Disruption as a communicative strategy: The case of #FeesMustFall and
#RhodesMustFall students’ protests in South Africa.
Shepherd Mpofu
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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
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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-
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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
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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’
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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. While the major and physical project of the
#RhodesMustFall was the removal of the racist and imperialist architect Cecil John Rhodes
statue from the UCT campus, the larger debate encompassed issues to do with the marginalisation of blacks and the continuous privileging of whites, dead or alive, at institutions of higher learning. Of course the removal of colonial artefacts, especially those with multi-layered symbolisms of conquest and domination is an important aspect in decolonisation as removal of these statues alters and profoundly undermines their power in present day politics (Larsen 2012; James 1999).
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On March 9, Cumani Maxwele, an activist and UCT student whose life has been shaped and antagonised by the racism that continues to define Cape Town, a city ‘many whites present it to the rest of the world as a European garden city with little connection to Africa’ (Pilger
2007, 258) and indeed South Africa, entered the UCT campus with a bucket full of faeces and emptied it on the Rhodes bronze statue. This raptured the silence that had for far too long legitimised what is popularly known as white privilege, symbolised by ‘colonial’ curriculum, the privileged use of the Dutch-informed settler language, Afrikaans at Universities of
Pretoria, Free State, Stellenbosch and others. It also raised debates on the promotion of black professors or rather transformation of faculty to reflect the post-Apartheid South Africa. In essence the movement revisited the past, carried it into the current state of national affairs and attempted to inform the future, something that has been treated as a blind spot by the founding fathers of the nation.
Three days after Maxwele’s ‘poo protest’ students gathered around the statue, debated
Rhodes’ role in conquering Africa and finally decided that his statue had to be removed from where it stood (Fairbanks, 2015). After a month of agitation, during which time the statue was defaced with graffiti and covered with black garbage bags, the university council decided that Rhodes’ statue ‘must fall’. The #RhodesMustFall protests were replicated in other universities like Stellenbosch and Rhodes where in the former issues to do with teaching and learning in Afrikaans were contested. At Stellenbosch it led to the #OpenStellenbosch movement while at Rhodes University protesting students demanded the renaming of the university. In most cases, like at the University of Johannesburg (UJ naming Committee, n.d.) building names were officially changed or students christened them with new names. At Wits the administration building was renamed by students from its official name ‘Senate House’ to
Solomon Mahlangu building. In April 2016 the university officially adopted the name. In
October 2015 protests spread to most universities in the country including an attempt to
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occupy parliament while it was in sitting and a march by student to the president’s Union
Buildings offices protesting against a proposed fee increment. This gave birth to the
#FeesMustFall movement.
The #FeesMustFall movement was born out of inconclusive attempts at trying to negotiate a
non-fee increment of 10.5% for the 2016 academic year in October 2015 at Wits.
Nompendulo Mkhatshwa captures the experience of negotiating for students’ issues in the
following manner:
Before we went into that meeting she (Kalla) told me that while it was going to be
very difficult, she thought we should attend and see how far we got. When I arrived, I
realised just how much the voices of students were completely undermined by the
lily-white council. We were just as good as pictures on the walls of that boardroom.
Student discussions are generally held in 20 minutes and taken to a vote quickly… so
there is that kind of undermining. (Adams 2015: 22)
Later they called a students’ meeting where the route of a protest was adopted. However,
there have been online debates and disputes suggesting that Kalla and Mkatshwa were against
the protest and only took over as ‘leaders’ after they saw it gaining momentum for political
goal scoring. Metz, like Naidoo (2016) however observes that #FeesMustFall and
#RhodesMustFall were not a ‘single and coordinated movement’ (2016: 292).
The fee increments, according to Wits were necessitated by the weakening of the rand against
major currencies which led to a hike in book, journal and other research material prices, an
increase in staff salaries in the backdrop of a government subsidy of just five percent. At
Rhodes University student protests started because the university, besides expected fee hikes,
demanded that students pay 50% of their fees upfront. The protests soon spread to other
universities in the country leading to attempts at occupying parliament and Union Buildings,
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the seat of the country’s administration. These disruptions of parliamentary activities
(attempted), public life in the streets of Cape Town and management of government business
at the Union Buildings in Pretoria led to President Zuma announcing what popularly became known as a “zero percent fee increase”. Besides, the image of the Wits Vice Chancellor,
Adam Habib, held ‘hostage’ by the students transformed the public imagination of authority
and power that circulated on the internet and mainstream media, clearly illustrating the
amount of anger, rage and desperation students lived through.
The #FeesMustFall Movement was later riddled with leadership ‘crisis’ as its face,
Nompendulo Mkatshwa, was seen as a sell-out as she was alleged to be in the ANC pay roll
and also faced allegations of bribery. However, on social media she was compared to the
likes of Lilian Ngoyi, one of the 156 accused persons in the December 1956 treason trial and,
earlier in the same year, had led an anti-pass march to the Union Buildings, then the seat of
Apartheid government; and the iconic anti-Apartheid activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
Other women ‘leaders’ of the Fallist movement include Jodi Williams and Shaeera Kalla. As
already argued above, issues of leadership in these movements, most specifically the
#FeesMustFall project is contested as attested to by University of the Witwatersrand student
Leigh-Ann Naidoo (2015, 12) who declares ‘[T]his is not a movement that started at the Wits or that started about fees. This is a movement of student protests that has been developing for more than a decade: so think carefully when anyone or any political party wants to claim it as theirs’.
At the core of these movements were not the mere removal of the Rhodes and other colonial statues in public spaces in South Africa or free university education but also a need to address an litany of issues that have been treated as blind spots by the post-Apartheid government such as funding for mostly poor black students at university, decolonising the university in terms of staff promotions and curriculum. Students also spoke about lack of transformation at
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the universities, the ill-treatment of black ‘outsourced’ workers and racial inequalities that
continue to characterise not only universities but the country at large. In the words of the
Fallists in their book, Rioting and writing a colletion of Fallists’ diaries the #FeesMustFall
‘movement is/was an attempt from below to disrupt this unequal, racialised social and economic order. It rekindled and questioned the idea about the university in a postcolonial society’ (Chinguno et al. 2017: 16). As the then University of Free State Rector, Jonathan
Jansen puts it, at tertiary level, the problems lie with
the Afrikaans universities, [where] racism comes blatantly in a Nazi salute or
urinating into black people’s food or wearing blackface. At the English universities, it
is the snub in the hallway, the put-down about your promotion… the talk behind your
back, the fear of reprisal if you speak out, the inability to hug or deliver an
unconditional compliment, and the constant reminder that you are not part of the club.
(2015: 7).
In addition, the ‘undecolonised’ curriculum gives black protesters and their sympathisers grounds to call for its decolonisation and that of the institution too. A UCT politics lecturer
Lwazi Lushaba wrote an open letter to his Head of Department who had raised concern about the composition of his lecture where he invited the #RhodesMustFall protestors to make presentations during a politics class pointing out problematics of knowledge as contained and dispersed by black bodies. He points out:
We are of a race that has no knowledge to offer modern South Africa. Our forms of
cognising, modes of being-in-the-world, our weltanschauungen cannot be admitted to
credence. They fall outside the bounds of modern disciplinary knowledges. More
precisely our forms of knowledge are incomprehensible to the ideological sciences of
man. Because we epitomise unreason and irrationality and perhaps all things in-
human for centuries our physical presence in institutions of knowledge production
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like UCT was decreed undesirable by whiteness. As such today we find ourselves in
institutions of higher learning whose material, cultural, aesthetic, symbolic and
intellectual production are pointed in a direction away from us. Worse still we bear
the burden of calling these – “our institutions” – while fully aware that these
institutions despise us. It matters not that we give all our productive lives as black
people cleaning them, cleaning their toilets, securing them, serving them coffee and
tending to their gardens – their hatred of black people remains firm. (2016).
The itinerary of this article is as follows. After this introduction I theorise and offer a methodological framework for the paper. Then focus is shifted to disruption and violence where I offer operative definitions of the terms. After that I pay attention to violence and protests in South Africa before casting light on the #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall’s use of creative rage to express their demands and predicament. Thereafter I focus on how the officialdom in universities has reacted to the students’ protests before concluding.
On theory and method
Ordinary and poor people are faced ‘with threats to their personal security, and [these] threats include poverty, violence, the suppression of rights and freedom and deprivation of resources’ (Shingetomi 2009: 1) and it is through protests that they can change their conditions. There is a lack of ‘serious’ formal channels through which they can raise their grievances and this leaves non-formal channels as indispensable alternatives to demand change to their fate. Such conscious, concerned and sustained efforts by ordinary people to change some aspect of their society by using extra-institutional means (Goodman and Jasper
2003) is what is usually referred to as social movements. The Fallist movements in this paper could be theorised as social movements as they coalesced around specific goals and identities as excluded interest parties after recognising collective threats to their future, security and
12 identity as citizens. The Fallist movements do not present themselves as political parties even though political interests amongst protestors could been seen advancing political scores causing tensions in the process. Of particular note is the activism and sometimes leadership provided by ANC-aligned students in marching to parliament, ANC and the country’s president Jacob Zuma’s offices and to the Johannesburg Albert Luthuli House, the ANC headquarters.
Methodologically, the article looks at the voices of the elite and protestors in the mainstream, social media and public platforms and subjects critical discourse analysis method. Discourse analysis analyses how language is used in text and discourses and also looks at issues of power, positionality, dominance, subjugation and resistance. Statements or material from commentary between 2015 and 2016 is used. In most cases social movements actors are treated as a homogenous mob, to be described and spoken for by commentators without having their specific voices and concerns ventilate public discourse. Social media gave them a voice as they told their story to the world from their perspectives especially after their perceived ‘violence’ led them to losing sympathy of the public.
On disruption and violence
For the purposes of this article disruption and violence are two key concepts important to define. Disruption ordinarily refers to upsetting, disturbing and interrupting a way of life. In the context of this paper, it means simply that, but with a positive twist to it. Society has inculcated in people an impression that there is a certain order of things in the world that we have to follow and upsetting this is frowned upon. Fallist movements were seen as disrupting the core business of institutions for example. Some ‘culturalists’ argued in the media that these students were disrupting history and its preservation by demanding the removal of
‘historically’ important statues from public spaces. But disruption is a two-way street, and,
13 just like a coin, we must appreciate its other side as a positive approach to finding solutions especially to poor people’s problems. Thus there are those in society who refuse to accept as fact that human life and existence should be associated with barrenness and suffering such that they must resign themselves to a life themed by hopelessness, suffering, victimhood and meaninglessness.
It takes defiance of the imagined normal society to attempt to find redress especially to those taken for granted problems affecting the poor. Fallist protests had to disrupt the ‘smooth’ running of institutions in order to create time especially for the management and politicians to address their issues. The same could be said of activities by liberation fighters and other activists in previously colonised countries. However, as the South African Fallist movements’ experience demonstrates, new orders, post-Apartheid in this case, also disrupt the hopes and aspirations of a previously suppressed people after conquering the evil status quo. This is obtains in a context where some feel disruptions of society must be left to the pre-1994 order as if black people in leadership are incapable of misgoverning and disrupting the flourishing of the previously marginalised (Naidoo 2015). Or it is a case of taking advantage of Mandela’s role in the creation of the mythic rainbow nation and of the Ubuntu that some politicians use to downplay the intelligence, humanity and creativity of Africans.
At best Ubuntu is an African condition and reality that is beyond description. Putting it in writing is containing and limiting it. Disruptions and violence, just like fire or water can either be useful or detrimental depending, of course, on where one stands in relation to ‘the normal order of things’ people have been socialised into.
In an article on violence and ubuntu, Colin Chasi argues that violence is the hallmark of humanity and it ‘marks all human life’ (2014: 287). Kean (2004: 4) in Chasi (2015: 288)
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traces the word ‘violence’ to its Latin root made up of two words ‘violentia (force) and latus
(to carry)’. Violence therefore denotes what happens whenever force is carried out in such a
way that someone is ‘thereby interrupted or disturbed or interfered with rudely or roughly or desecrated, dishonoured or defiled’ (Chasi, 2015: 288). For the purposes of this article I would attempt to ‘democratise’, as Chasi (2015) in his critique of scholarship that tries to contextualise ‘violence’ and its operative definitions would argue, the meanings of violence
so as to argue about it in context. Violence could be both physical and emotional. Violence
could also mean failure to carry out certain duties expected, for example. Thus government
failure to deal with issues of decolonisation in the postcolony could be read as violence
against the poor.
Maintaining colonial and Apartheid symbols in public spaces in a post-Apartheid setting
could also be argued to be violence against those who have to relieve the traumatic
experiences of the evil system every time they consciously engage with these symbols and
artefacts. Official silence on things that matter to ordinary people is violence. The Fallist
movements differently sought to address specific issues in society through disrupting the very
systems that were/are committing violence against their dreams of a post-Apartheid era where
blacks could flourish more than they could during Apartheid. Thus disruption as a
communicative form commits violence, as argued by the pro-status quo voices, to the hitherto
silence that characterises the atmosphere which itself is violence against the protestors. In this
silence is masked a life and order of being and seeing that threatens and undermines the lives of the largely, as Fallist movement advocates would argue, black, dispossessed and disempowered bodies. This leads to Fanon arguing that ‘[T]he function of a social structure is to set up institutions to serve man’s needs. A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a non-viable society, a society to be replaced’ (Fanon 1968: 53) hence qualifying
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the disruptions that the poor visit to the world as we have been conditioned to see it in pursuit
of change.
Violence and protests in South Africa
There is a bizarre interaction between South Africa’s democracy, a clear form of orderly and
legal violence and the way the black poor, if they infringe the law, are treated in comparison
with the white and mostly rich ‘law abiding’ citizens who make ‘mistakes’ and sometimes
commit crimes just similar to the poor’s such as murder, rape, drunken driving and public
violence. Public perceptions are that the former face the full might of the law while the latter
have led to peppering of public opinion regarding justice with perceptions that the white and
rich are favoured by the law as could be gleaned from debates on biased application of justice in South Africa surrounding athlete Oscar Pistorius’ case when he was accused of murdering
his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day in 2013. Von Holdt has argued that South
Africa’s is a violent democracy which has configured power relations in such a way that
‘violent practices are integral to these power relations’ (2013: 590).
Since 1994 protests have characterised the communicative space between the ruling elite and
the poor. In most cases citizens have complemented peaceful protest methods with disruptive
tactics to get an audience with authorities. This has largely led to the South African Police
Services (SAPS) using violence against the protestors in an attempt to control and subdue
them. SAPS and political leaders usually argue that the protestors are violent when they burn
tyres, blockade roads, gather in public, stone and burn public or private property as extreme
forms of demanding official reaction. Paret argues that in South African context the use of
‘violent protest’ by public officials ‘is both ambiguous and deeply entangled with democracy’
(2015, 107). The two, Paret suggests, are always at crossroads. Paret opines that ‘violent
practices may become a tool of liberation, promoting democracy by empowering the
16 marginalised groups. On the other hand, democracy may become a tool of domination, undermining dissent by constituting as violent those persons and actions that deviate from formal institutional channels’ (2015: 107). What is clear is that the use of ‘protest within the confines of the constitution’ or by ‘respecting other people’s constitutional rights’ is a shorthand for ‘protest on the margins and do not disturb that which is a disturbance to your lives and future’ and therefore helps maintain the status quo. Makhanya becomes a spokesperson for the version of democracy Paret (2015) and Von Holdt (2013) criticise when he writes:
It has become routine now that at certain points of the year, students will destroy
university property and disrupt classes to drive home their points. Then there is
their logic and lines of argument, which make you wonder if you are listening to
the nation’s future intellectual leadership or cargo ship sailors. They totally refuse
to accept the other side of the argument – that universities cannot manufacture the
money that is needed to keep the lights on and the bookshelves stocked. They rattle
on with incoherent rhetoric about making universities ungovernable and chasing
management off campus unless their demands are met. In the process, the whole
discussion and process of finding solutions has been turned into a dialogue of the
deaf. (2015).
The Fallist movements’ protests have been met with raw violence, including rape allegedly from the police and the bouncers (private security personnel) which the universities have employed to control students. The bouncers, hired at extra and probably exorbitant costs, have systematically violated the rights of guests, students and staff members at Universities with the University of Johannesburg (UJ) probably being the most notorious. According to
Frassinneli a professor at UJ, ‘The violent modes of repression and securitisation that prevailed at some of our campuses represented, above all, an intellectual and political
17 failure,’ (Nicolson 2016). In most instances whenever there have been violent clashes with the students throwing stones there has been an invasion of campuses by armed and militant police and bouncers. In some cases, like Rhodes University violence captured on camera at the end of September 2016 by citizen journalists, there has been a replay of Apartheid era quelling of black protestors where white policemen are seen violently dragging black students and shelling rubber bullets at them from close range. In September 2016 University of
KwaZulu Natal police who went to the extent of hunting students and smoking them out of their residences with tear gas while some were shot at close range. At the University of
Johannesburg the private security guards, whose actions during protests observed by the author showed worrisome and cluelessness on public order management and control as they threw stones at students and hunting them outside campus harassing young people even without confirmation whether they were students or not. They pepper sprayed, harassed and tortured journalists. Jane Duncan from UJ argues that
Private security guards have been deployed on many campuses, even when they were
peaceful and no protests were taking place, suggesting that a national decision had
been taken to deploy them, irrespective of the actual threat levels on the ground...
Depending on the authorities’ responses, some protesters may be pushed towards
radicalisation, where more extreme, even violent actions are engaged in, or
institutionalisation, where activists become sucked into official decision-making
structures. Many protesters are frightened off by the escalating violence, but small
groups of protesters – whose attitudes have been hardened by official recalcitrance –
begin to specialise in more organised acts of violence. (Nicolson 2016)
In trying to explain the violence employed by protestors, Wits student leader Kalla argued:
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If we are to move beyond violent engagement we will have to change the structure of
the way things work and, most important, who they work for. The system works
against the poor black student. Until that is the reality we would be naive to not
expect violence, because the reality we live in is already violent. (Nicolson 2016).
However Habib, whom students accuse of refusing to meet with them and instead, decided to conduct a poll by the end of September 2016 to gauge whether students wanted to suspend the academic programme until further notice or resume classes, views this as romanticisation of violence when he comments
Many have simply turned a blind eye to violence or threats thereof, and some have
even advocated violence as a legitimate means in a revolutionary moment. Really? At
a university? In this moment, in a democratic era, whatever our criticisms of it? Is
there not a romanticising of violence by middle-class activists and academics?
(Nicolson 2016).
Habib’s comments are dismissed as mere hypocrisy by Kalla who explains:
None of us want to see a library destroyed but what does that library represent in an
unjust system? It does not represent learning and accessibility to education, and until
it does represent that, it means little to the poor black child because it is inaccessible
for so many. So if we want libraries to be respected we must respect and honour the
hunger of students to attain a decommodified and decolonised education. Until then,
our condemnation and hooliganisation of protesting students without any real
understanding of their reality is nothing more than hypocrisy. (Nicolson 2016)
Later I argue that violence against property is used as a last resort after a round table discussion has failed. Mandela and other anti-apartheid fighters record using the same tactics.
Of course this was outside the violences of democratic constitution that hangs on the necks of
19 the poor like an albatross stopping them from pursuing their dreams through other means if
‘democratic’ means are found to be not working. State and institution sponsored violence in the name of protecting property and other students’ democratic rights has to be worrisome especially after the August 2012 Marikana massacre where police butchered striking miners in protection of capital. Students have called on this as a reference point of what the elite are capable of doing and in most cases have announced that they do not care if shot and killed for their rights.
‘Creative rage, or New anger’: Fallist movements’ voices
Most voices supporting Fallist movements did not gain prominence in the mainstream media.
These gained prominence in alternative media such as the Daily Vox, public lecturers, social media such as Twitter and Facebook where activists also organised or gave out information to the public and stakeholders (Chinguno et al. 2017). In a Ruth First lecture, Legh-Ann Naidoo
(2016) suggested that WhatsApp was the most used organising, publicity and communicative tool for the Fallist movements. An email exchange between #RhodesMustFall and the UCT management, after the fall of the Rhodes statue, suggests that the statue was symbolic of things they wanted fallen. #RhodesMustFall’s letter of demand to management lists issues relating to (black) students’ need for permanent accommodation, exclusion, victimisation of protestors, access to education regardless whether one affords or not and the demand that the university assists international (Non-South African) students stuck in their countries because they did not have police clearances to register (Email communication between
#RhodesMustFall and UCT management, 2016).
Naidoo further adds that the #FeesMustFall movement had an agenda
to kill the fallacies of the present: …of the rainbow nation, the non-racial, the
Commission (from Truth and Reconciliation, to Marikana…), even liberation. The
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second task is to arrest the present. To stop it. To not allow it to continue to get away
with itself for one more single moment… the third task… is to open the door into
another time. (2015: 2).
The student protests also led to the occupation and renaming of most university buildings that bear colonial names. The occupation led to lectures and discussions around ending of outsourcing and re-humanising the black service staff from the disposable ‘outsourced’ staff into permanent employees (Naidoo 2015). These occupations, argues Naidoo, engaged with the way ‘power was working to silence and alienate certain people in the conversation, and amplify others voices’ (2015: 2). Thus these occupations led to university shut downs where university staff stayed away because their workstations and offices were occupied by protesting students and it is during these disruptions that a moment to plan for the future was created.
Probably the ‘most’ offensive aspect of the protests, some argued, was the racist tone of their messages. Lwandeni Fikeni, in his Ruth First Memorial lecture argues that what was racist in the protests was aesthetics of rage characterising the call for dismantlement of apartheid
South Africa. He deconstructs the ‘F**** white people’ graffiti on the walls of the university and t-shirt art emblazoned the same words as black people’s reassertion of identity and expressions of frustration. To Jansen these were ‘shocking words’ (2015: 7) expressing the
‘anger and intolerance [that] shows up all too frequently in the way we protest in the streets, in parliament and on campuses’ illustrating the loss of dignity of protest. Quoting Mbe
Mbhele who says ‘F**** white people is a perfect articulation of how we feel… Frank
Wilderson says there’s no vocabulary, no language to articulate black suffering. That means white people have screwed us to a point that is beyond discourse, that’s beyond political language, that’s beyond respectful, understandable, engagement; so f**** white people’
(2016: 5) Lwandeni Fikeni dismisses Jansen’s suggestion of dignity in protest when the
21
protestors’ lived experiences are a summary of dehumanization. Further he argues that the
expression ‘F**** white people… formulates itself at the intersection of art, rage, and
performance. F**** white people is a way of speaking of one’s experience of institutional,
structural, and everyday racism. F**** white people is a highly aesthecised form of
critiquing South Africa’s social ordering.’ This expression of rage and anger ‘reveals tensions between the dominant and the dominated, where one feels constantly f***d by the other
directly… through active forms of racism, or indirectly through institutional practices’
(Fikeni 2016: 3). The whole student movement hinges on ‘f****ng’ white people, the colour
of privilege and oppression in South Africa. Samantha Vice (2010) argues that whites should
wear the colour of whiteness as a badge of shame as they benefit from what is popularly
known as white privilege which is a ‘mental and physical patterns of engagement with the
world that operate without conscious attention or reflection’ (Vice 2010: 325). This white
privilege ‘comes to constitute ways of ‘bodying’ as well as ways of thinking’ that speak to
each other (Vice 2010: 325). It damages the morality of white South African, not that they
have done anything wrong, but because their race ‘accords’ them things that should be
equally competed for by all citizens.
Fallist movements have been accused of violence (Metz 2016, Habib and Mabizela 2016,
Habib 2015, Makhanya 2015). This has been contested by Duncan and Frassinelli (2015) and
Fikeni (2016) with the former arguing that university managers, in the case of UJ, were heavy
handed in dealing with protestors through bouncers that used ‘hitting, punching, slapping, kicking and throttling… using pepper spray, beating… with batons, stripping their clothes off,; threatening, intimidating, or harassing students and …their legal representatives’ (2015:
3) to control protestors. The latter argues that it is inappropriate to call students’ protests
‘violent’ precisely because the disruptive rage was ‘remotely congruent to the violence of the state and institution’ (2016: 8).
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Mindless revolt?: ‘bureaucrats’ on violence and ‘controls’ of disruptionists
This section casts a spotlight on the critiques of the Fallist movements by officials in
government, university and other thought leaders in the media and academic works. Their voices matter and easily taken-for-granted and become unquestioned knowledges because of interlocutors’ socio-politico-economical standing. These condemned Fallist protests as
disruptive and infringing on peace and tranquillity the mythic rainbow nation offers. Students
relied on social media such as Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook and other radical anti-status quo
news sites like the Daily Vox to contest official narratives. This is not to suggest that
mainstream totally blacked out students’ voices.
Official discourse on student movements’ activities ostracised and undermined the cause
of student while ironically conceding that the issues they raise were significant. Jansen’s
observation that the protesters are young people ‘who have not spent a day living under
apartheid or a night in the cells of the white regime’ (2015: 7) labelling them gangsters
and hooligans ‘masquerading as progressive’ (2015: 7) at best diminishes the concerns of
the Fallists. Mabizela and Habib’s (2016) article in the The Sunday Times follows the
same line of critique. Mondli Makhanya the editor of the privately owned newspaper The
Star labelled protests as ‘mindless revolts’. Masutha, a former student leader at Wits who
supported the #FeesMustFall protests lashed out at Makhanya thus: ‘Every revolution will
be confronted by reactionaries who seek to protect and maintain the status quo. In this
regard we must ignore co-opted anti-blacks like Mondli Makhanya, editor of some
newspaper, and his masters who find it reasonable to refer to our peaceful protests as
hooliganism’ (2016).
Similarly, writing about the ‘second’ wave of #FeesMustFall, which saw students burn
artworks, build shacks etc at the UCT Habib and Mabizela use the power allocated them by
23 the media and their offices to dismantle the cause of those who participated in the protests on racial and statistical grounds. The following highlights this argument:
The current student protests on campuses throughout the country are distinctly
different from those witnessed last year. The protesting communities no longer
represent the non-racial, multiclass alliance that united the entire student community
and mobilised the support of multiple stakeholders in our society. Instead, the protest
movements have been hijacked by small groups that are using increasingly violent
methods of protest to convey their anger at what they call the systemic oppression of
black people. In recent weeks, we have seen "art activations" using offensive
language to communicate forms of anger against systems; T-shirts and graffiti clearly
demonstrating hate speech; malicious damage to property; and buses and artwork
being burnt. Our country, our higher education system, our economy and our
collective futures are on a knife-edge. It is time for all of us to stand up and be
counted among those who are prepared to protect our future and the rights and
freedoms for which we fought so hard. Let us defend and safeguard our higher
education system. (Habib and Mabizela, 2016)
While some alleged forms of violence attributed to the movements like petrol bombing occupied buses, lecture rooms, auditoriums and libraries (Metz 2016, Habib and Mabizela
2016, Makhanya 2015) cannot be justified, it is important to highlight, again, that there is need to understand how and when these happened. Most of these violent attacks on property, some scholars argue, took place ‘outside’ the times or moments of protests (Frassinelli
2016). Duncan and Frassinelli’s (2015) report on student protests at UJ suggests that SAPS and university management employed violent tactics to control student protests. They observe that the university shut down every time there was a protest and ‘this created a
24 situation where no dialogue was possible and sent the message to students and workers that there is no space for the exercise of the right to peacefully protest on campus’ (2015: 13).
For instance, the UJ auditorium and computer labs were allegedly petrol bombed at night in the beginning of 2016. Some argue that since the infiltration of the movements by the state security agents, it cannot be categorically stated with finality that indeed protesting students were the sole culprits. At Wits in September some unused petrol bombs were found by security details while by end of September a lecture hall was torched at UJ. The elite have been quick to lay blame on the students and not keep their minds open to the possibilities of infiltration by criminal, university management or state security sponsored elements with ulterior motives of undermining the protestors. Thus the third force remains a mystery but as declares ‘I know it exists, but we need to talk so we can understand where people and their opportunistic agendas are coming from’ (Adams 2015: 23).
The above challenges Thaddeus Metz’s argument that protestors should have protested with minimum disruption possible while looking ‘at the larger effects on society, and especially on the worst-off socioeconomic classes in it’ (2016: 300). Metz walks into a landmine established by protestors who raise race and gender issues to mark certain discursive territories in South Africa, and resists a white man ‘telling’ black people how to express their frustration; something called ‘whitesplaining’ in the Fallist movement circles. Simply put, whites are not qualified to pontificate on black bodies’ suffering and how they should protest. Vice puts it thus ‘[I]f we are a problem, we should perhaps concentrate on recovering and rehabilitating ourselves. I shall suggest that because of peculiarities of the
South African situation, this personal, inward-directed project should be cultivated with humility and in (a certain kind of) silence’ (2010: 324). It is possible to face a counter argument that the lives of these protestors and the other extremely poor 12 million people
(Metz 2016) in this country are already worse off and if possible, to draw a mischievous
25 parallel, they are almost in the same circumstances in terms of pain like some of the
Palestinians who use their bodies as weapons of last resort fighting against Israel abuse.
Habib and Mabizela (2016) also fall into the same discourse of labelling, when they identify the 2016 movement as a ‘minority’ and ‘hijacked’, setting them apart from this community of ‘us’ where Habib and Mabizela and their imagined reader of the column in The Sunday
Times belong. Moreover, when one looks at the much celebrated image of Stellebosch white students forming a wall between black students and predominantly black policemen they notice what is wrong with South Africa and one central issue at the core of Fallist movements’ protests: racism. The act by white students is easy to decipher and uncritically celebrate. But the message is clear, police in South Africa will never attack white people!
Thus the barricade was meant to communicate that and more; it revealed which lives matter the most in contemporary South Africa in as far as employment of state violence is concerned. The parallels could easily be drawn with the Marikana massacres of 2012 where about 32 miners who were striking for a decent wage were killed at by South African police.
Had there been white miners on strike were the massacres going to happen? If so, what made white Stellenbosch students willing to take the bullets? What does it say about equality in the rainbow nation?
While Metz (2016: 299) reads some of the graffiti such as ‘one bullet, one settler’ as
‘disproportionally severe’ and imagines that the #RhodesMustFall movement was merely focused on the removal of the statue when he quips ‘[A]fter all, Rhodes did Fall, and did not need fire to do so’ (2016: 303) demonstrates how the pro-non protest scholars and officials miss the point that the statue is symbolic and its fall did not mean the literal end and falling of threats to black students’ future at universities, the decolonisation of the curriculum and public spaces and the whites targeted in this instance are, just like the statue of Rhodes, symbolic of the apartheid characterising South Africa today.
26
Metz, in his theory of just war, appreciates that extreme forms of violence could be used especially after dialogue has failed. In other words these movements were sponsored by a common narrative and lived experiences of being black and poor. I am alive to the fact that some students from well-off black families like ANCs Frank Chikane’s and Brian Molefe’s sons were arrested for participating in the movements. This speaks partly to the current political heat caused by friction within the ANC is apolitical statements against President
Zuma’s regime. However, the fact that these movements were leaderless attests, to a certain extent, to their various modes of disruptions where, as Metz (2016) observes, employed violence in a self-defeating or barbaric manner like bombing buses occupied by students, or stoning private cars on the roads. While some forms of violent disruptions took place, these could be traced to the Apartheid era forms of protest and attempts to undermine the evil
Apartheid system. Metz argues that the protestors’ use of ‘force’, even though necessary,
‘must be the least amount needed to do the job’ (2016: 301). This thread of thought runs through Metz (2016) and Habib’s (2016) intervention on student protests and the amount of disruptions and violence these two think students ‘must’ employ. In an article in the
WitsLeader, Habib argues that students need to protest in a manner that speaks of ‘humility that (they) demand of others’ (Habib 2016: 11).
If inspired by resistance to Apartheid, Fallist students are admonished not to read Biko and
Fanon ‘selectively’ as this would be an ‘injustice’ and reading these texts ‘without understanding the distinction between apartheid and democratic South Africa, is to do a disservice to the intellectual legacy of one of South Africa’s fallen heroes’ (2016: 11). Of course there have been milestones achieved since 1994 but these are outweighed by the sustenance of the very system that many people fought against: Apartheid! Metz says the use of ‘extreme’ forms of violence, and there seems to be no definition of violence used by him and other critics of the Fallist movements, could better be exemplified by Mandela and
27
Umkhonto we Sizwe when they fought Apartheid. ‘Mandela repeatedly said that he and the
ANC had turned to destructive means only because other means had failed to work. Mandela had used peaceful means of struggle against Apartheid for about fifteen years, and the ANC and black resistance movements generally had used them for several decades’ (2016: 301).
This partly informs Mandela’s 1964 statement at Rivonia trial that the decision to embark on a violent political struggle was reached after peaceful means had failed.
Metz (2016), without being critical on the possibility of success suggests that MK had used the least force necessary to achieve freedom and equality. He also neglects, in this instance, where maximum violence was used and where the least was used. Mandela (in Metz 2016:
301) suggests that violence was employed but the intention, as Mandela says in his autobiography, was ‘controlled and responsible’ (Mandela 1994, 325). Thus, as captured by
Metz,
it made sense to begin with the form of violence that inflicted the least harm against
individuals: sabotage… strict instructions were given to MK that we would
countenance no loss of life. But if sabotage did not produce the results we wanted,
we were prepared to move to the next stage. (Mandela, 1994: 325, 336).
When Metz argues that ‘[W]hat goes for fighting apartheid and colonialism surely goes for fighting injustice in the post-apartheid, post-independence era. Those engaging in protests against injustice in university settings are obligated to use the least disruptive or forceful means necessary’ (2016: 301) he could be reading into or a misreading Mandela’s statement when we lump life and property together.
28
Thus Mandela clearly states that the MK was not prepared to kill people as was the case with
Poqo an outfit ‘loosely linked to PAC, [whose] acts of terrorism targeted both African collaborators and whites’ (1994: 325) but the agenda, it seems, was property destruction, with the ultimate aim of making life inconvenient for the regime. The distinction with between anti-Apartheid and the Fallist movements seems clear. The latter lacked clear planning and leadership leading to uninformed and retrogressive acts of endangering human life.
Jansen (2015), Habib (2016), Habib and Mabizela (2016), Metz (2016) and others still hold disturbance of class, burning of parked cars, as grossly wrong without attempting to underscore the far reaching meanings of the dreams that the post 1994 system has deferred.
Seepe argues that the students’ protests have stripped off the camouflage that characterises the routine ways of seeing and being in South Africa. To him the ‘post-1994 narrative failed to appreciate the scale of historical challenges’ that continue to face the poor. Jansen (2015) misses the point when he sees as glorious those protests that occurred during Apartheid but dismisses the current ones as unjustifiable. There are times when those who experienced colonialism, while expressing frustration about their experiences nowadays quip saying
Apartheid was better. This is not nostalgia per se but should be understood contextually.
Moreover the use of Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Bayers Naude, Neville Alexander and Walter
Sisulu among others as role models of ‘dignified’ protest (Jansen 2015) for Fallist movements who view Mandela as ‘a man who led South Africa into a soft landing that left white privileged undisturbed and black poverty undiminished’, as ‘a sell-out’ (Jansen 2015,
8) is unhelpful. To some Mandela is a sell-out and a mythic messiah to others. Most anti- student protests subscribe to the latter. Even the use of other students’ protests as points of reference is meant to delegitimize the Fallist movements and this line of argumentation is dismissed by Makhanya thus:
29
Many comparisons have been made between this uprising and previous student-led
turning points in history. The generation we saw on the streets has been compared
with others that spearheaded change – the 1944 ANC Youth League founding
generation, the 1969 SA Students’ Organisation generation, the 1976 Soweto
generation and the 1980s generation. But these are simplistic comparisons. It is a
different time with a different set of challenges. Where previous uprisings and
phases of uprisings were against a pernicious system, today’s struggles and
uprisings are about the stubborn institutionalised injustice and inequality that was
cemented by apartheid.
In other words, the former protests were informed by Apartheid and the recent ones are in reaction to apartheid.
Concluding reflections
This paper has demonstrated how the deferred dreams of mostly poor South Africans lead to social movements such as Fallist movements, which use collective identities and threats to their future to try and change their circumstances. Largely, it has challenged the misconception of the rainbow and the post-Apartheid democratic South Africa and ably demonstrated that poor people are still under apartheid-like conditions and they will always use violence to alter their circumstances. Globally, this has also been the trend as exemplified by Occupy Wall Street in America in 2011, 15-M Movement in Spain, Tahir
Square protests in Cairo in 2013, Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the Arab Spring and Winter in North Africa and the Middle East starting in 2010 among others. On the other hand the research shows that the voices of powerful officials demonstrate that democracy could be used to silence and perpetuate the predicament of the marginalised, itself a form of violence
30 against the poor and economically marginalised. The protests and disruptions expose and articulate the brittle nature and ‘failure of the rainbow project in so far as abstracting the crisis of socio-politico-economic inequality in South Africa and the silencing of those at the receiving end of that inequality’ (Fikeni, 2016: 9). Through disruption the Fallist movements managed to score some concessions from government especially. This could suggest that disruption worked so long to gain some concessions even though students remain unsatisfied. The paper has also demonstrated, to a lesser extent, that the power the pro-status quo elites have through access to the media where they present certain versions of the events in an attempt to silence students could be countered through alternative media. The marginalised protestors found their voices and expression in such alternative media as the
Daily Vox and The Daily Marverick, Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp whose commentary, analysis and stories rail against the grain. The use of media by the Fallists is a study on its own and this paper could not do justice to it due to lack of space. In addition it is not the argument of this paper that the Fallist movement did not have internal tensions and cases of violence. There were racial, nationality, gender, political and class tensions within the movement and this calls for a separate study especially the exclusion of black foreign nationals, accusations of chauvinism, rape, misogyny, homophobia and the like. Suffice to say that the Fallist movement’s use of disruption and violence follows the trend of other global movements and protests as the only available resource for fighting for justice and calling the leading elite into account or altering conditions to accommodate the poor powerless. But the question asked by Hughes in the epigraph still remains: What happens to a dream deferred?
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