semi-structured interviews and group discussions, while drawing on student-produced texts and videos, attending reflective events with participants, and – having studied at UCT – conducting personal conversations with peers (see, Platzky Miller, 2019. p. 26–34, 2021).

4. The role of language is highly contested in South Africa, especially amongst decolonial activists drawing on critical authors like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Nevertheless, English was the common language for much of the general debate in #RMF, and our interviews were therefore all conducted in English.

5. See, Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis (2002) for a longer discussion, not directly drawing on Sartre or Fanon, of a ‘situated imagination’ that is ‘shaped and conditioned (although not determined)’ by social positioning.

6. The occupation of (public) space has a long history. This can be traced through seventeenth century miners’ movements, workers’ self-organisation in factory occupations (Ness & Azzellini, 2011), and part of anti-colonial resistance in e.g., maroon communities. Occupations have been ‘rediscovered’ in social movements since the 1960s (Frenzel et al., 2014).

7. In this sense, occupations can be understood, in Foucault’s terms (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986), as one kind of ‘heterotopian’ space – a counter-placement. Similarly, the notion ‘free spaces’ describes places of otherness, which have a counter-hegemonic character. The concept of free spaces recognizes the cultural practices of subordinated people for transformation, operative across subcultures, communities, institutions, organizations, and associations. Free spaces can be space in which resistance emerges, a strategy of a social movement, recruiting bases for mobilisation, or outcomes of social movements as they spatially institutionalise (see e.g., Polletta, 1999, p. 4, 7; Varvarousis et al., 2021, p. 295). Occupations do not necessarily have a counter-hegemonic character but can be a strategy of interrupting or performing power. In our case study of RMF, however, the occupations have a counter-hegemonic character and can thus also be described as free spaces.

8. These three channels are similar to Brown’s (2016, p. 549) account of circulated, inherited, and inhabited experience respectively.

9. Identifying any movement’s ‘starting point’ is controversial. We situate this movement’s origin at the mass meeting because it is its first large-scale collective action. However, we recognize this was only possible because of preceding institutional activism (e.g., Student Representative Council engagement), and numerous existing groups’ conversations on decoloniality (See e.g., students accounts, Ndelu, 2017; Xaba, 2017).

10. While student protests across the country had general commonalities, particularly around the questions of abolishing tuition fees and ending worker outsourcing, their specific trajectories, tactics, and imaginaries varied.

11. Bremner/Azania at UCT was initially occupied for three weeks before students were evicted by private security called in by university management (Naidoo, 2016, p. 3). Shortly thereafter, students occupied another campus building nearby for several more weeks, also renaming it Azania House and continuing similar practices. The Bremner building was briefly re-occupied in April 2017.

12. Students engaged particularly with Fanon (1963/2004) and Steve Biko (1978), alongside a range of figures in South Africa and beyond, including Pumla Gqola, Zethu Matebeni, Achille Mbembe, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Ifi Amadiume, Maria Lugones, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Walter Mignolo.

13. In place of a single leader, students adopted what they called a ‘leader-full’ approach, with a plurality of leadership across the movement. This practice emerged in part from students’ understandings of pre-colonial consensual politics in Africa, as well as anarchist praxis (Platzky Miller, 2019, p. 153).

14. This resonance is uneven: combining sometimes with other struggles against durable legacies of colonialism and racism across the continent and diaspora, but also easily depoliticized and tamed (Okech, 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS), South Africa.

Notes on contributors

Antje Daniel

Antje Daniel is a senior scholar at the Department of Development Studies, University of Vinna and assiciated researcher at the Centre of Social Change, University of Johannesburg. Her research focusses on social movements, civil society, utopia, future, imagination, democratisation and conflict.

Josh Platzky Miller

Josh Platzky Miller is an NIHSS postdoctoral fellow at the Humanities Institute, University of KwaZulu-Natal, and an affiliated lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge. Josh's primary research interests are social movements, African and Latin American politics and political thought, social epistemology and the imagination, and the global history and historiography of philosophy.