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Abstract
This article focuses on the Fees Must Fall Protests in South Africa as a decolonial strategy implemented by university students who seek a fully liberated South Africa. Students’ core demands of the access to and quality of university education embody Africans’ early ideals of freedom from the Victorian Era to the turbulence seen in the violent student protests of the 1970s and 1980s. Students underscored that their future is compromised by the ruling party’s inability to live up to a democratic blueprint of liberation. By marching and inflicting disruptive modes of politics, including vandalizing property, university students called for the removal of colonial artifacts. Through innovative uses of social media networks and viral hashtags, students documented their effort to decolonize their universities through a form of knowledge production infused with African epistemologies.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Ndlovu, #FeesMustFall and Youth Mobilisation in South Africa, 57.
2 Gukelberger, “Youth and the Politics of Generational Memories,” 3.
3 Ramaru, “Feminist Reflections on the Rhodes Must Fall Movement,” 89–90.
4 Fairbanks, “The Birth of Rhodes Must Fall”; Maxwele, “#RhodesMustFall.”
5 Mthoni, “A Rapist State’s Children.”
6 Mazibuko, “Being a Feminist in the Fallist Movement in Contemporary South Africa,” 488.
7 Goosen, Rethinking UCT, 18; Lulat, “A History of African Higher Education from Antiquity to the Present,” 289.
8 Molefe, “T.O. Molefe on Reconciliation Ideology.”
9 Mazibuko, “Being a Feminist in the Fallist Movement in Contemporary South Africa,” 488.
10 Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology.”
11 Mbembe, “Decolonizing the University: New Directions.”
12 Mbembe, “On the Postcolony.”
13 Rotberg, The Founder, 357.
14 Robinson, Black Marxism.
15 Mupotsa, “A Question of Power,” 23.
16 Student demands largely mirror those raised in the 2014 report from the Council on Higher Education South Africa to the South African Parliament.
17 Ndlovu, #FeesMustFall and Youth Mobilisation in South Africa, 57–71.
18 Commission of Inquiry into Higher Education and Training, “Commission of Inquiry into Higher Education and Training Report.”
19 Bhengu, “Durban University of Technology Classes Called Off as Students Protest over Funding, Demands.”
20 Mazibuko, “Being a Feminist in the Fallist Movement in Contemporary South Africa,” 488–491.
21 Trans University Forum, “About.”
22 Ibid.
23 Lewis, “Another University is Possible.”
24 “Students hand over memorandum at Durban City Hall.”
25 Lulat, U.S. Relations with South Africa.
26 Kallaway et al., Education After Apartheid.
27 The commentary and scholarship about the fallist movement were documented in newspapers, digital forums, magazines, and academic journals. See below sampling of academic scholarship: Boosyens, Fees Must Fall; Cini, “Disrupting the Neoliberal University in South Africa”; Costandius et al., “FeesMustFall and Decolonizing the Curriculum”; Greef et al., “The #FeesMustFall Protests in South Africa”; Griffiths, “#FeesMustFall and the Decolonised University in South Africa”; Habib, Rebels and Rage; Habib, “Seeding a New World”; Heffernan and Nieftagodien, Students Must Rise; Kamanzi, “Rhodes Must Fall”; Langa et al., #Hashtag-Analysis of the #FeesMustFall Movement at South African Universities; Luescher et al., #FeesMustFall and its Aftermath; Mazibuko, “Being a Feminist in the Fallist Movement in Contemporary South Africa”; Naicker, “From Marikana to #FeesMustFall”; Ndelu, “We Refuse to be Silenced”; Ntombana et al., “Positioning the #FeesMustFall Movement within the Transformative Agenda”; Peterson et al., “Democracy, Education, and Free Speech”; Sinwell, “The Fees Must Fall Movement”; Webb, “Asinamali.”
28 Ray, Free Fall; Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Zondi, Decolonizing the University, Knowledge Systems, and Disciplines in Africa.
29 Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Zondi, Decolonizing the University, Knowledge Systems, and Disciplines in Africa.
30 Gumede, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC.
31 Morake, “Why Decolonizing UCT is Imperative.”
32 Baker, “This Photograph Galvanized the World Against Apartheid.”
33 Pelzer, Verwoerd Speaks.
34 Ibid.
35 Department of Basic Education, Annual Report.
36 Gumede, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC; Habib, South Africa’s Suspended Revolution; Jansen and Blank, How to Fix South Africa’s Schools.
37 Ndlovu, #FeesMustFall and Youth Mobilisation in South Africa.
38 Pampalone, “In South Africa, Anger in a Hashtag.”
39 Ndlovu, #FeesMustFall and Youth Mobilisation in South Africa, 59.
40 Ibid.
41 Lewis, “Another University is Possible.”
42 Frankel, Between the Rainbows and the Rain; Shenkar, Marikana.
43 Bernardo, “Shackville Erected at UCT.”
44 Mkhabela, “#Shackville, UCT Students Share Their Reasons.”
45 Ntongana, “UCT Students Protest Against Accommodation Shortage.”
46 Pampalone, “In South Africa, Anger in a Hashtag.”
47 Brown, South Africa’s Insurgent Citizens.
48 Serino, “Anti-Racism Protests Use Poop to Make a Point.”
49 Pandoor, “The Contested Meaning of Transformation.”
50 Mamdani, Citizen and Subject; Pereira, Changing Narratives of Sexuality; Zeleza, African Universities in the Twenty-First Century, Volume 1.
51 Khumbo Sebambo, “Azania House as a Symbol of the Black Imagination.”
52 Biko, I Write What I Like; Hani, My Life; Maxeke, “The Progress of Native Womanhood”; Mandela, My Soul Left with Him.
53 Maxeke, “The Progress of Native Womanhood,” 503.
54 Maxeke, “The Progress of Native Womanhood.”
55 Dube née Mdima, Africa.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Tshepo Masango Chéry
Tshepo Masango Chéry is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a South African scholar whose work traces the history of liberation struggles on the African continent. She is critically attune to the function of race, gender, and religion expression in these movements. Her current book project Kingdom Come: Archbishop Alexander’s Transnational Practices of Faith and Freedom in South Africa and Beyond uncovers the ways early twentieth century African Christians built their own religious institutions and relied on them to respond politically to the changing racial landscape of segregationist South Africa. It argues that African churches in the early twentieth century developed a critical set of political methodologies that church leaders contributed to the anti-apartheid struggle that began well before apartheid. Kingdom Come provides a new genealogy of religious activism operating beyond the expected norms of respectable masculinity in African society. Her scholarship works to shed light on various facets of political radicalism that have been underexplored in southern African histories.