#MustFall–TheEvent: Rights, student activism and the transformation of South African universities (original) (raw)
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Journal of Student Affairs in Africa
A significant amount of literature on the student movement in South Africa is characterised by two limitations. Firstly, a significant amount of this literature is found in un-academic and non-peer-reviewed sources, such as social media, online newspapers, blog posts and other platforms. Secondly, some of this literature is characterised by an absence of theory in offering us critical analysis of the emergent conditions of the student movement as a phenomenon in South African higher education (SAHE). In this article, we respond to the above gaps by contributing to the scholarly development and critical analysis of the student movement in SAHE. In order to respond to the above two gaps, we firstly provide a brief historical and contextual environment that has contributed to the emergence of the student movement phenomenon in SAHE. Secondly, we introduce Nancy Fraser's social justice perspective, in offering us the theoretical and conceptual tools we need to look at the struggles and challenges that confront student movements, focusing in particular on the challenges that frustrate them in relating and interacting as peers on an equal footing in society. Using Fraser's social justice framework to look at the #MustFall movements will allow us to better understand them as complex phenomena in SAHE and allow us to properly understand their emergence.
THE STUDENT REVOLTS IN SOUTH AFRICA 2015: An Argumentative Approach
This essay seeks to critically analyse the development of the protest movement in South Africa in 2015, and how it has managed to cripple the higher education system for a sustained period of time. And yet, the essay acknowledges that South Africa has a higher education system to be proud of, funded to satisfaction, a regulatory mechanism that supports it, and performance that is laudable. And yet it is from that higher education system where much rebellion and dissent comes from. This paradox is examined in the paper in some detail. The paper then analyses the
What Are We Witnessing? Student Protests and the Politics of the Unknowable
Journal of Student Affairs in Africa, 2019
South African public higher education has been dogged by student protests since 2015. Many of these disruptions raise pertinent issues for the sector, as well as bring about valued awareness and change. Critical scholars have remarked that in every social or political movement, something of pronounced importance is being said-usually emerging from representatives of groups that have been marginalised, subordinated or even muted. In this article, a "logosemantic" theoretical perspective (Visagie, 2006), which is also referred to as "key theory" (Visagie, 2006; Van Reenen, 2013) is utilised to determine some driving conceptualisations emerging in the "languaging strategies" (Stewart, Smith & Denton, 2012) of contemporary student movement culture in South Africa. Not discounting significant research that investigates the impact of the digital age on the communication, mobilisation and sustaining of social movements, this article takes a critical look at grounding concepts that may be identified in the discursive formations of the movements. These are taken to be neither new nor unique, either in essence or manifestation. However, the divisions and polarisations they expose, signal an urgent need for some communicative reform in the "imagined community" (Anderson, 2016) of the academy.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023
Student activism has been a crucial force for social change in universities. To this end, students around the world have been at the forefront of movements to promote democracy and human rights. In recent years, student activism has been used to fight social inequality, funding problems, balancing political ideologies, promises and quest for identity, especially among the subalterns, people of colour formerly colonised and those facing systematic, epistemic, cognitive, and structural exclusion. While the fight at first value appears noble, desirable, and doable, the praxis of student activism in the 21 st century among some countries in the Global South, most especially in Africa, presents ambivalence marked with thuggery, arson, and criminality. Universities in Africa have become unsafe sites for students, academics, and other stakeholders. It is against this background that the book was conceptualised with the intention to problematise destructive student activism. The book documents various case studies in the African continent on how students have practised, reimagined and reconstructed to ensure the relevance of universities in peace-making initiatives. Thus, this research-based book argues that in the midst of student unrest within universities, alternative situational responses are available, doable and achievable, underpinned with critical consciousness, geared to make universities relevant to meet the demands of the 21 st century's sustainability needs.
THE 2015 STUDENT MOBILIZATIONS IN SOUTH AFRICA. CONTESTING POST-APARTHEID HIGHER EDUCATION
PArtecipazione e COnflitto. The Open Journal of Sociopolitical Studies, 2019
In October 2015, a student protest at the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), a historically white university (HWU), arising in opposition to the decision taken by the University Council to increase tuition fees, spurred a massive wave of mobilizations across the country. The protests drew national and international media attention to what became the #FeesMustFall movement, named after the most popular twitter hashtag adopted by the protesters. Why did a local mobilization at WITS in 2015 trigger a national wave of student protests? After ten days of protests, the South African President intervened directly to calm down the situation by announcing a 0% increase in tuition fees for 2016. To all appearances, ten days of protests allowed South African students to win their battle over the hike in tuition fees. How and why did they obtain this concession? To answer the questions above, I have combined various qualitative methods of analysis. I carried out several in-depth interviews with relevant actors involved in the issue; I analysed movement documents elaborated by the students in the year of the protest (2015) as well as the main policy documents on higher education in post-apartheid South Africa (1994-2016) released by the government.
South African students movements 2015
An article written during the climax of national student protests in South Africa in October 2015. It discusses the context and significance of the revived student movements over the months March to October 2015.
2017
Protests in South Africa is not a new phenomenon nor is it a phenomenon which is unique to South Africa. As early as the 1700's for example, during the French Revolution, citizens protested against perceived injustices perpetuated by the governing elite against the poor and working class. There is almost no country or continent that can claim that they have not experienced some form of unrest, peaceful or violent, by citizens whom were no longer satisfied with the status quo, or the undelivered promises of the elected government. In this regard, South Africa has seen its fair share of protests, violent and non-violent, prior to the first democratically elected government in April 1994. Prior to the 1994 elections it could be argued that protests were justified given the one-party rule and the disenfranchisement of the majority of its citizens South Africa's citizens including what could be considered an inferior educational system. Disconcertingly. Post 1994 South Africa has been plagued by the persistence of protests leading to much blood shed, loss of life and damage to property. While the right to peaceful protest by various sectors of the South African population is enshrined in the South African Constitution(South Africa 1996), it is the violent and persistent nature of these protests leading to some commentators referring to South Africa as the " protest capital of the world". Of equal concern is the increase in student protests at institutions of higher learning on various issues, often manifesting itself outside of the formal participatory mechanisms available to students, by students whom can be considered "the born frees" This study explores participatory mechanisms available to students at institutions of higher learning in general, and student protests as an attempt to influence, formulate and transform public policy at institutions of higher learning. In particular the study is guided by a qualitative research paradigm using a structured interview tool to gather primary data using the University of the Western Cape as a case study against the backdrop of the #feesmustfall protests. It is further argued in this study that the #feesmustfall protests are not an end in itself, but rather a symptom of the broader inadequacies of the current participatory mechanisms available at institutions of higher learning in university governance structures in general, and the University of the Western Cape in particular. Stellenbosch University https://scholar.sun.ac.za
Student Activists or Student Anarchists? South Africa’s Contemporary Student Protests Reviewed
European Review Of Applied Sociology
Just over twenty-three years ago, the right to strike or protest received an explicit constitutional entrenchment and thus, legal protection. This would progressively empower citizens, including students, to protest against any infringement or deprivation of their rights or entitlements, and poor service delivery by any stakeholder in the institutions of learning, the government or private sector even. Today, South Africa is inundated with multiplicity of nationwide protests, most of which have been accompanied by appalling levels of violence, anarchy and criminality. Unexpectedly, students have had their share in such protests, and it could be argued, they have been an inspiration to various communities. Hence, this article proffers a critical reflection of the conduct of students during protests at the institutions of higher learning. The article seeks to understand and or explain variables that motivate students to vandalise property or antagonise those that opt to be passive or ...
South African Historical Journal, 2018
The student protests that swept South African universities in 2015 and 2016 have already been subject to many analyses from different quartersacademic, journalistic, and autobiographical. This is understandable, as some of the key participants and observers were analysts and scholars themselves. The movement born under the hashtag #RhodesMustFall at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in March 2015 coalesced as #FeesMustFall at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in mid-October. It expanded to a national movement by the end of that year, leaving almost no institution of higher education in South Africa untouched. The rise of Fallism, as it has come to be called, has marked South Africa's largest cohesive protest movement since the end of apartheid. In a country known popularly as the world's 'protest capital', 1 this merits a substantial degree of attention and analysis. The two books under review here, Jonathan Jansen's As By Fire: The End of the South African University, and Susan Booysen's edited volume, Fees Must Fall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation, and Governance in South Africa, approach the events of the student protests, as well as their underlying causes, aims, and effects, from markedly different standpoints. As such, it is productive to read them in conversation (and sometimes disagreement) with one another. Both books were largely written in mid-2016, during the relatively quiet interlude between the first wave of #FeesMustFall, which began in October 2015, and the second sustained wave of national student protest, which was sparked in September 2016 by the then Minister of Higher Education's announcement of the fee scheme for the coming academic year. As a result, both texts address themselves primarily to the events of late 2015 and early 2016, and include the confrontational and violent events of late 2016 2 only as appendices to their analyses, rather than at their cores. This is, I think, an important limitation. As a historian of student protests, it seems premature to me to write a sustained analysis of these movements. Even the few weeks during which I have prepared this review have brought new revelations of links between the top echelons of the African National Congress (ANC) and some protesting students 3 as well as the much-anticipated release of the Heher Commission Report on the (in)feasibility of free higher education in South Africa. Despite the Heher Commission's recommendation, during the ANC's December 2017 party conference, President Jacob Zuma announced his intention to introduce free higher education for poor and middle-class students. At the time of writing, how this will be funded, and how it will reshape South African universities in the long term, remains to be seen. In short, by virtue of their publication dates, each of these texts necessarily presents an incomplete picture of the student