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

1 Introduction

The imagination is central to human existence. It has, however, largely been overlooked in social movement studies, and philosophies of the imagination are largely depoliticized, leaving underexplored the connections between imagining and movements. In this article, we explore the relationships between the imagination and protest, especially in the form of occupations. We focus on the 2015 #RhodesMustFall student occupation at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, to discuss the imaginative processes of collective actors – especially their decolonial and intersectional imaginaries. As ‘imaginaries’, decoloniality and intersectionality encompass the kinds of futures and alternative social configurations that activists conceived of through the movement. We explore these theoretically through a theoretical ideas relating to imagination developed by Sartre and Fanon; combined with debates about occupations. Overall, we argue that the #RhodesMustFall student occupation was a vital space and time for students to reimagine education and society, catalysing and disseminating the movement’s central imaginaries.

From March 2015, numerous parallel protests erupted throughout South African Higher Education institutions. The #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) movement at the University of Cape Town was central in this process, and particularly its occupation of Azania House, for this provided a space and time for activists to re-envision what the university, social relations and organization should look like. Between 2015 and 2017, #RMF connected with activists at other universities and coalesced into #FeesMustFall, one of the largest sustained movements and radical challenges to authority in post-apartheid South Africa. Students across the country confronted their institutions and the state, which remained shaped by their racist colonial roots and apartheid-era roles. Twenty years after the end of Apartheid, students raised prominent new critiques of the 1994 political settlement, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and its promises of transformation, and the idea of the South African ‘Rainbow Nation’, a ‘multi-racial’ democracy with equality and rights for all (student accounts; see also, Chikane, 2018; Lester et al., 2017). Students highlighted continuities between colonialism, apartheid, and contemporary society. The black majority, they argued, in fact continued to be exploited.¹ As one student summarized,

Post-1994, we have been brainwashed with the idea of the ‘rainbow nation’. What is clear is that we live in a post-apartheid South Africa where inequality, racism, white supremacist capitalist, patriarchy continues to oppress black people in the country. The movement comes out of the feeling of being desperate, angry and frustrated by the state of things in the country (quoted from Ndelu, 2017, pp. 62-63).

While engaging with the broader socio-political context, the #Fallist movement focused on issues central to the South African education system. Against commodified and marketized education, the movement demanded the abolition of university fees.² Students called for decolonizing education and overcoming structural and epistemic violence. Students also allied with campus operations workers to end exploitative labour conditions and racialized class hierarchies entrenched by ‘outsourcing’ workers (student-worker account, Luckett & Mzobe, 2016).

Throughout 2015–17, students in South Africa protested on and off campuses. Their repertoire included shutdowns, demonstrations, marches, and occupations. Across the country, the #MustFall movement wave had numerous direct impacts, with several universities including UCT committing to decolonizing education and insourcing workers. By December 2017, the #FeesMustFall wave receded as students’ pressure saw then-president Jacob Zuma commit to fee-free tertiary education for poor and working-class students.

The #MustFall movements in South Africa can be seen as part of a ‘fourth phase’ of decolonization debates in Africa, specifically focusing on Higher Education (Mamdani, 2016). They follow, reignite, and challenge three previous phases: anti-colonial national liberation from the 1950–60s, post-colonial debates on university-state relations, and contesting Structural Adjustment Programmes’ neoliberalization of education from the 1980s (Okech, 2020, pp. 315–316). These challenges are significant because educational institutions are situated at a unique intersection. While they are primarily oriented towards knowledge production, they are also sites of social struggle, encompassing material and epistemic concerns, and they speak to immediate needs and longer-term questions of social reproduction, continuity, and change (Platzky Miller, 2019, p. 43).

This article brings together two authors’ empirical research conducted independently on the same occupation over an overlapping time period. This process drew on different, but complementary methodological and theoretical approaches synthesized into the arguments below.³ We develop our understanding of students’ perspectives through biographical interviews, particularly participants in occupations, exploring their views on education and movement-building. We supplemented this by participating in talks, attending protests, and mass-meetings, interviewing academics involved with the movement, and drawing on several students’ published works.

This kind of research presents ethical and political concerns, including the danger of reproducing hierarchies of knowledge production between scholars and activists, and the risk of eclipsing students’ own concerns by scholarly interest (see e.g., a former Fallist’s account in Gamedze, 2020; or broadly in Dawson & Sinwell, 2012). Similarly, numerous activists and scholars have argued that an important aspect of resisting epistemic imperialism is not only to bring ‘Southern’ social movements into focus as objects of study, but theorize with and from their own knowledge production (Cox et al., 2017). As such, we also engage with students’ theoretical contributions, paying particular attention to their language,⁴ politics, and imaginaries.

In the next section, we show how social movement theory can productively engage with theorizing the imagination and the spatio-temporal conditions of occupations. In part three, we discuss students’ struggles in South Africa, before focusing on the Azania House occupation to argue that it was an important space for students to take refuge, share experiences, and to imagine a more liberated education and alternative forms of social organization. In part four, we present students’ imaginaries, arguing that two emerged centrally from the occupation: decolonization, which became the movement’s foundational axis, and intersectionality, which was also central but was more contested. Finally, we conclude by arguing that the #MustFall movements are significant not only at a local scale, but are more globally important because they draw our attention to how colonialism and decolonization should matter for theorizing from the Global South about social movements.

2 Social movements, imagination, and occupations

Studies on social movements implicitly presume a relation between collective action and the future: a critique of the present and a claim for an alternative future are preconditions for mobilization (Schulz, 2016). Movement participants aim at regaining control over their own lives, and in the process thus create imaginaries about how a society should be (Neidhardt & Rucht, 2001). Although there is relatively broad recognition that the imagination, futures, and temporality are important for movements, these themes remain niche in academic debates (Gillan, 2020; McAdam & Sewell, 2001). Summarizing a recent special issue on temporality for Social Movement Studies, Gillan and Edwards (2020) argue that existing literature tends to interrogate temporality through metaphors of rhythms, such as cycles of protest, or through the notion of ‘eventful’ temporality in protests. Amongst those approaching the relationship between the present, possible futures, and the imagination in movements, several authors have directly acknowledged the importance of activists’ sense of the future. Brown (2016), for example, highlights the role of ‘prospectus’, a horizon of possibility in movements, which relies on the imagination without theorizing it as such. Others, such as Schulz (2016), have endorsed an ongoing dialogue between social movements and research on futures to understand and shape public imaginations, but similarly has not theorized the role of the imagination itself.

Very little of the research on futures in social movement studies engages directly with the imagination (Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014). The concrete relations between collective action and future imaginaries remains under-theorized, especially as mediated in specific spatio-temporal conditions, such as occupations (Aitchison, 2011; Frenzel et al., 2014). This paper addresses these gaps. Firstly, we draw in perspectives on imagination developed by Sartre and Fanon, to understand how the imagination works, and hence how people develop imaginaries (objects of their imagination). Secondly, we show how a movement’s spatiality, here in terms of occupations, matters in developing, negotiating, and experimenting with imaginaries.

2.1 Imagination

To imagine is to be conscious of what does not currently exist. This is vital for social movements in projecting ‘how the world might be otherwise’, shaping individual and collective meaning, action, and change (Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014). Social movement studies tangentially discusses the imagination in highlighting subjective motivations for activism, grounded in individual experiences and cultural embeddedness (Baumgarten et al., 2014), or emotional resonance (Jasper, 1998). Scholars have also discussed movement meaning-making and how claims for change have been developed through framing theory (Benford & Snow, 2000). These may be important facets of movements, but do not speak centrally to the imagination as a fundamental human capacity, instead intervening ‘downstream’ in its functions or effects. Conversely, philosophies of the imagination that explore its basic features, such as in Kind (2016), tend to remain silent about political action and so are largely unhelpful for social movement scholars.

To address the imagination’s underlying features and political dynamics, social movement theory can productively draw on Sartre and Fanon’s contributions. Sartre (1940/2004) theorizes the imagination as a basic intentional mental faculty: imagining is a central and inherently human practice. For Sartre, the imagination differs from perception because it is unconstrained by reality. To imagine something is to be conscious of some object – an imaginary – but conscious of it as not being real. This alone is vital for social movements because activism necessarily implies a relationship to alternative possible social arrangements; that is, a consciousness of something desirable but not presently real.

Without being able to imagine and relate our current experiences to an imagined future, we would experience the world purely as a given and therefore lack the capacity to conceive of alternative possibilities that may be within grasp, which would foreclose action to change how things are. Thus, the imagination (or lack thereof) is necessary for developing (or limiting) a sense of self, agency, and ultimately collective action – as in a movement’s occupation.

However, imagining can only take place relating to, and with an experience of, what is real (Sartre, 1940/2004, p. 185). Developing Sartre’s theory, Fanon argues that the imaginary consciousness is ‘certainly unreal, but it drinks from the concrete world’ (Fanon & Geronimi, 1956/2018, p. 431). This means that ‘imaginary life cannot be isolated from real life: the concrete, objective world is what constantly fuels, enables, legitimates and founds the imaginary’ (p. 431). The tension between the real and the imaginary is fundamental for movement activism because, as Sartre (1940/2004, p. 184) argues, imagining involves an ‘escape from the world’, which enables an alternative engagement therewith. From this, we distinguish three moments in the act of imagining: entanglement with reality as it is (often, in social movements, involving a sense of discontentment or critique), then an imaginary in which that reality is negated (imagining a world without the object of critique), and then a substantive imagined alternative (a different way in which the world could be).

Social structures condition the relationship between agency and the imagination. If imagining is grounded in situated, embodied, lived experiences, it can be conditioned (facilitated or inhibited) by particular social configurations.⁵ The scope of our capacity to imagine also depends on our agency, specifically our connection and engagement with reality. As Fanon argues (Fanon & Geronimi, 1956/2018, p. 431), imaginaries ‘are only possible to the extent that the real belongs to us’. The opposite would be a denial of agency and alienation from reality so severe that the imagination cannot be set in motion. Fanon’s particular contribution (pp.), then, is to argue that structural oppression, particularly its most extreme forms under colonialism, may limit the scope of the imagination, reducing a sense of possibility to blunt actuality.

While social configurations can inhibit the imagination, social movements can also affect the scope of people’s imaginations. Collective action oriented towards changing the social world is widely understood to reveal alternatives to existing structures, norms, and behaviours. Undertaking collective action can thus initiate and facilitate an expansion of participants’ imaginative horizons. Moreover, by changing circumstances, social movements may shape new conditions from which people imagine. Such action is grounded in real-world conditions and takes place in space, for instance, in an occupation. In summary, understanding how people imagine requires an understanding of their social context, and especially the spaces in which new collective movement imaginaries emerge and are shaped.

2.2 Occupations

Since 2008, the Arab Spring, European anti-austerity and Occupy movements have drawn renewed popular and scholarly attention to occupations (Daniel, 2018).⁶ From Tahrir to Wall Street, Gezi to Syntagma, Bolotnaya to St Paul’s, movements have reclaimed public space, questioning established authority. Social movement literature largely focuses on occupations alongside protest camps, and sometimes squatting, mostly as a movement strategy or tactic (See e.g., Feigenbaum et al., 2013; Frenzel et al., 2014; Yip et al., 2019). Such studies highlight the centrality of space in reshaping activist subjectivities and fomenting creative political practices (Aitchison, 2011; Frenzel et al., 2014; Risager, 2017). In occupied spaces, participants may develop new forms of living and ways of relating to one another or the world beyond the occupation, implementing alternative norms or values, or elaborating new forms of power. However, occupations are simultaneously grounded in real-world conditions, shaped by the context they respond to. They operate against existing social structures as part of an ‘ongoing and evolving sequence of interactions and resistance practices’ (Beckett et al., 2017, p. 175). Occupations can thus house counter-cultural practices against hegemonic norms and dominant social relations (Naidoo, 2016, p. 2).⁷ Occupations are therefore ‘eventful’ protests, transforming the movement through challenging the old and generating something new (Della Porta, 2011; Platzky Miller, 2021).

Since the 2000s, social movement scholars have also explored prefiguration: the ‘creation of alternatives in the here and now’ seeking to ‘build the world anew’ through movement practices (Maeckelbergh, 2011, pp. 2–3). Following numerous recent movements, scholars have highlighted how movement strategy is related to imagination, experimentation, and establishing new practices or institutions (Yates, 2015, 2021). Movements prefigure imagined alternative worlds by refusing to distinguish between the ‘ends’ and ‘means’ of political struggle, instantiating imaginaries in present organizing (Graeber, 2002). This is crucial in occupations and protest camps (Feigenbaum et al., 2013), which offer space for experimenting with and instantiating alternative social configurations. In occupations, activists can materialize imaginaries.

Occupations rely on participants imagining the world otherwise, while manifesting these imaginaries as agents in refashioning the world around them. But occupations can also facilitate the development of the imagination. Because the imagination is socially conditioned, it can be theorized as developing through three channels: dialogical spaces, conceptual resources, and creative expression (Fletcher, 2016).⁸

Firstly, occupations can be prime sites of ‘copresence’ (Sewell, 2001, p. 57), bringing people from a range of backgrounds into the same space, facilitating dialogue and exchange, and even offering refuge and respite against everyday oppression. Secondly, they provide physical space for participants to learn: introducing, sharing, and exploring new conceptual resources, ranging from theoretical tools to tactical tips, histories of past activism to personal experiences. Thirdly, by controlling the space of an occupation, activists control their own activities and are less constrained by the strictures of everyday life. They thus experiment with creative production, from new cultural activities to alternative forms of decision-making, acting, and relating (Naidoo, 2016, p. 6).

These activities often rely on limiting access to occupied space, partially or extensively excluding non-movement participants. Semi-exclusive control of occupied space can facilitate an escape from undesirable present, reprising the individual act of imagining at a group level: collectively withdrawing from ordinary life, becoming conscious of something other than what exists, and engaged with reality in being set against it (Sartre, 1940/2004, p. 184). As Naidoo (2016, p. 6) argues, an occupation ‘creates a new space-time’, which throws into relief the problems with existing social structures and renders alternatives more visible. Occupations thus can facilitate alternative ways of living, values, and practices, and may challenge existing social structures. They offer a focal point for movements to develop, negotiate, and practice new imaginaries (Aitchison, 2011).

However, occupations are often temporary and unstable counter-spaces, changing and adapting continuously (Beckett et al., 2017, pp.). They are under pressure from two main challenges: maintaining themselves and avoiding fissures or dispersal, especially from authorities’ repression (Naidoo, 2016, p. 4); or becoming mainstreamed, institutionalized, and incorporated into the status quo (e.g., Tarlau, 2015).

We have argued that social movement studies can be enriched by a theory of the imagination, which links real-world conditions and movement activity to activists’ imaginaries. We discuss this specifically through occupations, which can challenge existing structures, create refuges and sites of cooperation and learning, and may experimentally prefigure alternative forms of social organization. Such occupations demonstrate through struggle how the world could be.

3 #RhodesMustFall and the Azania House occupation

The #RhodesMustFall (RMF) student-led movement started with a mass meeting of students at the University of Cape Town (UCT) on 12 March 2015. This mass meeting was preceded by a symbolic protest a few days earlier in which student Chumani Maxwele had thrown shit on the statue of British racist-colonialist Cecil John Rhodes, prominently placed at the centre of UCT’s main campus.⁹ The protest’s goals centred on ending ‘institutionalised racism and patriarchy’ at UCT, and resisting violence against ‘black students, workers and staff’ (#RhodesMustFall, 2015). Over the following months, similar protests emerged at other universities across the country, before coalescing from October 2015 under the banners of #FeesMustFall and #EndOutsourcing.¹⁰ UCT Fallists inaugurated the wave of 2015 student-worker movements in South Africa, and did so spectacularly, puncturing university life: with radical demands for intersectional decolonization erupting through the ordinary post-Apartheid discourses of transformation – and a successful occupation of a large UCT administrative centre, the Bremner building (or, as it was renamed, ‘Azania House’).

Despite occupations becoming more common globally in post-2008 struggles (Risager, 2017), they had been rare in South African universities prior to 2015. Two significant precursors were in the 1960s, when UCT students briefly occupied the same administrative building during the ‘Mafeje Affair’ (Ntsebeza, 2014), and in the early 2000s in Johannesburg, when students at the University of the Witwatersrand occupied a manager’s office to challenge the firing of workers (Pendlebury & van der Walt, 2006). From 2015, however, in the context of #FeesMustFall, students across the country attempted to occupy buildings at numerous universities. These were largely unsuccessful, as police and private security violently prevented students from controlling campus space (Duncan & Frassinelli, 2015; Manzini, 2017). Because it was an exceptional, successful tactic, we focus our analysis on the Azania House occupation at UCT.

3.1. The Azania House occupation

On Friday, 20 March 2015, UCT students occupied the Bremner building.¹¹ According to Ahmed (2019, p. 29), activists linked to the Student Representative Council (SRC) had pre-planned a short, weekend-long symbolic occupation – resonating with the 1968 Mafeje Affair occupation (#RhodesMustFall, 2015, pp. 9, 118). Most students, however, had no idea of any planned occupation, and one described it taking place ‘almost by accident’ (Interview, student, 20 March 2019).

As students took control of the space, they reshaped and repurposed it for the movement’s development, initially by contesting and reconstructing the space’s symbolic meaning. They did this initially by renaming the building ‘Azania House’, adopting a Pan-Africanist term referring to southern African pre-colonial social boundaries. As one student explained,

Azania is a name for free liberated space for black people. We said that ‘Bremner’ must be changed to ‘Azania’ because it is a place for black people to speak about their pain and to re-engineer society (Interview, student, 23 March 2017).

The occupation quickly became more than simply symbolic. Inside, students established a working and living place, and created a space for movement organizing and sustenance, with students cooking and eating in the building’s offices. A student narrated,

At the occupation, we had corners of the different areas that people would sleep in and leave their things. We’d wake up in the morning, organize breakfast or whatever, and some people would go to class, other people would stay at the occupation (Interview, student, 29 September 2017).

Azania House also hosted much of the movement’s political education and cultural production, as students organized events from public debates to poetry sessions and movie screenings. Although the core group of around 60 occupiers was a small proportion of UCT’s student body, numerous students, workers and academics participated in the occupation’s social and political life. One academic later highlighted the positive and optimistic feeling that this diverse group created, and the ‘remarkable energy and solidarity’ that shaped the occupation (Interview, academic, 30 September 2017).

3.2. Conditioning reimagining

For students, Azania House was a space from which to express frustrations and enact aspirations, spurring students’ imagination of what was possible. As one student-activist suggested, the occupation ‘created the conditions for a vibrant intellectual space for imagining what could replace [the university]’ (Naidoo, 2016, p. 3). Azania House was, others reflected, a ‘symbol’ or ‘catalyst’ for the ‘black imagination’ (Gamedze, 2015; Sebambo, 2015). Indeed, #RMF writings from the occupation demonstrate the importance they placed on the imagination: in one published collection, students mention the imagination approximately 100 times in almost as many pages, and it appears frequently in contributors’ titles (#RhodesMustFall, 2015). As one student put it,

I think that was one of the most fundamental aspects of the movement: that we were able to imagine […] what a liberated society would be like (Interview, student, 29 September 2017).

Students used Azania House to facilitate their imaginative activity by (1) creating a sense of refuge, care, belonging, and healing; (2) learning together and sharing ideas; and (3) experimenting with and enacting their imaginaries.

3.2.1. Refuge

Students used Azania House to seek refuge from the alienation and marginalization they experienced at university, often framed as ‘black pain’ (see, Nyamnjoh, 2017). Students spoke of Azania House as a kind of sanctuary: a caring home that nurtured a sense of belonging, enabling students to heal from their experiences of racism and discrimination (Interview, student, 29 September 2017). This emerged especially from students’ practices of sharing their experiences of university and life in South Africa, listening to one another, and taking each other’s experiences seriously. As one student put it, ‘there were many people who could acknowledge what people were saying and respect it’ (Interview, student, 29 September 2017). This helped students to reflect and build new senses of self, commonality and relationships with one another, and understandings of their position in their institution and society (Student account, Gamedze, 2015, p. 123). As one student described,

At first it was completely overwhelming finding people who are feeling the same as you and feeling validated in your experience […] a whole lot of people felt super isolated […] At first, I was like ‘oh my goodness, this is a daydream’ (Interview, student, 11 April 2017).

Even as it is connected to ‘ordinary’ life, imagining always involves some dissonance from reality. This was a starting point for Azania to, in one participant’s account, provide a ‘spatial safety that allowed for the imagination of blackness to flourish’ (Sebambo, 2015, p. 108). The sense of refuge in the occupation thus provided an environment in which the practice of imagining was nourished and cultivated.

3.2.2. Learning

Azania House was also a space for individual and collective learning, reflection, and sharing of ideas, stimulating the imagination. Students’ learning involved denaturalising and denormalising existing social relations, rather than accepting the way things are as inevitable or desirable (Platzky Miller, 2021). As one student highlighted,

In those occupations, there was much deeper conversation about how we imagine our society. […] We just started and notions of decoloniality came into the picture. That we are not here for transformation, we are here for decolonization. Because if societal disease is colonial the only remedy should, therefore, be decolonial (Interview, student, 23 March 2017).

Reading clusters flourished throughout the occupation, particularly after a student brought a crate of books on themes largely relating to African political thought and anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles. Over time, students created their own reading lists and collated digital resources, widely publicizing a freely accessible Dropbox folder with ‘conscientisation literature’. The occupation also hosted discussions and debates, including with sympathetic academic staff and operations workers, on themes ranging from Rhodes’ acts of dispossession, to UCT’s complicity in racism and apartheid (Interview, student, 7 April 2017).

As university students, alongside interactions with academics and reading circles, Fallists’ views were partially influenced by academic debates. They drew on feminist, decolonial and postcolonial theory (particularly subaltern studies) and authors from the African diaspora, especially in Black Feminism, Critical Race Theory, and Afro-pessimism (Sitas, 2017, pp. 34–35).¹² These theoretical tools were freely adapted, reinterpreted, and transferred into the movement’s imaginaries. As one student, Xaba (2017, p. 98), argued, ‘what was unique about the movement was the ability to articulate and translate a fairly alienating academic concept to the public and also use the theory of decolonization as an ideological tool that inspired resistance.’

Students also drew on their knowledge of past social movements, revolutions, and histories of struggle for liberation. Sources of influence included, for instance, Pan-Africanist and anti-colonial movements, diasporic anti-racism in the US Black Power movement, and struggles against apartheid in South Africa, especially the Black Consciousness Movement and the 1976 student-led Soweto Uprising (Booysen, 2016, pp. 12–14). One student narrated how she was inspired during occupation because past struggles resonated for her:

I remember one guy got up, and talked about [Black Consciousness Movement co-founder] Steve Biko. I remember thinking, I need to read the book […] That weekend I stayed at home, I read the book, and I was crying because of what Steve Biko was talking about. He was talking to me about the things that I have been taught about myself (Interview, student, 7 September 2018).

What students learned helped them better understand themselves and the discrimination they experienced. Students drew on prior movements’ demands, transposing these onto the conditions that they experienced in contemporary South Africa and at university. These experiences were, as we discuss below, the raw materials that shaped students’ imaginaries.

3.2.3. Experimentation

A further facet of the occupation that conditioned students’ imaginations was their experimentation. This manifested in several areas including pedagogy, as students explored alternative, artistic, dialogical, and non-hierarchical modes of producing and sharing knowledge.

A central theme, however, was organizing horizontally; as one student recalled, ‘we agreed from the beginning that it was a flat structure that nobody was going to be the leader of the movement’ (Interview, student, 29 September 2017).¹³ In practice, students in the occupation enacted this through direct-democratic, consensus-based decision making. They coupled this with critiques and challenges to the hierarchical structures of the university, state, and existing political parties and student organizations (student account, Chikane, 2018, p. 203). By experimenting with horizontality and consensus, students endeavoured to centre the voices and positions of those ordinarily discriminated against and overlooked at the university. For example, students recalled being prioritized to speak in meetings because of their experience of discrimination (Interview, student, 29 September 2018). Students thus tried to change the university space, which they perceived as discriminatory and oppressive, into a social and inclusive space. Experimenting with inclusive decision-making entwined with the question of leadership: horizontalism, aimed at overcoming all forms of hierarchical and exclusionary structures, would thus prefigure the more egalitarian university and society that they wished to create, drawing imagined egalitarian futures into the present in organizing the occupation (Platzky Miller, 2019, p. 148).

Despite these principles, internal cleavages and new hierarchies in #RMF emerged over time (Interview, student, 27 September 2018). These included controversies about representation; gendered violence, roles and heteronormativity; ideological and party-political differences; essentialized racial politics and class hierarchies among student activists (See e.g., student account, Ndelu, 2017; see also, Daniel, 2020, 2021). Azania House, still a refuge for some, became more dangerous or exclusionary for others. In one egregious case, a male Fallist sexually assaulted a female Fallist inside the occupation (for a student account see, Dlamini, 2015; see also, Maluleke & Moyer, 2020). Despite claims that the occupation was a hierarchy-free and safe space for experimentation, this instance shows that broader social problems could be recreated within the occupation. Egalitarian experiments could fail.

In summary, the Azania House occupation was a space which offered some a refuge. It stimulated learning, facilitating shared understandings of discrimination, and a common knowledge basis of past struggles and academic debates. Simultaneously, students experimented with new forms of social relations, including horizontal, collective decision-making. These conditions proved fertile ground for imaginative development, as we discuss in the following section.

4 Students’ decolonial-intersectional imaginaries

During the Azania House occupation, students imagined what an alternative university and even society would look like. In this section, we discuss their imaginaries in three groupings: 1) imaginaries of negation, wherein aspects of the existing order no longer exist; followed by substantive imaginaries of alternative futures encompassing 2) decolonial imaginaries; and 3) intersectional imaginaries. Each of these imaginaries was informed by a complex interplay of the factors highlighted above, including students’ personal experiences, academic debates, and experimenting with alternative forms of organizing in the occupation.

Decolonization and intersectionality were the two most prominent substantive imaginaries that students in #RMF developed. What these entailed was contested over time, and the two were often entwined with one another. Among the developed imaginaries decolonization became dominant and widely accepted across the movement, as a challenge to a ‘system that does not recognize’ the ‘experience of blackness’ (#RhodesMustFall, 2015, p. 3). Decolonization, according to one prominent early framing in #RMF, entailed three pillars: Black Consciousness, Pan-Africanism, and Black Radical Feminism.

The second key imaginary, intersectionality, overlapped with decolonization, especially in the contributions of feminist and LGBTQI* students. However, its place was significantly more contested throughout the movement (Daniel, 2021).

In key statements, the movement argued that decolonization and intersectionality were linked. Moreover, they argued that ‘systems of exploitation’ around multiple social categories were ‘rooted in the world at large’, and hence that the ‘decolonization of this institution is thus fundamentally linked to the decolonization of our entire society’ (#RhodesMustFall, 2015, p. 12). However, we focus here on how students’ imaginaries in higher education, as a powerful focal point for intergenerational social reproduction, at the intersection of institutional, epistemic, and social reorganization (Platzky Miller, 2019, pp. 40–41).

In the following sections, we discuss students’ imaginaries of what decolonization and intersectionality could involve at this scale. First, however, we address ‘imaginaries of negation’ as a precursor for the more substantive imaginaries. In doing so, we highlight the oppressive conditions that students critiqued and rejected, and how they imagined a world without those forms of oppression. Students were still imagining the world otherwise, but in a limited sense, of only the absence (negation) of these conditions, without further substantiating what a decolonized or intersectional future would look like.

4.1 From critique to imaginaries of negation

As the imagination is grounded in real-world experiences, the most immediate form of imagining an alternative world is to imagine the world with a particular aspect of it negated. Students’ first explorations towards decolonization and intersectionality thus often began with critiques of reality, emerging from palpable feelings of alienation and frustration at the university, its hostile culture, and the continuities of racism and exploitation in South Africa since 1994. One student described her experiences at university,

I am so angry about my history, that this happened to my family, that I come to UCT and am still treated inferior, I am still not given the human dignity that I deserve and that white people in this institution are so violent (Interview, student, 7 September 2018).

Such discriminatory experiences meant that students’ imaginaries often started with negating the existing social conditions; withdrawing from, critiquing, and overcoming the existing present. As another student indicated, ‘for imagining the ideal society we have to dismantle the colonial system’ (Interview, student, 7 September 2018).

Many students also identified university curricula as a source of alienation, critiquing the knowledge they encountered as ‘Western’, ‘Eurocentric’, or reproducing ‘Whiteness’ (#RhodesMustFall, 2015). Students argued that this shaped their own experience: they felt increasingly isolated and disjointed from their past and history because ‘the West is always the starting point from which we articulate ourselves’ (Interview, student, 3 March 2017).

From such critiques emerged an imaginary of negation: students envisioned an end to an existing white-supremacist, patriarchal, colonial world, and all its alienation and dehumanization. The very slogan ‘MustFall’ expresses this struggle for abolition, regardless of what other contending imaginaries may coalesce for rebuilding. As one student explained,

you want nothing to do with the system as it is. It’s not about ‘you want to change things here and there’. We are disconnecting ourselves from the so-called ‘society’ that was there (Kamanzi, 2015).

These imaginaries of negation were also developed with an intersectional perspective. This entailed imagining overcoming interlocking hierarchical power relations, and particularly a future free from masculine control, gendered violence, shaming, and compulsory heterosexuality (See e.g., student account, Matandela, 2017, p. 15).

Because imaginaries of negation are of the end of discrimination, hierarchies, and exploitation, they entail a liberation from intersecting structures of oppression. This motivated students; as one argued, ‘we want to be free. I think that is precisely what has been my fuel. The constant longing to be free’ (Interview, student, 29 August 2018).

4.2 Decolonial imaginaries

Going beyond negating the existing world, students in the Azania House occupation developed expansive imaginaries of what the future could look like. Most prominently, students imagined a decolonized university and society. At the university level, decolonial imaginaries were particularly responsive to three epistemic questions: what kind of knowledge universities produce and prioritize, whose knowledge counts, and why/where that knowledge matters.

Early reflections of how students imagined decolonization are embedded in the #RMF Mission Statement (#RhodesMustFall, 2015, p. 8), released on 25 March after several days of the occupation. The statement reflects a constellation of concerns, including demanding that UCT:

• Implement a curriculum which critically centres Africa and the subaltern […] treating African discourses as the point of departure – through addressing not only content, but languages and methodologies of education and learning – and only examining western traditions in so far as they are relevant to our own experience.

• Introduce a curriculum and research scholarship linked to social justice and the experiences of black people.

• Re-evaluate the standards by which research areas are decided – from areas that are lucrative and centre whiteness, to areas that are relevant to the lives of black people locally and on the continent.

Students thus firstly imagined decolonization as resuscitating and valorising subaltern knowledge formations. This was most intuitively framed as reorienting learning toward ‘African knowledge’, grounded in the experiences of African societies, whether untainted by colonialism, formed in resistance thereto, or operating beyond its reach. Bringing these imagined futures into the present, students confronted the question of how existing, Eurocentric curricula ought to be abolished, radically changed, or relate to alternative (Africanized) curricula (Platzky Miller, 2019, pp. 65–68). Throughout the #MustFall movements, students and academics offered numerous suggestions, from adding to or recentring the existing curriculum (student account, Shezi, 2016, p. 27; see also, Garuba, 2015), to recognizing the entanglement of dynamic knowledge formations through historical encounter and interaction – rather than knowledge ‘belonging’ to one culture, geography, or ‘race’ (Connell, 2019, pp. 91–94; Smith, 2017, p. 15).

Secondly, students sought to ‘disturb institutional academic hierarchies’ (see, Gamedze, 2020, p. 61 for a student account), challenging institutional understandings of who had valuable knowledge. Instead, they imagined institutions which recognized the valuable, often hidden or neglected, knowledge of both students and (operations) workers. This too emerged from the occupation’s discussion groups, led by student and worker participants, identifying variously as women, non-binary, and black. This reconstructed their experiences as ‘pedagogically valuable’ (Naidoo, 2016, p. 3). At the centre of the occupation, those ordinarily most marginalized in the institution were attempting to enact the different world they envisioned: free from hierarchy, exploitation, and oppression, and where all experiences truly mattered.

Thirdly, students reimagined the university as a microcosm of society in a way that could be transformative. A third aspect of imagining decolonization was thus conceiving a repurposed education system: more attuned to the needs of broader society in the country and continent. This encompassed the who and the what, as a university that marginalizes some groups and trades in Eurocentric knowledge could not hope to adequately address contextual issues. One student thus described their imagined university as ‘an institution in Africa that stands and believes and looks for solutions for Africa […] To allow African people to take part’ (Interview, student, 28 September 2018).

4.3 Intersectional imaginaries

The second major imaginary emerging from the occupation was intersectionality. From the outset, students presented decolonization and intersectionality as two complementary, intertwined imaginaries. The Mission Statement (#RhodesMustFall, 2015), for instance, presents intersectionality and decoloniality as both unpacking structures of oppression. Their understanding drew on Crenshaw’s (1991) conception, defining intersectionality as a tool to understand social-structural conditions of interlocking and overlapping oppressions, including gender, sexuality, class, mental health, and able-bodiedness. As the #RMF founding statement (2015, p. 6) argues, intersectionality

must inform our organizing so that we do not silence groups among us, and so that no one should have to choose between their struggles. Our movement endeavours to make this a reality in our struggle for decolonization.

Feminist and queer student activists used the concept of intersectionality as a tool both to critique hierarchies in the movement, and to challenge the patriarchal social relations that shaped their institutions. These relations were undergirded by a heteronormative masculinity and largely erased the voices and experiences of feminists and LGBTQI* people (student account, Khan, 2017). Intersectionality, then, could be used to facilitate the path towards decolonization (Daniel, 2020, 2021).

From the Azania House occupation, students began developing expansive imaginaries of what intersectional liberation would look like. Some imagined a world which prioritized socio-emotional connections, such as love, care, deep compassion, and genuine community and humanity (e.g., UCT Trans Collective, in Publica[c]tion, 2017, p. 27). Galvanized in part by imaginaries emerging from the initial occupation, students over the course of the #MustFall movements shaped deeper visions that gave further substance to an imagined intersectional future. For example, one student highlighted that beyond intersectional oppressions lay a ‘post-revolutionary world’ of solidarity, which would facilitate everyone’s capacity to learn from one another, would ‘sustain all of us’, and ‘be safe for all of us, and not just some of us’ (student account, Zukiswa White, in Publica[c]tion, 2017, p. 28).

Although the imaginaries of decolonization and intersectionality were initially presented as complementary, intersectionality became increasingly contested and became a point of fracture (Daniel, 2021). As early as the Azania occupation some, predominantly male, participants told feminists and queers that #RMF was ‘Black first’ and to ‘leave our gender issues and feminist politics at the door’ (student account, Ramaru, 2017, p. 92; see also, Daniel, 2020). Entangled with other ideological currents and increasing party-politicization, some prominent students in #RMF imagined decolonization around a narrower, essentialized black racial identity (e.g., Nyamnjoh, 2017, p. 264). Disregarding intersectionality, patriarchal proponents argued that existing hierarchies, especially around class, gender, and sexuality, were not the movement’s priorities. Feminist students particularly contested this shift with the #PatriarchyMustFall counter-protest. However, many left or disidentified with #RMF over the more exclusionary activists’ positions. Prominently, for instance, the UCT Trans*Collective decided to ‘submarine from active membership’, holding #RMF accountable to intersectional decolonization from outside (student accounts by UCT Trans Collective, in Publica[c]tion, 2017, p. 27).

5 Conclusion

Calls for decolonization and intersectionality since 2015 have significantly shaped the higher education landscape at UCT and across South Africa. Over time, students contested and reworked these central imaginaries, shaping them into more specific epistemic and political projects. For example, students contributed to academic knowledge production, often framed as ‘decolonial’ and ‘intersectional’, through numerous journal articles, books, conferences, and research projects (for overviews, see, Platzky Miller, 2019, p. 66, 211; Maylam, 2020). Across UCT, structures for self-reflection were initiated, from the Curriculum Change Working Group to summer schools and regular events on decolonization.

We have argued that these imaginaries were catalysed and incubated by the Azania House occupation, which offered space and time for students to find refuge, connect with one another, share experiences, learn, and experiment with enacting their imaginaries. The occupation drew students out of everyday experiences, to imagine how the future might be different, and to attempt to draw those imaginaries into present practice. These imaginaries were shaped by students’ critiques of the existing social order, conceptual tools from academia and movements, shared experiences of alienation and anger, and practices such as collective, horizontal decision-making. Students responded to profound issues in South African higher education and society: in their imaginaries of negation, they envisioned the abolition of discrimination, racism, hierarchies, and exploitation, and a liberation from intersecting structures of oppression. Moreover, from the occupation, students established decolonization as a dominant movement imaginary, and intersectionality as a central imaginary and tool to realize decolonization. However, intersectionality remained contested and was a significant axis of factionalization, and its centrality waned over time (Daniel, 2020, 2021). This shows that even though some imaginaries in movements may be relatively more constant or significant, they are fluid and negotiated rather than static.

The centrality and significance of #RMF’s decolonial imaginaries is also demonstrated by its resonance elsewhere; influencing, engaging, and sometimes catalysing new movements (Rhodes Must Fall Oxford, 2018). Calls for decolonization have grown in the Global North, especially in European and American social sciences – including, notably, in South Africa’s former colonial metropoles, the UK and Netherlands (Ahmed, 2019; Omarjee, 2018; Rhodes Must Fall Oxford, 2018).¹⁴ This resonance is undergirded by the interconnected expansion of capitalism and colonialism, global structures of exploitation and oppression, which have shaped the contemporary world and imprint the present (Bhambra, 2021). #RMF’s imaginaries of decolonization are thus not unique to South Africa, but transnationally traverse the linkages historically etched by colonialism and capitalism.

Structural conditions matter for social movements, and scholars have – after a hiatus focusing on cultural and ‘post-material’ issues – renewed their interest in capitalism (Hetland & Goodwin, 2013). However, even this literature often remains shaped by studying protests in Western Europe and North America, still the basis for most social movement scholarship (Daniel & Neubert, 2019; Fadaee, 2016; MacSheoin, 2016). Euro-American-centric theorizing risks recreating pseudo-universalization, presenting particular regional experiences as general theory, and thereby perpetuating hierarchies of whose knowledge is more valuable – and whose experiences matter enough to theorize about (see, e.g., Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; Santos 2018). The South African student-led movements call attention to colonialism as a structural condition against which many movements act, often more explicitly in the Global South. They thus demonstrate the importance of theorizing the centrality of colonialism for movements generally (Cox et al., 2017). This matters not just for explicitly anti-colonial or indigenous movements, too easily cast aside today as a ‘historical’ or ‘peripheral’ movement type. Colonial structures remain entrenched in the very centres of imperial dominance in Euro-America, and this continued legacy shapes and is contested by movements across both the Global South and North.

The South African student-led movement created a space to reflect and theorize on the challenges of the contemporary world. Resonating with struggles far beyond Cape Town, students’ decolonial and intersectional imaginaries and practices are valuable for reimagining global justice today.

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).

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.

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).