Fallism

Students’ protests against fees are not new in post-apartheid South Africa, especially in historically black universities.
However, many of these protests were not widely covered in the mainstream media, raising questions in this report
about who is worth media coverage. Jane Duncan (2016) argues that the media’s coverage of protests depends on who is involved and whether or not the protest is violent. Duncan (2015: 142) asserts that the media tends to focus mainly on violent protests, ‘creating the impression that the protests in South Africa are inherently violent, and that police action against them is warranted to protect property and public safety’.
Student-led protests gained momentum in 2015/16 and spread across the country. The #FeesMustFall movement
sparked heated debates on fee increases in universities. Other demands by students included the decolonisation of the educational system, transformation of universities to address racial and gender inequalities in terms of staff composition, as well as insourcing of general workers. The protests generally started peacefully within various universities, supported by academics and other concerned stakeholders. The message was clear that the costs of higher education were too high and unaffordable for the majority of poor black students. The #FeesMustFall movement was widely supported but things changed, especially when protests started turning violent. What form(s) did the violence take during #FeesMustFall?
Why and how did it happen? What were the triggers of violence or the sequence of events leading to protests turning violent? Did the lack of positive response from broader university management structures and the state contribute to violence during the protests? How did the #FeesMustFall movement start at each university? Who were the key figures involved? What were the gender dynamics within the movement? How exactly did things start in 2015? What changed between 2015 and 2016? What were the sources of divisions within the movement? When did protests turn violent for each university? Did the actions of the police provoke violence? What are the lessons that can be learned from these protests, especially ways in which they can be managed and contained in future in order to prevent violence? These
questions motivated the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation to undertake the current study to explore the dynamics of students’ protests in order to understand the manifestations of violence and the sequence of events within each university during #FeesMustFall.
This report provides analyses of the #FeesMustFall protests in nine universities: the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), University of Zululand, Rhodes University, University of Limpopo(Turfloop Campus), Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), University of Cape Town (UCT), University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Student researchers were recruited to conduct research
and write a report for each university. Some of the researchers were studying at these universities; others were not.
Recruiting researchers who were students at the universities facilitated gaining access to key informants, especially protesting students who were highly paranoid about being interviewed by individuals whom they did not know. Some of the researchers were also actively involved in the protests, which helped them to provide an insider perspective. These
student researchers were encouraged to be highly reflective about their own subjectivity, biases and lived experiences of being #FeesMustFall activists, while simultaneously researching the movement. However, not all researchers were students at these universities, and this initially posed challenges in gaining entry to key potential participants. Some interviewees were deeply suspicious about being interviewed, suspecting that the researchers might be informers due perceived militarisation of campuses which resulted in many student leaders being arrested. The researchers used their networks within their own universities to connect with other key informants from other universities. The process then snowballed into connecting with other protesting and non-protesting students as well as with informants such as general workers and union representatives.
Individual and group interviews were conducted with student protest movement leaders, Student Representative
Council (SRC) members, and protesting and non-protesting students. The majority of the participants interviewed were
students, although there were also interviews with academic staff members, general workers and security officials.
University management officials were not interviewed as the focus of this study was only students’ reflections and
accounts of their participation or non-participation in the protests. Archival information such as official social media
accounts, news articles and academic sources were also consulted in order to understand how the media was reporting on the protests. The main aim of each report was to prioritise the voices of the students and to uncover their views about politics, decolonisation, the violence, the tensions and contradictions that emerged out of the #FeesMustFall movement.

[Opening paragraph]

In 2015, A CLUSTER OF NEW STUDENT ACTIVIST GROUPS
emerged at South African universities. Their initial names differed across campuses, reflecting the institutional particularities of their concerns. While the language of tuition was the principal focus of advocacy groups at Stellenbosch and the University of Pretoria, catalysts for mobilization elsewhere included student housing shortages and the presence of colonial iconography. By late 2015, through campaigns to establish unity of purpose, student movements mobilized behind a common demand: free higher
education. The name attributed to the movement, “Fees Must Fall”, captured this commitment. For the first time in the post-apartheid era, students marched on campuses, to Parliament, and to the seat of government in Pretoria, to protest against the rising cost of university fees.

The recent growth of the 'fallism' movement, in conjunction with Black Lives Matter (BLM), has seen a surge in the number of plinths that stand vacant across South Africa, the United States and Europe since 2015. This article explores the theme of the empty plinth and interrogates what the significance of absence is. It asks what role empty plinths play in fomenting discussion about historical injustices? And, how these empty plinths can be reactivated or reclaimed in a way that attempts to recognize contested memories and ameliorate contemporary divisions along the lines of race, religion and ethnicity? It considers how the British, Ukrainian and Irish states and their civil societies have variously responded to the problem of what to do with monuments (and their empty pedestals) to individuals and regimes that are guilty of human rights abuses. To draw these conclusions, it looks in detail at three examples of monuments that have fallen over a protected time period and the responses to their empty pedestals: The Edward Colston statue in Bristol, United Kingdom (2020); the Bessarabska Lenin which precipitated the leninfall across Ukraine (2013) and Nelson's Pillar in Dublin, Ireland (1966).

The 2015/16 student protests in South Africa, dubbed #MustFall protests, signalled a historic moment in the country's post-colonial-apartheid history in which student-worker collaborations called for the decolonising of the university and its Eurocentric curriculum and, by extension, basic education and its Eurocentric curriculum too. Since then, there have emerged two dominant narratives of decolonisation in South Africa. The first is what I call a nativist delinking approach that recentres decolonial and Africa-centeredness discourses, ontologies, and epistemologies relatively separate from Euro-north and American-centric ones. The second is a broader, inclusive approach to decolonisation, which this study adopts. However, both these dominant narratives fail to counter much of the knowledge blindness informed by a false dichotomy advanced by positivist absolutism and constructive relativism that defines the sociology of education, including many of the calls for decolonisation. Thus, through a decolonial conceptual framework and Karl Maton's Epistemic-Pedagogic Device as a theoretical framework, fallism as decoloniality is adopted in this study to propose ways to transcend the Eurocentrism that characterises the current school history curriculum in South Africa, as well as the nativist and narrow provincialism of knowledge. Equally, an argument is made for the advancement of an inclusive decolonial project that is concerned with relations within knowledge and curriculum and their intrinsic structures.