Alexandra Bramsen
Professor Tish Lopez
Geography 90
17 March 2022
Understanding the Decolonial Contestation of #FeesMustFall: a South African Student Movement
The recent Fallist student movements of South Africa, in particular the #FeesMustFall protests face a lot of critique in their demands for decolonization. The literature surrounding student protests in South Africa range from explaining the history of it, explaining the theory behind the action and then of course there are those that seek to complicate and push back on the efforts of the protests. My arguments for the #FeesMustFall protests build off groundwork in the thesis by Timothy Irvine (2016) on the Rhodes Must Fall movement. The protests were framed within Global Studies as a movement that has “laid the discursive and social foundation for anti-capitalist movement that has re-centered the narrative of violence, colonialism, and decolonization”—from which similar social movements might learn from (2016, p. 317). Irvine uses the foundational theory of both Frantz Fanon (1963) and Steve Biko (Sithole, 2017) in decolonization, as I will also continue to do. Mbembe (2008) further contextualizes the struggles of decolonization in South Africa.
Papers by Mpofu (2017) and Dube (2017) explain further details of the protests and the different aspects of the movements. Both Zembylas (2018) and Horáková (2018) asses the protests work in progressing decolonization. I then use this strong grounding to investigate the scathing descriptions of protest violence and anarchism by Rapatsa Mashele (2017), push back on the understanding that this is a simply a call for representation (Stuurman, 2018), and focus on protest as intentional disruption. All in all, it concludes with imagining what futures of moving towards decolonized pedagogy would look like in South Africa, which to me is at the heart of these protests.
To address South Africa as a nation state now and theorize its conduct of pedagogy being interrogated by student activists, we must contextualize its colonial past. What follows is condensed version of events that does not include pre-colonial histories which with more time would be an important time to look at for imagining decolonial futures for South Africa. Colonial histories stretch as far back as early 1500s with Portuguese naval conquests that claimed land, incurred coastal raids, and precipitated trading including that of enslaved Africans along the very south of what is now the Republic of South Africa. In 1652, the establishment by the Dutch East India Company of de Kaapkolonie, the Dutch Cape Colony, together with the construction of de Fort Goede Hoop, the Fort of Good Hope was the shift creating the pure imperial colony that would eventually become the Imperial settlement colony according to Osterhammel’s types of colonialism. Settlement, agriculture, religious violence, and capitalist military escapades were all intertwined into this conduct of imperial colonization. In recreating European oppressive poli-socio-economic systems the area saw an influx of settlers looking for opportunity.
This period had a significant increase in British colonial society alongside that of the well-established Dutch or Afrikaans society. The Boer wars in of 1880-1881 then 1899-1901 were peaks of the resulting Anglo-Afrikaner tensions. It was the first time in history where modern concentration camps were purposefully used to devastate both indigenous African and Dutch-Afrikaner populations under British Imperialism. By 1910 British Imperial power was consolidated with the nation-state of the Union of South Africa. The 1800s produced racist imperialist university institutions under these conditions, with the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1829 and Stellenbosch University (SU) 1866. Overall, the groundworks for the Republic of South Africa’s education systems were laid during this time of de jure racism with dominating Anglo-British paradigms that was again reiterated during Dutch-Afrikaner colonial period from 1940-1990s. The abolition of Apartheid during the early 1990s was a step towards decolonizing South Africa, but as we will see in this investigation of South African pedagogy, those legacies are still being fought against (Irvine, 2016).
South Africa has a long history of student activist movements. While there are many complexities in the composition, action, and effectiveness of such protests, they are pervasive in South African history and political climate. For instance, student protests were crucial to Apartheid abolition. Students were leaders in and ultimately victims of protests like the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 and Soweto uprising of 1976, where police outright murdered, brutalized and abused Black bodies in retaliation. Such overall oppression by the state on Black bodies during the 1960s created a gap in the political sphere that was filled by Black student activists who in seeking quality free education took on the struggle for larger social change (Stuurman, 2018).
Corresponding demonstrations continue in the student movements #RhodesMustFall (RMF), Open Stellenbosch (OS) and more recently, the focus in this analysis, #FeesMustFall. The Rhodes Must Fall movement started in 2015 as a call for the removal of Cecil Rhodes’ statue on the UCT campus but escalated logically into a call for decolonization that swept the nations universities into a frenzy (Dube, 2017). Open Stellenbosch was a movement that picked up #RhodeMustFalls call to reevaluate university curricula, structure, faculty, student body and so on, and pushed it to a whole new level. On the SU campus a group of student activist demanded the “opening” and reformation of the institution to include all identities that have thus far been excluded (Irvine, 2016).
#FeesMustFall is progressing these decolonial contestations counter-hegemony of university conduct and widely the continuation of Eurocentric pedagogies and praxis. The issue is that while Apartheid was abolished in 1994, true radical continuous decolonization has not existed in South Africa (Irvine, 2016). We can understand this using the term coloniality, which describes a system where colonial rule is longer in place but has left behind structures of oppression that continue to place European as the top of the hierarchy (Zembylas, 2008). 2015 October, saw a spike in tuition fees, a direct contradiction to the ruling party, African National Congress’ (ANC), post-apartheid promises of free and accessible education for all Black students, which in turn sparked the #FeesMustFall protests (Irvine, 2016). The core message of these protests was that fees were beyond reach of poor Black students, but their demands stretched deeply into calling for decolonization of universities and restructuring to have equitable inclusion across race and gender.
They want free decolonized education for all. Such demands were not new and the start to the movement cannot be attributed to the protests in October of 2015 at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) and UCT. In truth, historically Black universities have been demanding the same things for a long time but have had a history of being characterized by media as centers for violent demonstration, which vicariously justified atrocious police violence and the disregard of the public. Post-1994 policy and funding created the recursive issues of inequity. The government called for university mergers between historically Black and white institutions, to forge more equitable access for Black students to quality education, but they failed to achieve these goals in implementing the merges and, in most cases, worsened racial and class lines of inequity across campuses. The fact that #FeesMustFall protests stood out to the public and brought about heated debates, was due to the racial biases of the country’s media. #FeesMustFall now included contestation on “renowned” historically white campuses, such as Wits and UCT which made the topic approachable (Ndelu et al., 2017).
Fanon (1963) explains that to continue down the path that Europe has taken and made, is to lead to an end of destruction despite its temptations. If South African universities continue to justify and reinforce European praxis and pedagogy at their core, they will fail their students and their country in removing themselves from a system that was designed to oppress and subjugate the indigenous majority. These systems marginalize the radical voices of Fanon and Biko, and that is why their works drives that of the marginalized students on these campuses. Biko founded the South African Students Association (SASO) in 1968 for and entirely lead by Black South African Students and has been mirrored in the efforts of the Rhode Must Fall movement of 2015 (Irvine, 2016). He believed that incremental change only supported the interests of the white ruling class and fought for radical structural change. Biko’s Black Consciousness searches for a Black collectivity of what it means to be Black in an anti-Black world. In doing so he is careful to not define being Black in such a way as to divide along tribal and other social lines but notes a spectrality to being Black in which struggles are forged by systems beyond themselves. Rather he calls for action where Black protestation is “acting in themselves and for themselves” confronting histories of oppression by creating Blackness (Sithole, 2016).
The university and overall, the education system can be considered a non-state power, but it is still interrelated to state functioning through complex weavings of capital flow. Capitalism itself, is always going to exist as racial capitalism. By Melamed’s (2015) account of racial capitalism as asserted by colonial structures, we can see that radical change is necessary to remove the coloniality that is perpetuated by primitive accumulation from the dispossession of indigenous communities or the more generalized subjugated populations. This is relevant in #FeesMustFall as it directly relates to racial capitalist functioning through education as an institution of social governance but also a site of struggle and resistance (Gerrard et al., 2021). In fact, before and during apartheid SU was notoriously an institution used to secure white supremacist ideologies by intellectually supporting the states racist policies (Irvine, 2016).
These student protests have the potential to make impacts across space and time. Using the concepts of Pan-Africanism we can treat post-colonial struggles as an issue that supersedes the borders that were assigned under imperial rule (Smith, 2018). South Africa in particular, has significant influence on its surrounding counterparts within Southern Africa and beyond (Irvine, 2016). This must be kept in mind as we assess the progress of these student protests. Beyond the Pan-African movement there is pan-African thought where the struggles faced by African people are addressed as complex and diverse transnational issues, that when holistically viewed encompasses the political and cultural. One broad conclusion that is found in pan-Africanism is that there are inconsistencies between “promise and practice” when it comes to decolonization, which is reflected in the failed promises of universities and the ANC concerning free decolonized education (Smith, 2018). Student movements across the Globe, but particularly across Africa, can learn from what is achieved and enacted in the decolonial contestations by the #FeesMustFall movement. Irvine (2016) goes so far as to analyze and compare case studies in California and Germany, that have very different histories, but could draw on many lessons from the South African Fallist movements. Furthermore, the push of Fallist movements to center awareness of intersectionality across race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc. contributes to its scope of impact and relatability. Mpofu (2017) claims that intersectionality, Pan-Africanism, and Bikoist and Fanonian Black Consciousness are the three pillars of ideology on top of which the Fallist movements have been built.
The #FeesMustFall movement has managed to accomplish much since 2015. While it still cannot be said that universities are fully engaged in decolonization, many have at least begun to engage with student demands. An alliance between students and laborers, particularly outsourced laborers, was forged under #FeesMustFall as they sought to end outsourcing in addition to fee adjustments. It had a very different approach than that of #RhodeMustFall in terms of decolonial contestation, but it rocked the country with the extent of its demonstration with such a large, unified front. Decolonizing universities became a national conversation that resulted in some short-term progress. While pushing for #NationalShutdown the movement saw many violent clashes with police and social media was a buzz.
Demonstrations, occupied campuses, blocked streets, centered around government, parliament, and police buildings, and even attempted to shut down Cape Town International Airport. On October 20th, 2015, tuition fee increases were capped at 6% across the nation by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) Minister Nzimande. Then a mere 3 days later after continued protest President Zuma announced that the cap for fee increase the following would be zero percent. On October 28th the UCT administration commit to end outsourcing (Irvine, 2016). Each university that had such protestation reacted differently and on different timescales. The Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) came to an agreement on November 14, 2016, which demilitarized the campus, gave thousands of students their certificates after previously barring them due to missing fees, and made progress towards in-sourcing labor. Tshwane University of Technology stated that there would be no increase in fees for 2017 (Ndelu et al., 2017).
While these are just a few of the small victories made under the movement, there is still a long way to go and more to be done in achieving free decolonized education in South Africa. As Mariame Kaba (2021) said beautifully, “Because people take opportunities, situations arise. Sparks happen. Those things are all true. And the thing that can make those moments of real lasting and important change is the ongoing organizing that’s been happening all along.” Student movements will continue to organize and continue to light sparks of change, until the goals of free decolonized education have been met.
There are critiques of the protests that argue the conduct is unnecessarily violent and anarchistic, lacking in ideological strategy. Rapatsa Mashele (2017) contrasts current student movements in South Africa to a romanticized version of the student protests in history that forged the way for the abolition of Apartheid. They believe that the property destruction and impacts on human lives are nothing short of anarchy that discredits true reasoning and legitimate calls for change. While still expressing understanding of the modern issues of coloniality that students face, Rapatsa Mashele adopts a position of blame that students are at fault for not fully understanding their positionality and ramifications of their actions on society. This displacement of blame does not recognize the state violence and harm perpetuated by institutions of governmentality. In fact, it paints a picture of the Black student as a “suspected terrorist” who under social death theory is preconditioned for actual death (Cacho, 2012). They are not allowed legal personhood or right to life by this violent characterization which is not helped by the bias of mass media to maintain a focus on the spectacularly violent. Criminalization of students participating in the protests went as far as taking legal action against the use of movement hashtags on social media (Mpofu, 2017). Using Mbembe’s (2003) necropolitics to decipher this, Black students sentenced by the necropower of the state and wider public to death-worlds, where the use of catastrophic force is justified against them.
Instead of creating death-worlds for students, it is important to see how explicit police violence as well as universities’ blatant disregard of student opinion together incite and provoke such anger and violence within students. The working definition of violence used, is that it is an occurrence of force, physical or emotional, that causes harm with some form of intervention or disruption. The Black poor are met with utterly different types of force when protesting compared to the white generally rich figures in South Africa. Student Fallist protests have had to face onslaughts of police violence and additional campus bouncer abuse. Bouncers have been hired in by universities in reaction to protests. The reality is that violence including rape, assault, and militant force, continues to be enacted against students on campuses (Mpofu, 2017). How are they expected to not react with demonstrational violence when their circumstances emulate such conduct? Protesting violence and destruction of property has been seen to come at a boiling point, as a last resort, when tireless outcries have not been heard or acted upon, when the anger and pain has built up to spark outburst. The power relations that exist in the state give no other option for change but violence as a way for the voices of Black students to be heard and injustices seen. It is damning and liberating all at the same time, as in their violence they disrupt the systems that subjugate them, much like the blurred lines that form under necropower that Mbembe (2003) highlights between martyrdom and freedom. In fact, education is seen as a space to engage with violence without denying or perpetuating it, but when this engagement is stripped of larger meaning in the political sphere then the violence is adopted out of necessity with that knowledge (Irvine, 2016).
Similar critiques, point to a contradiction of protests demanding better education while disrupting them. However, with the previous understanding of how violence comes to light in protests, similar logic comes to light here. Disruption is protest when there are no other options to approach the problems at stake. It demands recognition and remediation. Mpofu (2017, p. 355) explains that “disruptive rage positions students as an important cog in deconstructing the mythic imagery of the rainbow nation that has dominated the nationhood narrative since 1994.” The rainbow nation was a concept formulated post-apartheid that sought to expunge white guilt and paint a deceptive picture of a peaceful diverse state of existence, that instead continues harms on those who still suffer from the ramifications of Apartheid. Disruptive protests are taken on consciously by students as a strategy for expressing dissatisfaction with the current ontologies of conduct by those in power. They are meant to draw attention to social, economic, racial, environmental injustices. This has been the case since the early student protests. In 1988, universities in South Africa had many of their classes and examinations put off because of the strikes that workers and university students were conducting speaking out against the legislative steps that were being taken to repress union powers and anti-Apartheid organization (Zille, 1988). The Fallist protests only continue this legacy of disrupting ontologies of coloniality.
With so much at stake, it is ignorant to label the core of the issue as one of representation, when the movements demand a revolution. Stuurman (2018) attempts to use a framework of representation to explain student social movements calling for Black power. However, this framework minimizes what is at stake under perpetuated coloniality. Fallist movements call for much more than a seat at the table or even leadership. Mbembe (2008) expresses the idea of ‘transformation’ with all its tensions, as a movement of reparation that accounts for historical detriments but while doing so does not disadvantage true qualifications and ability. It takes equity as a point where all are treated equally, but when presented with two equal individuals in terms of credentials, while select the candidate who has historically been marginalized. This already shifts us from the thought that we need more Black student representation in university administration, but rather impactful Black student involvement. However, this only takes us into the first step. We must then recognize there is a multiplicity in the actions of decolonization. For one, social justice is tied to cognitive justice, which recognizes various epistemes in this world (Zembylas, 2018). The foundation of South Africa’s education as Eurocentric pedagogies needs to be disrupted and overturned to include diverse constructions of episteme and pedagogies. There is need for more than just recognition of students, but rather reparations to the marginalized, restructuring of systems, and abolition of harmful Eurocentric praxis must occur to continue the decolonization of the universities in South Africa post-Apartheid.
There are copious ways forward from this awareness are diverse and rooted in intersectionality. Lezra (2014) uses studies of representations of atrocity to imagine pedagogies that are self-aware, empathetic and could shape a future where those transgressions are not repeated. Furthermore, Zembylas (2018) explains how universities might twist Eurocentric pedagogies and create space for humanizing, but better yet, decolonizing pedagogies that are forged by the marginalized by “hacking” with the resources they have access to, but towards worlds that they strive for. This is progressed further by Horáková (2018) calling for the Africanization of universities, abolishing Eurocentric ontologies and being inclusive of the diverse ways of being African in multiculturalism. What was previous impossibilities have been coming into reality through different modes of protests, including the violent, and so continued pressure and striving for the impossible changes must persist for the dreams of free decolonized education is reached (Irvine, 2016). It is easy for an out sider to oversimplify and subvert the truths of the Fallist student movements, but they are reaching for a decolonial future that is beyond the imagined “rainbow” nation and one that exists soundly within Pan-African and intersectional thought.
References
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Note from the author:
In doing this analysis I believe it is of great importance to place myself in context. I am a Zimbabwean of European settler origin, who grew up in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and is writing this paper at a predominantly white Ivy League institution in the United States. I have family and friends in South Africa, many of whom have studied at the universities under question in these protests. My family has a history of attending Rhodes University and I take the critiques of it very seriously, harboring my own strong opinions about its dire faults and shortcomings. Returning to the fact that I am writing this at Dartmouth College, I would like to acknowledge how such Ivy League institutions have had their fault in shaping racist, capitalist, Euro/Western centric and totalizing theories that were adopted as “mainstream” pedagogy (Irvine 2016). I want to be clear that these student protests are complex, multivarious and point towards a diverse set of solutions. There is never going to be one solution in the process of decolonization. While I have not personally been involved in these movements, I connect deeply to them and have tried to gain a better understanding of them through a contact on the ground. A close friend who attends university in South Africa has shared emails concerning the protests with me for more context. This is useful considering how much the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted avenues of communication, publicization and protestation in different ways.