The Rise of Fallism: #Rhodesmustfall and the Movement to Decolonize the University
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The Rise of Fallism: #RhodesMustFall and the Movement to Decolonize the University Abdul Kayum Ahmed Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 © 2019 Abdul Kayum Ahmed All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT The Rise of Fallism: #RhodesMustFall and the Movement to Decolonize the University Abdul Kayum Ahmed When a black student threw feces against a bronze statue of British imperialist, Cecil John Rhodes, located at the University of Cape Town (UCT), it sparked the formation of the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) student movement in March 2015. The Black-led #RMF movement sought to decolonize the university by confronting institutional racism and patriarchy at UCT through a series of disruptive and creative tactics including occupying university buildings and erecting a shack on campus. As part of their decolonization process, black students tried to make sense of their experiences in a predominantly white university by de-linking from UCT’s dominant model of Euro-American knowledge to construct their own decolonial framework comprised of Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness and Black radical feminism. A few weeks later in May 2015, students at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom who were inspired by the student movement at UCT, created the #RhodesMustFall Oxford movement, using the Rhodes statue at Oriel College as a focal point in their call to decolonize the university. This dissertation explores the formation of the radical #RMF student movements at UCT and Oxford—referred to as the Fallist movements. I first consider what led the #RMF movement at UCT to adopt a decolonial framework centered on Black radical feminism, Black Consciousness, and Pan-Africanism, and then examine how the #RMF’s decolonial framework generated the emergent idea of “Fallism” that extended beyond the students’ demand for the Rhodes statue to fall. Finally, I assess the ways in which the formation of #RMF Oxford was influenced by the #RMF movement in Cape Town. The #RMF mission statement characterized the black experience at UCT as “black pain” or as “the dehumanization of black people” informed by the “violence exacted only against black people by a system that privileges whiteness”. In order to better understand their experiences of black pain, student activists de-linked from the university's dominant knowledge production systems that privileged whiteness through its epistemic architecture. The #RMF UCT movement’s de-linking or “epistemic disobedience”, was also employed by students at Oxford who wanted to integrate “subjugated and local epistemologies” into the Eurocentric university curriculum. Based on this empirical analysis of the #RMF’s engagement in epistemic disobedience at both UCT and Oxford, I argue that the university occupies a paradoxical position for Black and other marginalized bodies: it is simultaneously empowering and dehumanizing; it offers the possibility of acquiring knowledge that could serve as a liberatory tool from the violence of socio-economic marginality (Black liberation), while at the same time, the physical and epistemic architecture of the university can create an oppressive, alienating space for Black, queer and disabled bodies among others (Black pain). This assertion leads me to experiment with developing Fallism into an emergent decolonial option that emanates from acts of epistemic disobedience to unveil the hegemonic intellectual architecture of the university. Through a combination of 98 interviews, one year of observations, and document analysis, this study offers insights into the formation and evolution of the #RMF student movements at UCT and Oxford, while contributing to a critical understanding of the university’s paradoxical epistemic architecture. TABLE OF CONTENTS I - INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale and Significance 8 Dissertation Outline 11 II - BACKGROUND 14 Introduction 14 Historical Context 15 A Timeline of the #RMF Movement in Cape Town 22 A Timeline of the #RMF Oxford Movement 49 III – THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 57 Introduction 57 Epistemic Disobedience 59 Social Movements Theory 67 Public Pedagogy 72 Theory from the South 75 IV – RESEARCH METHODS 80 Introduction 80 Interviews 83 Observations 88 Document Analysis 91 Coding Research Data 94 Coding Software 94 The Coding Process 95 i Validity and Trustworthiness 98 The Researcher 99 Limitations 100 V – BLACK PAIN/BLACK LIBERATION 105 Introduction 105 The Birth of a Movement 106 Constructing a Decolonial Framework 114 Black Consciousness 116 Black Radical Feminism 124 Pan-Africanism 136 VI - THE RISE OF FALLISM 146 Introduction 146 The Emergence of #Fallism 148 On Constructions of Fallism 149 Fallism and the Question of the Human/Non-Human 157 Fallism as a Decolonial Option 168 VII - ON EMPIRE 177 Introduction 177 The Influence of #RMF Cape Town on the Oxford Movement 180 Comparing the #RMF Oxford and Cape Town Movements 192 Race as an Organizing Tactic 193 Theoretical Frameworks 198 Gender and Intersectionality 204 ii Human Rights 208 Fallism as a Decolonial Option from the South 210 VIII – CONCLUSION 216 REFERENCES 223 APPENDICES 234 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Written in part from a hospital bed prior to my appendectomy on January 1, 2019, and during my convalescence at home, this inadequate list of acknowledgements represents my feeble attempt at expressing gratitude to the many individuals and institutions who nurtured, encouraged and inspired the writing of this dissertation. My research was generously funded through grants provided by Teachers College, the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity, and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Fellowship. I would like to firstly acknowledge and thank my dissertation advisor, Professor S. Garnett Russell, who gently guided me through the Ph.D. process to emerge with radically new ways of thinking and being. Your generous trust and encouragement created the space for my political and intellectual evolution, while simultaneously ensuring that I remained grounded in the academic project. Thank you to Professor Nicholas Limerick who read through an earlier draft of my dissertation providing comprehensive and meticulous notes that critically influenced my emergent thoughts and ideas. I am also deeply appreciative to the rest of my dissertation committee, chaired by Professor Souleymane Bachir Diagne, and comprised of Professor Vanessa Agard-Jones and Professor Lewis Gordon, who played a fundamental role in offering insights and advice that profoundly shaped my thinking and scholarship. To my family and friends in South Africa, the U.K. and the United States who encouraged, supported, housed, entertained and fed me during my research, I am incredibly grateful. My parents, Hawa and Abdul Wahab, thank you for providing me with the many opportunities that you were so forcefully denied and prohibited from even dreaming about. Thank you for guiding, supporting, and loving me before, during and after this research project. iv To my brother Jaleel, thank you for the regular calls to check up on how I was doing, and Hakeem, for not getting upset when I returned your car late on several occasions after conducting interviews or field work. En dankie Selena, vir al U ondersteuning geduurende my studies. Thank you to my mother-in-law for feeding me on Friday feast nights, and to my sisters and brothers-in-law for your support and encouragement. To my friends Naseera and Michael, Fathema and Anas, Michelle, and Fathima and Luc, thank you for housing and entertaining me during my many sojourns to South Africa. To Mansur, thank you for the welcome distraction on poker nights, and for the many lunches and dinner conversations you invited me to and generously paid for. I am equally grateful to my friends in New York, including fellow Ph.D. students Lucia, Phoebe, Ji, and Manuel, as well as Dr. Sandra Sirota and Dr. Diana Rodriguez, for their invaluable support and advice during the Ph.D. process. To my network of friends in New York who have become my extended family, thank you for the laughter and love that you showed during this intellectual journey, and for tolerating my invocations of “epistemic coloniality” in many late night conversations. To my wife Farzana, who taught me the meaning of “uxorious”, you have been such a powerful and influential force for nearly half my life that it is hard to figure out where I end and where you begin. I want to thank you for contributing so profoundly to who I have become, and who I am still in the process of becoming. This dissertation could not have been written without your unconditional love and support. Finally, I am also deeply indebted to every student, professor, administrator, worker, activist and public intellectual, who took the time to meet with me and who contributed to the research for this dissertation. The #RhodesMustFall activists profoundly shifted the way I see the world so that my perspective will never be the same again. v DEDICATION For Biko Ahmed vi I - INTRODUCTION On March 9, 2015, Chumani Maxwele, a black student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa, took containers filled with human feces and emptied its contents onto a bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes located on the university's campus (Nyamnjoh 2016, Mamdani 2016, Jansen 2017). Maxwele’s defacement of the Rhodes statue was an important catalyst in the formation of #RhodesMustFall (#RMF)1—a radical student