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Disruption as a communicative strategy: The case of #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall students’ protests.

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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 marginalized 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.
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JAMS 9 (2) pp. 351–373 Intellect Limited 2017
Journal of African Media Studies
Volume 9 Number 2
© 2017 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jams.9.2.351_1
SHEPHERD MPOFU
University of Johannesburg
Disruption as a
communicative strategy: The
case of #FeesMustFall and
#RhodesMustFall students’
protests in South Africa
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 politi-
cal 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 disrupt-
ing 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 marginalized poor
majority black people whose dreams remain deferred. This argument will be framed
by questions around the current burdens of apartheid, the achievements of disrup-
tive protests and the meaning, roles and behaviours of officialdom towards members
and ideologies of Fallist movements.
KEYWORDS
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) 1995: 426, original emphasis)
In October 1997 John Pilger interviewed estate agency owner Pam Golding
who asserted that ‘everybody is doing their best to become one rainbow
nation’ (2006: 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 elections and running for political office. What
was more miraculous, I argue, is not only the negotiated settlement or prob-
lematic 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 and supported by the ideological state apparatus
such as media, schools and of late the universities, is regarded as the preferred
set-up of things. To the marginalized poor majority whose dreams have been
deferred in the enigma that the post-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 normalized 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) griev-
ances 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 indi-
vidual bigots’. This is further demonstrated through the problematic Truth and
Reconciliation Commission which was blind to the larger part of the white
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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, ‘[i]n one fell swoop, the entirety of the white community was exon-
erated’ through the imagining of a rainbow nation – a euphemism of silencing
any malcontents and a project of dis-membering the past memories and expe-
riences 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 apart-
heid whereby the previously disempowered continue existing on the margins
of mainstream politics and economy characterized by poverty, violence and
lack) South Africa, to some, especially the poor, the concept of the rainbow
nation commits violence against them as it masks deeper ‘violence’s’ the unre-
pentant 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 symbolized by the administrators of universities or even
the country, student-led movements opted for disruptions. The Fallists scored
some concessions such as non-fee increment for 2016, removal of the Rhodes
statue from the University of Cape Town (UCT) campus, funding for those
whose households earn less than R600,000 per year, promises of decoloniz-
ing the curriculum and faculty among other things. This article reflects on the
Fallist movements’ campaign by South African students while also demon-
strates the power of the status quo through the use of mainstream and
alternative media wherein voices of the prominent and powerful (vice chan-
cellors and political commentators) in society gained access and attempted
to undermine the Fallist movements. The term Fallist in Fallist movements
has two meanings, one of which was intended while the other was not when
the activists coined this self-label. The first is an extract from the hashtags
#FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall. This is the symbolic falling of the old,
oppressive and exclusive system that privileges the rich and white members
of the community while marginalizing the mainly poor black and majority
citizens. Thus Fallism identifies ‘the commonalities in the movement’s politi-
cal philosophy, helping capture some of its most explicit goals, such as the
removal of the Rhodes statue from the University of Cape Town’s campus’
(Hodes 2016: 9). Rhodes’s statue symbolizes the past which, past is seen as
living, present and informing the present which needs to be eradicated both
symbolically and physically through the eradication of artefacts, statues and
artworks symbolizing, memorializing and representing the estranged colo-
nial past. The Fallist movement is anchored on the triumvirate of ideologies:
the Bikoist and Fanonian Black Consciousness, Pan-Africanism and intersec-
tionality. At the core of #FeesMustFall project is an attempt to decolonize
knowledge, curriculum and faculty through the teaching of material from
black thinkers where available and also a fight for the employment of black
academics in previously white universities. Also forming part of this project
is a fight for free quality education. The second definition of the Fallist move-
ment is rather ironic and initially unintended by the Fallists. Towards the end
of 2016 at the height of activism students’ struggles and aspirations were
not the one’s vying for space in the Fallist agenda but also intra-movement
tensions, which threatened the movement’s focus became topical. There
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were accusations of sexual violence and also tensions between male and
female figures, queer and straight activists, feminists and patriarchy fight-
ing for poster-face-positions of the movement with males being accused
of misogyny and frustrating women’s role in the movement. Tensions were
more conspicuous at the UCT art exhibition commemorating the first anni-
versary of the movement when the UCT Trans-Collective ‘smeared red paint
over photographs and physically blocked the entrance to the exhibition hall’
(Hodes 2016: 6).
The Fallist movement is ever mutating defying any systematic and logical
understanding through pinning it into one final definition, monolithic char-
acterization and analysis. At the core of this article is an argument that it is
during times of ‘noise and chaos’ that effective communication, in the context
of protests, takes place. Specifically the article 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 funda-
mental 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 lead-
ers dealt with protestors in an attempt to silence pertinent issues without
addressing them. Seepe notes this concert as the
hypocrisy of the so-called analysts the majority of whom are univer-
sity academics. Societal protests are routinely described as reflecting a
crisis of legitimacy and 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 decolo-
nisation project.
(2015: 11)
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 article 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 communi-
cative strategy that guarantees the poor of an audience with the powerful
elite running important institutions in society. The article starts by histori-
cizing the Fallist movements across South Africa with an intention of draw-
ing parallels between #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements and
how student activities managed to garner sympathy and negative reactions
from society and how they managed to bring the governance of the coun-
try and universities into a standstill when they attempted to occupy parlia-
ment and marched to the Union Buildings, the administrative seat of the
government.
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
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(online) argued that the protests, even though justified, the methods thereof
were ‘unlawful and transgress the constitutional rights of others’ (2016).
Similarly authorities’ 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 institu-
tions will in the future become arenas of social struggle’ (1991: 157) especially
in most African countries. The disruptive rage and subsequent violent reme-
dial 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 nationhood 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 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 marginal-
ize 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 marginalization of blacks and the continuous privileg-
ing of whites, dead or alive, at institutions of higher learning. Of course the
removal of colonial artefacts, especially those with multi-layered symbol-
isms of conquest and domination is an important aspect in decolonization
as removal of these statues alters and profoundly undermines their power in
present day politics (Larsen 2012; James 1999).
On 9 March, Chumani Maxwele, an activist and UCT student whose life
has been shaped and antagonized 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 2006: 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 legitimized what is popularly known as white privilege, symbolized 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 graf-
fiti 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
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do with teaching and learning in Afrikaans were contested. At Stellenbosch it
led to the #OpenStellenbosch movement while at Rhodes University protest-
ing students demanded the renaming of the university. In most cases, like
at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) (n.d.) building names were officially
changed or students christened them with new names. At Wits the adminis-
tration 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 occupy parliament while it was in sitting and a march
by student to the President Jacob Zuma’s Union Buildings offices protest-
ing 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 per cent for the 2016 academic
year in October 2015 at Wits. Nompendulo Mkhatshwa captures the experi-
ence of negotiating for students’ issues in the following manner:
[b]efore we went into that meeting she (Kalla) told me that while it was
going to be very difficult […]. 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 board-
room. 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 (2016), like
Naidoo, however, observes that #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall were not
a ‘single and coordinated movement’ (Naidoo 2016: 292).
The fee increments, according to Wits were necessitated by the weaken-
ing of the country’s current, 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 5 per cent. At Rhodes
University student protests started because the university, besides expected fee
hikes, demanded that students pay 50 per cent of their fees upfront (Quintal
2015). The protests soon spread to other universities in the country leading to
attempts at occupying parliament and Union Buildings, the seat of the coun-
try’s administration. These disruptions of parliamentary activities (attempted),
public life in the streets of Cape Town and management of government busi-
ness 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 levels of anger,
rage and desperation students lived through.
The #FeesMustFall movement was later riddled with leadership ‘crisis’ as
its face, 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
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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 specifi-
cally the #FeesMustFall project is contested as attested to by Wits student
Leigh-Ann Naidoo 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’ (2015: 12).
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 a 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, decolonizing the university in terms of staff
promotions and curriculum. Students also spoke about lack of transformation
at the universities, the ill treatment of black ‘outsourced’ workers and racial
inequalities that continue to characterize not only universities but the coun-
try at large. In the words of the Fallists in their book – a collection of activists’
diaries – Rioting and Writing the #FeesMustFall ‘movement is/was an attempt
from below to disrupt this unequal, racialized social and economic order. It
rekindled and questioned the idea about the university in a postcolonial soci-
ety’ (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 ‘undecolonized’ curriculum gives black protesters and their
sympathizers grounds to call for its decolonization 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:
[w]e are of a race that has no knowledge to offer modern South Africa.
Our forms of cognising, modes of being-in-the-world, our weltanschau-
ungen 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 produc-
tion 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 insti-
tutions’ – while fully aware that these institutions despise us. It matters
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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 theorize
and offer a methodological framework for the article. 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 cast-
ing light on the #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall’s use of creative rage to
express their demands and predicament. Thereafter I focus on how the offi-
cialdom 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’ (Shigetomi 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 is what
is usually referred to as social movements. The Fallist movements in this arti-
cle could be theorized as social movements as they coalesced around specific
goals and identities as they included interest parties after recognizing collec-
tive threats to their future, security and identity as citizens. The Fallist move-
ments do not present themselves as political parties even though political
interests amongst protestors could been seen advancing political objectives
ultimately 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 them to
critical discourse analysis method. Discourse analysis analyses how language
is used in text and discourses and also looks at issues of power, positional-
ity, 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 article, it means simply that,
but with a positive twist to it. Society has inculcated in people an impres-
sion 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
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disrupting the core business of institutions for example. Some ‘culturalists’
argued in the media that these students were disrupting history and its pres-
ervation by demanding the removal of ‘historically’ important statues from
public spaces. But disruption is a two-way street, and, just like a coin, we must
appreciate its other side as a positive approach to finding solutions espe-
cially 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 barren-
ness 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 colonized countries. However, as the South African Fallist move-
ments’ 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 marginalized (Naidoo 2015). Or it is a case of taking advan-
tage 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 detri-
mental depending, of course, on where one stands in relation to ‘the normal
order of things’ people have been socialized 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 (2014: 288) 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 ‘democratize’, as Chasi (2015) in his critique of scholarship that tries
to contextualize ‘violence’ and its operative definitions would argue, the mean-
ings of violence so as to argue about it in context. Violence could be both physi-
cal and emotional. Violence could also mean failure to carry out certain duties
expected, for example. Thus government failure to deal with issues of decoloni-
zation 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 characterizes the atmosphere
which itself is violence against the protestors. In this silence is masked a life
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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’ (1967: 53) hence qualifying 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 characterized the communicative space between
the ruling elite and the poor. In most cases citizens have complemented peace-
ful protest methods with disruptive tactics to get an audience with authori-
ties. 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 marginalized 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 institu-
tional 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)
criticize when he writes in an online newspaper article:
[i]t 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
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wonder if you are listening to the nation’s future intellectual leader-
ship 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.
(2015a)
The Fallist movements’ protests have been met with raw violence, including
rape allegedly from the police and the bouncers (private security person-
nel), which the universities have employed to control students. The bounc-
ers, hired at extra and probably exorbitant costs, have systematically violated
the rights of guests, students and staff members at Universities with the UJ
probably being the most notorious. According to Frassinneli a professor at
UJ, quoted in an online newspaper article, ‘[t]he violent modes of repression
and securitization that prevailed at some of our campuses represented, above
all, an intellectual and political 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 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 UJ the private security
guards, whose actions during protests observed by the author showed worri-
some 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 is
quoted in an online newspaper article arguing that
[p]rivate 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 institutionalisa-
tion, where activists become sucked into official decision-making struc-
tures. Many protesters are frightened off by the escalating violence, but
small groups of protesters – whose attitudes have been hardened by offi-
cial 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:
[i]f we are to move beyond violent engagement we will have to change
the structure of the way things work and, most important, who they
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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 romanticization of violence when he
comments
[m]any have simply turned a blind eye to violence or threats thereof,
and some have even advocated violence as a legitimate means in a revo-
lutionary moment. Really? At a university? In this moment, in a demo-
cratic 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:
[n]one of us want to see a library destroyed but what does that library
represent in an unjust system? It does not represent learning and acces-
sibility 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 with-
out 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 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 organized or gave out information to the public and stakehold-
ers (Chinguno et al. 2017). In a Ruth First lecture, Legh-Ann Naidoo (2016)
suggested that WhatsApp was the most used organizing, publicity and commu-
nicative tool for the Fallist movements. E-mails were used as a line of communi-
cation between protesters and management of universities. An e-mail exchange
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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, victimization
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
(e-mail 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 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 univer-
sity buildings that bear colonial names. The occupation led to lectures and
discussions around ending of outsourcing and re-humanizing the black
service staff from the disposable ‘outsourced’ staff into permanent employ-
ees (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 char-
acterizing the call for dismantlement of apartheid South Africa. He decon-
structs 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 iden-
tity 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.
(Jansen 2015: 5)
Lwandeni Fikeni dismisses Jansen’s suggestion of dignity in protest when the
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
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experience of institutional, structural, and everyday racism. F**** white
people is a highly aesthecised form of critiquing South Africa’s social
ordering.
(Jansen 2016)
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 prac-
tices’ (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 Africans, 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 2016; Makhanya 2015b). 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 disrup-
tive rage was ‘remotely congruent to the violence of the state and institution’
(2016: 8).
MINDLESS REVOLT?: ‘BUREAUCRATS’ ON VIOLENCE AND
‘CONTROLS’ OF DISRUPTIONISTS
This section casts a spotlight on the critiques of the Fallist movements by offi-
cials in government, university and other thought leaders in the mainstream
media and academic works. Their voices matter and easily taken-for-granted
and become unquestioned knowledges because of interlocutors’ socio-politico-
economical standing. The political communication system in the coun-
try is still undergoing major transformations (Wasserman 2016) and at the
moment the role of the media and citizens in the country’s democracy remains
contested and disjointed. South African media have been criticized for being
concerned about the middle class and being a ‘vehicle of a particular view
of society’ that is a surburban view (Friedman 2011: 106). Friedman claims
that the South African media have failed to abide by its claims ‘to universality’
(2011: 107) and this poses serious questions to the role of the media in democ-
racy. Thus the elite voices, the ‘vehicle of a particular view of society’ were given
space in the media and condemned Fallist protests as disruptive and infring-
ing 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. When covered
it was to demonstrate their disruptive nature.
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Official discourse on student movements’ activities ostracized and under-
mined 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. Habib and Mabizela’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:
[e]very revolution will be confronted by reactionaries who seek to
protect and maintain the status quo. In this regard we must ignore
coopted anti-blacks like Mondli Makhanya, editor of some newspaper,
and his masters who find it reasonable to refer to our peaceful protests
as hooliganism.
(2015b)
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 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:
[t]he current student protests on campuses throughout the coun-
try are distinctly different from those witnessed last year. The protest-
ing 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 activa-
tions’ using offensive language to communicate forms of anger against
systems; T-shirts and graffiti clearly demonstrating hate speech; mali-
cious 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)
The media rarely challenges such assertions or seek responses from concerned
parties but, as Wasserman argues, in a context where it is the elite versus the
poor
the South African media tend to amplify the voices of those that
are already in positions of power and authority. The poor and the
marginalised are usually treated as subjects of news stories – talked
about, rather than given the space to talk themselves.
(2015: 222)
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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 2015a) cannot be justified, it is impor-
tant to highlight, again, that there is need to understand how and when these
happened and the media did not verify officialdom accounts. Most of these
violent attacks on property, some pro-student activists argued, took place
‘outside’ the times or moments of protests. Duncan and Frassinelli’s (2015)
report on student protests at UJ suggests that SAPS and university manage-
ment employed violent tactics to control student protests. They observe that
the university shut down every time there was a protest and ‘this created a
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 manage-
ment or state security sponsored elements with ulterior motives of undermin-
ing the protestors. Thus the third force remains a mystery but as Mkatshwa
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 peculiari-
ties 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 twelve million people (Metz 2016) in this country
are already worse off and if possible, to draw a mischievous 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
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movements’ protests: racism. The act by white students is easy to decipher and
uncritically celebrate as was done in the media. But the subtext of the message
is clear and harrowing for an imagined ‘rainbow’ nation; police in South Africa
will never attack white people! Thus the barricade was meant to communi-
cate that and more; it revealed which lives matter the most in contemporary
South Africa in as far as deployment of state violence is concerned. The paral-
lels could easily be drawn with the Marikana massacres of 2012 where about
32 miners who were striking for a decent wage were shot at and killed by
South African police. Had there been white miners on strike were the massa-
cres 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? The
act simply condemns and exposes the mythic 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 fall-
ing of threats to black students’ future at universities, the decolonization of
the curriculum and public spaces and the whites targeted in this instance are,
just like the statue of Rhodes, symbolic of the apartheid characterizing South
Africa today.
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 move-
ments 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 presi-
dent 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, they 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’ (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 read-
ing 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’ (Habib 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 exem-
plified by Mandela and Umkhonto when they fought Apartheid. He writes,
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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.
(Metz 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’ (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 obli-
gated 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.
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 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 characterizes the routine ways of seeing
and being in South Africa. To him the ‘post-1994 narrative failed to appreci-
ate 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
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(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:
[m]any comparisons have been made between this uprising and previ-
ous 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 inequal-
ity that was cemented by apartheid.
(2015b)
In other words, the former protests were informed by Apartheid and the
recent ones are in reaction to apartheid.
From the foregoing, it is clear that the media and the elite act in concert to
the detriment of the ‘other view’. The argument proffered here, as Hall et al.
(1999: 255) argue is not that media are the ‘primary definers’ of news events
‘but their structured relationship to power has the effect of making them play
a crucial but secondary role in reproducing the definitions of those who have
privileged access, as of right, to the media as ‘accredited sources’. From this
point of view, in the moment of news production, the media stand in a posi-
tion of structured subordination to the primary definers’. The media, being
business and controlled more by market forces than ethics of representation,
get away with some ethical inconsiderations have created a crisis of repre-
sentation and voice for the marginalized especially. This makes alternative
platforms of self-representation and expression critical in such neo-liberal
economies where news is market rather than human interest driven.
CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
This article 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 in a democracy could be used to silence and perpetuate
the predicament of the marginalized, itself a form of violence. The protests
and disruptions expose and articulate the brittle nature and ‘failure of the
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Shepherd Mpofu
370 Journal of African Media Studies
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 move-
ments 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 article has also demonstrated how
the pro-status quo elites have used their political and social capital to access
to the mainstream media and present certain versions of the events in an
attempt to silence students. In response the marginalized protestors found
their voices and expression in alternative media whose commentary, analy-
sis and stories railed against the grain. The use of alternative media by the
Fallists is a study on its own and this article could not do justice to it due
to lack of space. In addition, this article has not explored further internal
tensions and cases of violence of the Fallist movements. Suffice to say that
the Fallist movement’s use of disruption and violence and the elite’s use of
violence, and official media follows global trends of movements and protests,
and how the elite responds. The exercise of power through the courts of law
which saw universities such as the UCT attempting to criminalize students’
use of certain hashtags such as #FeesMustFall etc applied and were granted
by the High Court of Western Cape an interdict. Bizzarely #FeesMustFall
was cited as a respondent in the court case casting repressive ramifica-
tions to freedoms of assembly, protest and speech. For the former disrup-
tion and violence is the only available resource for fighting for justice and
calling the leading elite into account or altering conditions to accommodate
the poor powerless. The latter is well resourced to contain these disruptions
through officialized use of violence and suppression through the oppressive
state apparatus and ideological state apparatus such as the media. But the
question asked by Hughes in the epigraph still remains: what happens to a
dream deferred?
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SUGGESTED CITATION
Mpofu, S. (2017), ‘Disruption as a communicative strategy: The case of
#FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall students’ protests in South Africa’,
Journal of African Media Studies, 9:2, pp. 351–73, doi: 10.1386/jams.9.2.351_1
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Shepherd Mpofu holds a Ph.D. in media studies and is currently an AHP
fellow (2017–18) and Global Excellence Research fellow at the University of
Johannesburg. His research and teaching interests are in media and identity,
politics, digital media, citizen journalism and comparative media systems. He
is currently working on a book manuscript provisionally entitled Public and
Diasporic Online Media and the Discursive Construction of National Identity in
‘Zimbabwe’.
Contact: GES Post Doctoral Research Fellow, Department of Communication
Studies, School of Communication, Suite B Ring 6, Office Number B Ring 634,
09_JAMS_9.2_Mpofu_351_373.indd 372 8/31/17 4:39 PM
Disruption as a communicative strategy
www.intellectbooks.com 373
University of Johannesburg, Cnr Kingsway Ave and University Rd, Auckland
Park 2006, Johannesburg, South Africa.
E-mail: smpofu@uj.ac.za
Shepherd Mpofu has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
09_JAMS_9.2_Mpofu_351_373.indd 373 8/31/17 4:39 PM
The digital era has posed innumerable challenges to the business and
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Journalism Re-examined
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Lessons from Northern Europe
Edited by Martin Eide, Helle Sjøvaag and Leif Ove Larsen
09_JAMS_9.2_Mpofu_351_373.indd 374 8/31/17 5:40 PM
... Finally, the coloniality of knowledge, classified by decolonial scholar Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018) as occurring on the 'epistemic line', manifests in how the intellectual conquests of African and global South epistemic traditions, indigenous knowledge and subaltern ways continue to be pushed to the periphery. Read in higher education terms, #RhodesMustFall protests across South Africa (2015/2016) were, among other concerns, about the dominance of the "dead white man" in curricula (Alasow, 2015;Mpofu, 2017;Nyamnjoh, 2017), with black and women academics being forced to encounter the unpaid, unseen, unrewarded "care work" as the black nannies in the university (Magoqwana, et al., 2019). What we could term the "knowledge otherwise", this includes a call for the greater presence of indigenous languages in all facets of the academic project, challenging the dominant view, that as a result of the colonial encounter, when indigenous languages are used, they are incapable of expressing knowledge to the same extent as the languages of the colonisers (Veronelli, 2015). ...
... From inviting students, decolonial scholars, practitioners, musicians, artists, communities, and stakeholders in and outside academia and carefully structuring the engagement with these actors, a decentring of usually dominant voices was foregrounded and a centring of voices we would usually not hear empathised (Hlatshwayo & Shawa, 2020). This allowed for troubling and challenging hierarchies, power and the positionality of knowers or experts (Alasow, 2015;Mpofu, 2017;Nyamnjoh, 2017). ...
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... These examples have been witnessed in some countries in Africa. In South Africa, for example, the courts attempted to restrict the use of the hashtag #FeesMustFall by students protesting the increase in university fees (Bosch and Mutsvairo 2017;Mpofu 2017). In Uganda, for example, the government imposed taxes on some social media to discourage the use of certain social media platforms during the electioneering period (Grönlund and Wakabi 2015). ...
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... The factors motivating such behavior cannot be overlooked, as these unhealthy protests result in vandalism, disruptions of teaching and learning, and sometimes even deadly incidents [53,54]. The February 2019 DUT fatal protest and subsequent temporary closures of campuses due to student protests are a manifestation of students expressing their dissatisfaction with poor service delivery, disrupting the smooth progression of teaching and learning [55,56]. ...
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