On 9 March 2015, Chumani Maxwele, then a student at the University of Cape Town (UCT), flung a bucket full of human excrement at the statue of British colonialist and mining magnate Cecil John Rhodes on the UCT campus. With this defacing act, Maxwele called for the removal of the statue, which had been sitting in a prominent campus location for eighty years, purportedly because of Rhodes’ ‘generous gift’ of the land to the new academic institution in the late 19th century.
From this initial moment, a massive student uprising developed quickly that forcefully demanded the elimination of a symbol of colonialism and the long-called-for transformation of the university. The movement that became known as #RhodesMustFall (also: #RMF) combined militant street protests with intensive social media campaigns (Becker 2018; Nyamnjoh 2016). After a month of forceful student protests, the university’s governing structures sanctioned the removal of the statue, which happened on 9 April 2015.
#RMF kick-started a succession of student-led protests in South Africa between 2015 and 2017, which became known collectively as the ‘Fallist’ movements, primarily including, in addition to #RMF, the #FeesMustFall movements. FeesMustFall started in October 2015 at Wits University in Johannesburg and eventually swept through academic institutions in the entire country. Their key demands were free education in a dual sense, including free access to higher education, and curriculum changes to reflect the full range of South African and human expressions, rather than the Eurocentric focus, hitherto dominant in the South African academy.
Questions: What remains?
Commemorating the tenth anniversary of this momentous protest movement challenges us to think through a range of questions about the impact of #RMF and the movements that followed it.
Some argue that the activism was unsuccessful since South African universities still charge their students substantial tuition fees. The past few years have seen student protests across institutions at the beginning of each academic year in February. Those have been triggered in the main by students’ widespread calamities and sheer despair, commonly caused by a lack of affordable accommodation, and financial exclusion. One may ask, of course, whether the success or failure of protest movements can, and even should, be measured by whether or not their immediate, practical calls have been achieved.
Should we not rather develop a different approach to thinking about the impact of young people’s dissent and movements of rupture? What has been the impact of the student-led movements in South African universities, considering especially curricula change in terms of content and pedagogy? Beyond the university: Have the student-led movements made a change in the moral, intellectual, cultural and political structure of South Africa, the Southern African region, the continent, and even in global perspective? What has changed in the quest for an inclusive, fair and just society? How has activism concerned with anti-colonial and anti-racist politics evolved over the past decade?
What has this movement been to me?
In March 2015 I was teaching at the University of the Western Cape, located on Cape Town’s poverty-stricken periphery, twenty kilometres away from UCT’s glorious setting on the slopes of Table Mountain. By sheer coincidence I had designed a focus on affect and politics for the postgraduate course in anthropological theory I was teaching that semester. When the protests against the Rhodes statue emerged with such force, I asked my students to go to the UCT campus, observe what was happening there, and conduct informal conversations with their peers at that other university.
At the same time, I, along with other academics from across the Western Cape’s academic institutions, became involved as a “participant observer-ally” of the #RhodesMustFall movement. During March and April 2015, I spent much time hanging out at UCT, trying to respectfully listen to, and learn from the vibrant discussions of students and black academics. During the late afternoon of 9 April 2015, I was among the thousands gathered at UCT to watch the removal of the Rhodes statue. The student-led protests struck me as an important rupture, demonstrating from early on during the month-long campaign, that this crusade was not just “about the statue.”
RMF: Practical and ideologically trajectories
When Maxwele flung a bucket full of human excrement against the bronze statue of the seated Rhodes, his performance expressed inherent anger and frustration about the coloniality of the South African university as much as of South African society as a whole. Ostensibly an individual act, this work of memory against hegemonic structures of power and privilege was clearly intended as a performance for a wider audience. The activist had brought friends along who recorded the act on their mobile phones; they uploaded the videoed clips on social media, especially Twitter, where they went instantly viral, and helped launch a mass movement.
Three days after Maxwele had tossed the bucket full of poo onto Rhodes, a well-attended meeting took place to discuss the future of the statue. A week later, students marched to the seat of the UCT administration and demanded a date for the removal of the statue.
While then UCT Vice-chancellor Max Price was addressing the protesters, students occupied the university’s main administrative building, which they renamed Azania house, thus expressing their allegiance to Pan-Africanist positions. They transformed it into an alternative university, which challenged the content and hierarchical structures of colonial education.
Over the next few weeks activists successfully disrupted ‘business as usual’ on the UCT campus, and initiated a debate about racism and demands to decolonise education. Students put Frantz Fanon’s notion of mutual recognition as a precondition of true humanism into practice, for instance, when they walked around campus with ‘recognize me’ written on placards hanging around their necks. This extraordinary initiative got students and academics engaged in vibrant conversations about inclusion and decolonisation.
The movement succeeded to find the support of the university’s governing bodies. On 9 April the objectionable statue was removed under the thunderous applause of a large crowd who had gathered to watch this significant moment. From there, the protests spread quickly to other universities, initially especially those that are similar to UCT, historically white English-medium institutions, steeped in the ‘liberal’ South African tradition with deep roots in British colonialism and a corresponding institutional culture.
Throughout the South African winter and spring of 2015 students campaigned for changes of their universities’ symbolism; they demanded the removal of colonial memorials and the renaming of buildings. They also called for the appointment of more black academics. And they insisted upon the reform of curricula, which they said conveyed racist and colonialist forms of knowledge and ignored, even scorned African intellectual experience (Becker 2018). Eventually, in October 2015 the movements transformed into protests for free and decolonised education, which became known as #FeesMustFall, and shook the formerly Black universities as much as the historically privileged universities such as UCT.
‘Decolonisation’ became the catch phrase of the movements. A closer look shows that this often concealed the resurgence of older variants of Black Consciousness philosophy, particularly at the formerly ‘white’ universities, including the ‘English’ institutions such as UCT, Wits, or the small university in the Eastern Cape which bears the name of Rhodes, as well as the historically particularly conservative Afrikaans-medium universities, such as Stellenbosch University near Cape Town. The demographics of these institutions, which had previously catered predominantly for white students, had changed dramatically; by 2015, with one exception–Stellenbosch University–they had a black majority among their student body. In contrast, their institutional cultures, symbolism, and curricula, and the demographics of the professoriate had changed only marginally.
The slow institutional changes became a crucial issue of the new South African student movement. Black students described their experiences on historically white campuses as alienating; in expressive spoken and written observations they pointed out that the norm at universities continues to cater for white, middle class, able-bodied and heteronormative identified male students (Naidoo 2016: 181).
Central to the movement’s pursuit was the aim of ‘decolonising the mind’. Palpable was the hunger for new forms of knowledge, the extraordinary return to radical black intellectual traditions, to black feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies. With keen re-readings of Fanon’s and Steve Biko’s writings in particular, the new generation took up a philosophical critique of racism and the postcolonial condition, insisting on radical, and at times controversial, practice. With claims to mutual recognition and decolonisation as a precondition of true humanism, the activist practice focused on disruption: disruption of the spaces at universities and beyond that insist that ‘business as usual’ prevented the decolonisation of the post-1994 academy and South African society at large.
The radical framework that surfaced with the movements became known as ‘Fallism’. Fallism transcended concerns about education and academic institutions, developed into an emergent decolonial theory (Ahmed 2017). It embraced a notion of intersectionality, acknowledging that interlinking oppressive systems needed to be combated together, primarily race, class and gender (but also heteronormativity, disability, and others). One poster, for instance, which #RMF protesters held up next to the contested Rhodes statue proudly proclaimed: ‘Dear history, this revolution has women, gays, queers & trans. Remember that.’ The #RMF campaign became a space of vigorous and at times controversial yet productive related discussions. Later that year, co-surfacing with the FeesMustFall movements, student activists, radical academics and labour activists, particularly in Cape Town and Johannesburg built new alliances with a call to action for fair labour practices, and the end of the outsourcing practices that marginalised the most vulnerable university workers (Becker 2020).
Protest: embodied performance and the arts
From the earliest days, #RMF activists made extensive use of digital social media; South African Twitter was the space where the movement made their presence most felt to organise action as much as in debate about their concerns, aims and demands. At the same time, embodied performance took centre stage in the movements.
Chumani Maxwele was not the first South African activist to use human waste as a medium of protest. It is worthwhile tracking South African “poo protests” over the past 15 years to understand their role as a medium of embodied and affective performative protest. In October 2011, the late Ayanda Kota, of the ‘Unemployed People’s Movement’, dumped a bucket of human waste in the foyer of the municipality offices in Makhanda (formerly known as Grahamstown) to reinforce demands for the provision of proper toilets in the poor areas of the town. Two years later “poo protests”, as they became known, forcefully brought the private shame of unenclosed toilets into the public space of metropolitan South Africa, when activists from Khayelitsha township emptied the contents of portable toilets (portaloos) in several spaces of the genteel city, most effectively at Cape Town International airport, the gateway that brings millions of tourists to the city every year (Robins 2014).
This act of making private suffering public strongly resonated in Maxwele’s act of two years later, as he re-embraced forms of protests from South Africa’s poor. Standing shirtless in front of the large, looming statue of Cecil John Rhodes at UCT, wearing a bright pink mineworker’s hardhat, Maxwele said he felt suffocated by the overwhelming presence of colonial names and memorials on the campus. Most black students at the university couldn’t breathe on campus because of the English colonial dominance. “There is no (black)collective history here–where are our heroes and ancestors,” he asked before emptying the container of human waste on to the statue (cited by Robins 2015)
From Maxwele’s initial act to the momentous events of April 9, 2015, when thousands gathered on the UCT campus to watch the removal of the Rhodes statue, embodied site-specific performance took centre stage.
The removal was accompanied by an expressive living sculpture performance by Sethembile Msezane, then a Fine Arts Masters student at the university. As the crane removed the statue, for four hours the artist-activist stood on the plinth she had constructed, her face covered by a veil made of golden beads, wearing high-heeled stilettos and holding up wings, which she had made of human hair, lace and brass for the occasion, for two minutes and after a break of 10 minutes raising them again. Chapungu–the day Rhodes fell, as she named the intervention, demonstrated that the rising female bird from Great Zimbabwe was spreading her wings and taking back from the colonialist who had stolen her land and her spirit (Msezane, 2015/ 2023: 212-214).
The counter-memorial performance was more than a symbolic challenge. Msezane’s performance intervention defied the deficient decolonisation of the public space; significantly, however, the activists’ concerns did not stop with concerns about the continued staging of former colonial empire on their campus. They engaged with persistent racism and inequality. Their focus quickly turned from campus-based concerns to issues in broader society; student activists addressed a host of forms of oppression, structural as much as symbolic, and long histories ruled by male capitalists and white supremacy.
Art-based interventions such as Chapungu have since taken on increasing significance for contesting fragmented memories of the colonial past and calls for repair and care. Student and youth-led movements in South Africa and also in South Africa’s former colony, Namibia, have been, and continue to be a source of inspiration for innovative artistic activity (see, e.g., Brandt 2023). Artistic creativity has become the most sustained radical force, over and above orthodox forms of mass protest.
In an early instance, in October 2016 a theatre performance premiered at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town, which gained widespread international recognition and drew much attention to the student-led movements in South Africa. The Fall featured a clever play on words in its tagline (‘All Rhodes Lead to Decolonisation’). Eight graduates of the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies wrote, directed, and acted the production. Based on their real-life experiences, the piece offered a (self-)critical reflection on the hopes and fears of the student-led protest movements. The Fall was by no means straightforward agitprop. Rather, the young crew delivered a subtle exploration of the spontaneity and idealism, as well as the trauma that accompanied their political campaigns. This extraordinary workshop theatre production won the ensemble theatrical awards both at home and abroad.
Next to, before and beyond stage performances, activists re-appropriated older expressions of struggle creativity. New forms of astonishingly nuanced protest poetry played a vital role, as evidenced by the pieces that appeared in the young protest movements’ first publications, such as the collection guest-edited by #RMF for the Johannesburg Workshop of Theory and Criticism in 2015. At Wits University in Johannesburg young performance artists also took part in a live performance outside the university’s main lecture hall in October 2015, where they critically expressed their experiences at the ‘colonial’ post-apartheid university.
International inspiration
In South African memory, FeesMustFall and the calls for free education have become the most widely remembered facet of the Fallist movements. Internationally though, #RhodesMustFall had a profound impact. The campaign inspired similar actions to change the public space also internationally, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States (Ahmed 2020).
Students at Oxford university in the U.K. took the cue from their counterparts in Cape Town and campaigned for the removal of a statue of Cecil John Rhodes from Oxford’s Oriel College, which honoured its imperial benefactor. On 6 November 2015, some 300 students gathered outside Oriel College in central Oxford chanting in call-and-response fashion–‘Rhodes Must Fall! Take it Down!’–and asking inconvenient questions about Oxford’s imperial past. They had collected nearly 3,000 signatures in support of this aim. The protest disrupted Oxford’s ordered and typically unquestioned hierarchy (Chigudu 2020).
Unlike the South African campaign, RhodesMustFall Oxford did not succeed to send Rhodes off. Almost five years later, during the global Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, the Oxford campaign renewed their efforts. On 9 June 2020, a protest march brought 4,000 out in Oxford. Standing in front of a placard that read ‘Decolonise Oxford Uni’, Simukai Chigudu, in 2015 a doctoral student and a prominent voice of #RhodesMustFall Oxford, now an academic at the university, reminded the protestors powerfully that RhodesMustFall was started in 2015 in Oxford because of the students in South Africa who were tired of colonial iconography and white supremacy.
What remains?
Another five years later, while Rhodes remains up at Oriel College, Rhodes House, Oxford, hosts ‘Entangled’, an exhibition of southern African artists about colonialism, monuments and memory (https://www.rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk/programmes-events/calendar-of-events/2024/june/entangled-at-rhodes-house-oxford/). To see this exhibition, curated by Rhodes scholar Julie Taylor and her Guns and Rains gallery in Johannesburg, featuring works by artists from South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe in the home space of the Rhodes Trust, is a powerful reminder of the complex, at times contradictory impact of the student-led movements that took off in Cape Town ten years ago. It strongly resonates Simukai Chigudu’s powerful reflection, made in his 2020 speech about the Cape Town origins of the global surge of BlackLivesMatter, and his written reflection of “how a particularly potent British national imaginary has memorialized the country’s imperial past and is unable to deal with racism in the present” (Chigudu 2020).
#RhodesMustFall inspired forms of decolonisation memory activism across the global south and north. Equally, there can be no doubt that the Fallist movements were a catalyst for more radical questions about the legacy of colonialism, and the persistence of colonial structures–coloniality–in South Africa. A generation after the end of apartheid, they exposed deep-seated anger about the unfulfilled promises of liberation, persistent racism, and rising inequality. Despite undeniable polarising effects, the activists’ more radical transformative agenda continues to reverberate in contemporary discussions, not in the least in conversations among activists and intellectuals about practices of solidarity with local community struggles, which face the vibrant Palestine solidarity movement.
The largest impact the Fallist movements have had, however, concerned the essentials of decolonising South African higher education in practice. On the one hand, South African universities introduced top-down institutional structures with lofty aims to “decolonise the curriculum”. These centralised exertions remained, by and large, rather unsuccessful. In contrast, sustained changes of curriculum and, equally importantly, pedagogy have been made at the coalface of academic departments that listened to the robust conversations initiated by the student movements about epistemological and pedagogical issues that had previously not been raised in the post-apartheid South African academy. Questions about the politics of knowledge and curriculum reform were forcefully put on the agenda by the massive movements and opened the space for intense debates about the decolonisation of academic institutions and knowledge production in teaching and research. Our experience of developing reinvented undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in the UWC Anthropology Department has certainly been replicated in many instances. We, for one, responded with the development of new, critical content and a pedagogical approach that emphasizes multimodal critical inquiry through intensive writing practice, including free writing as we strive to create space for students to speak, and to listen to each other’s experiences of navigating multiple life worlds every day. Our department, and others too, have begun to understand that listening is critical for academics teaching in South African universities to learn imagining how decolonization, critique and our disciplines fit together.
References:
- Ahmed, A. Kayum. 2020. #RhodesMustFall: How a Decolonial Student Movement in the Global South Inspired Epistemic Disobedience at the University of Oxford. African Studies Review 62(3): 281-303. Ahmed, A. Kayum. 2017. ‘#Fallism as public pedagogy.’ Africa Is a Country, & March 2017. https://africasacountry.com/2017/07/fallism-as-public-pedagogy
- Becker, Heike. 2020. ‘From Johannesburg to London: student-worker struggles’. Review of African Political Economy online. 30 January 2020.
https://roape.net/2020/01/30/from-johannesburg-to-london-student-worker-struggles/ - Becker, Heike. 2018: Dissent, disruption, decolonization: South African student protests, 1968 to 2016, International Socialist Review, Issue 111 (Winter 2018-19): 31-47.
- Brandt, Nicola. ‘Practices of self’: Embodied memory work, performance art, and intersectional activism in Namibia. Memory Studies 16 (3) (2023), 533-45
- Chigudu, Simukai. 2020. Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford: a critical testimony. Critical African Studies 12(3): 303-312.
- Msezane, Sethembile. 2015/2023. “It’s coming down today.” In Activism: Documents of contemporary art, eds. Afonso Dias Ramos and Tom Snow, pp. 212-214. London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.
- Naidoo, Leigh-Ann. 2018. ‘Contemporary Student Politics in South Africa’, in Students Must Rise: Youth Struggle in South Africa Before and Beyond Soweto ’76, eds. Anne Heffernan and Noor Nieftagodien. Johannesburg: Wits University press.
- Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2016. #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism. Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa.
- Robins, Steven. 2015. ‘Back to the poo that started it all’, IOL, 9 April 2015. https://www.iol.co.za/news/opinion/back-to-the-poo-that-started-it-all-1842443
- Robins, Steven. 2014. Poo wars as matter out of place: ‘Toilets for Africa’ in Cape Town. Anthropology Today 30(1): 1-3.
Heike Becker is currently a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) in South Africa. Before, she taught Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape for 24 years. Heike has written widely on contradictions of memory culture and politics, decolonial activism, the public space and the arts in Namibia, South Africa and Germany. She has also published on popular culture, gender politics, student movements, and South African anthropology.