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The Case of #Feesmustfall and #Rhodesmustfall Students' Protests

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The Case of #Feesmustfall and #Rhodesmustfall Students' Protests Disruption as a communicative strategy: The case of #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall students’ protests in South Africa. Shepherd Mpofu 1 Abstract In 1994 South Africa became a miracle in the world of postcolonies as a newly independent ‘rainbow’ nation-state. Apartheid was replaced by an informal but still identical system which I refer to as apartheid. Good governance, democracy, peace, civility and quiet are framed by the media and regarded by investors and political elite among others to be the preferred set-up of things. Using the rage in the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student protests as data, I argue that disrupting the world as we know it in order to address the poor’s grievances is part and parcel of strategic and effective communication especially for the marginalised poor majority black people whose dreams remain deferred. This argument will be framed by questions around the current burdens of apartheid, the achievements of disruptive protests and the meaning, roles and behaviours of officialdom towards members and ideologies of Fallist movements. Fallist movements, disruption, violence, communication, apartheid, #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall 2 Introduction What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? (Hughes 1951) In October 1997 John Pilger interviewed estate agency owner Pam Golding who argued that ‘everybody is doing their best to become one rainbow nation’ (1997: 260). This after 1994 when South Africa became a miracle in the world of postcolonies with the introduction of multiparty democracy and extension of suffrage to previously excluded black majority in the country’s formal political rituals such as voting and running for political office. What was more miraculous, I argue, is not only the negotiated settlement or problematic imagery of the rainbow, whose colours do not congeal into one like a fruit cocktail would. The best done by Golding’s imagined ‘everybody’ has not been good enough. Is it the best to forgive and forget by the victims and the best to pretend to be sorry by the beneficiaries of Apartheid without any structural alterations to everyone’s life? It appears the post 1994 period, as the epigraph from Hughes (1951) above suggests, is a dream deferred and it is unclear whether it was sugar coated or not but what is clear is that it never dried like a raisin, but continues to fester like a fresh sore, stinks like rotten meat, sags like a heavy load. Has it exploded? That remains the question. The status quo, as framed by the media, is regarded as the preferred set-up of things. To the marginalised poor majority whose dreams have been deferred in the enigma that the post- 3 Apartheid South Africa turned out to be; these are disruptive and violent to their aspirations of a utopia they dreamt of in 1994. The violence to and disruptions of their aspirations are ignored or normalised in favour of the status quo. The argument pursued here is that disrupting the world as we know it in order to address their (poor’s) grievances is part and parcel of strategic and effective communication. Together with this, I attempt to foreground an argument that Fanon advances when he says that when systems fail to serve members of the society then they must be dismantled and new ones set up. The post-Apartheid South Africa has taken too long to transform as the pre 1994 Apartheid (with a Capital ‘A’) has mutated, since independence in 1994, to a different form of apartheid, manifesting itself as violence, poverty, socio-economic exclusion and racism. Thus while Apartheid ended in 1994, it is still subsists as apartheid. Or as Seepe (2015: 9-10) succinctly captures it ‘[W]hereas Apartheid had been considered as a system of subjugation, it was repackaged as mere acts of terror, violence and violation committed by individual bigots’. This is further demonstrated through the problematic Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was blind to the larger part of the white community that benefitted from looting, plundering resources and land and inhumane exploitation and dispossession of the black majority by focusing narrowly on physical bodily harm and violence against victims. Seepe (2015, 10) writes, ‘In one fell swoop, the entirety of the white community was exonerated’ through the imagining of a rainbow nation- a euphemism of silencing any malcontents and a project of dis- membering the past memories and experiences which the Fallist movements are attempting to re-member now. While good governance, democracy, peace and quiet are the preferred and imagined set-up of things in the current ‘alternative apartheid’ (I argue that even though official Apartheid ended in 1994, it mutated into an unofficial version of apartheid whereby the previously disempowered continue existing on the margins of mainstream politics and economy characterised by poverty, violence and lack) South Africa, to some, especially the 4 poor the concept of the rainbow nation commits violence against them as it masks deeper ‘violence’s’ the unrepentant structural problems of Apartheid that still hold sway in South Africa. This article employs #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall as just two of the various manifestations of apartheid to argue that in order to have a conversation with the status quo, that is, systems that continuously oppress the poor after 1994 symbolised by the administrators of universities or even the country, student-led movements opted for disruptions. This scored some concessions such as non-fee increment for 2016, removal of the Rhodes statue from the UCT campus, funding for those whose households earn less than R600 000 per year, promises of decolonising the curriculum and faculty among other things. This paper reflects on the Fallist movements’ campaign by South African students. At the core of this paper is an argument that it is during times of ‘noise and chaos’ that effective communication, in the context of protests, takes place. Specifically the paper looks at how the campaigns exposed some underlying societal issues that the successive, majority and ruling African National Congress (ANC) government has hitherto ignored. In addition, the decolonial agenda appended to the #FeesMustFall and most prominently #RhodesMustFall protests demonstrates the deeper and fundamental issues that burden South African society as seen mostly through the eyes of the students and working classes. This is closely related to the violent way the powerful elite including university administrators and political leaders dealt with protestors in an attempt to silence pertinent issues without addressing them. Seepe (2015: 11) notes this concert as the hypocrisy of the so-called analysts the majority of whom are university academics. Societal protests are routinely described as reflecting a crisis of legitimacy and 5 leadership, yet we have not seen this description accorded to their bosses [and the bosses according it to themselves] in response to the students’ protests and demands that include the decolonisation project. It is during this period of protests that South Africans began to debate post-Apartheid issues through social and legacy media with most voices, regardless of social status find expression on the former while the latter was usually a fora for officialdom. This does not suggest in any way that the voices were not found on both sides of the divide. This paper attempts to address issues of social movements paying particular attention to issues of violence, race, poverty, and how disrupting the day to day functioning of society could be seen as a strong communicative strategy that guarantees the poor of an audience with the powerful elite running important institutions in society. Firstly the paper historicises the Fallist movements across South Africa with an intention of drawing parallels and how student activities managed to garner them sympathy and negative reactions from society and how they managed to bring the governance of the country and universities into a standstill when they attempted to occupy parliament and marched to the Union Buildings, the administrative seat of the government. As Zizek (2008) suggests, disruption, struggle and violence are at the core of being human and existence thereof. Here I argue that protesters used both negative and positive violence against the system they deemed dangerous to their existence. Habib and Mabizela, Vice Chancellors at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) and Rhodes Universities (Rhodes) respectively, in an article in The Sunday Times argued that the protests, even though justified the methods thereof were ‘unlawful and transgress the constitutional rights of others’ (2016). Similarly authorities’ 6 responses to the Fallist movements and protests could be read as double negative violence with little of positive violence if anything. #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall Movements: A contextual background In 1991 Nkinyangi asked a potent question on whether ‘educational institutions will in the future become arenas of social struggle’ (157) especially in most African countries. The disruptive rage and subsequent violent remedial actions by officialdom in South Africa proves true that indeed universities are spaces of struggle for change. This disruptive rage positions students as an important cog in deconstructing the mythic imagery of the rainbow nation that has dominated the narrative since 1994. This section serves to locate a contextual background of the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall Movements. The #RhodesMustFall movement has its genesis at the University of Cape Town (UCT) a previously predominantly white privileged space, when compared to other universities in the country, of peaceful and rigorous intellectual release rarely marred by student protests. The #RhodesMustFall campaign started from an unlikely space but remains relevant and potent in the deconstruction South Africa’s imagined and epileptic rainbow nation that continues to marginalise the majority black citizens.
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