The rendering of Black people as mere subjects extends to far more than their geo-history. The issue around Black people being reduced to mere things was at the heart of the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements. Though these movements were birthed in institutions of higher learning, it was in the communities outside that they were sparked, for higher learning institutions are a microcosm of the broader society into which they are located. The political meaning of these two movements extends to far more than just an issue of access to education and the need for the decolonisation of scholarship. It is, fundamentally, a question of belonging, of Black people’s legitimate claim to meaningful citizenship.
On 9 March 2015, a group of students at the historically White University of Cape Town (UCT) desecrated the statue of British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes. The statue had been prominently located at the centre of the institution, overlooking the vast expanse of the city of Cape Town that remains to date one of the most segregated parts of South Africa. These students threw faeces at the statue, sparking an important public debate in a society that is at odds with its brutal, divided past and troubling present existence. The conversation was about the nervous condition of Black people in South Africa and the layered ways in which structural racism hurls them to the edge of the periphery of meaningful existence.
Explaining what had led him and two other students to throw faeces at the statue of Cecil John Rhodes on that day, student activist Cumani Maxwele had this to say: "The life of a Black person in South Africa is contaminated with a nervous condition … The condition drives me and many others to either go mad or commit suicide" (Maxwele, 2016). Maxwele poignantly details how the institutionalised racism at UCT results in the alienation of Black students, who are rendered out of place in an institution where their humanity is disregarded. These sentiments are shared by Senior Researcher at UCT, Zethu Matabeni, who argues that the symbolism of the Rhodes statue’s positioning where prestigious events and graduations are conferred was a demonstration of "everyday psychic manipulation that enforces one’s complicity in glorifying and celebrating statues of colonial conquerors and perpetrators as heroes … This perpetuated how black students were made not to belong at the university" (Matabeni, 2018).#RhodesMustFall was a struggle for belonging in zones of exclusion. It was not just an academic struggle, but a struggle for spatial, economic and epistemic justice. Malicious commentators who sought to dismiss it as a movement anchored on vigilantism and anarchy failed to understand that the statue was a representation of the ways in which institutionalised racism is celebrated in South Africa – the ways in which legitimate Black pain is rendered invisible by a society that is resistant to acknowledging the humanity of Black people.
And it was never spontaneous. In fact, a year before the #RhodesMustFall movement was born, Mahlatsi (co-author of this chapter) published the best selling and internationally acclaimed Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation, under the name Malaika Wa Azania, in which she argued that structural racism in the new dispensation was rendering Black people invisible subjects of a White normative society and denying them their rightful claim to the land of their forefathers. She argued that it was inevitable that young Black people, the so-called "born frees", would rise against the systematic injustice of the new South Africa, for "there are times when the only weapon a Black child can use to fight against a system that dehumanises her is to be so angry that she is left with no choice but to dare to be alive" (Wa Azania, 2014). This choice to be alive, to not "go mad or commit suicide" as Maxwele (2016) so aptly put it, is fundamentally a choice to fight for one’s rightful place in South Africa and in humanity.
The essence of the #FeesMustFall movement that would follow a year later was also about justice and visibility. It was about spatial, socio-economic, political and epistemic justice. Students were not just fighting for free education as a weapon to transform their lives. They were fighting for free education because they understood that without it, the status quo of White privilege and Black suffering would continue unabated. Students recognised that unless the doors of learning and culture are opened, and Black people are secured in the room, they would continue to stand outside and be spectators in an economy that they should be participating in as equals – exactly as colonialism and apartheid intended.
The reality of the situation is that although at 79.4 per cent Black people make up a significant majority of the South African population, they remain still an economic and cultural minority (Statistics South Africa, 2017). A look at the demographic make-up of the professoriate in South Africa demonstrates that Blackness operates at the margins. Academia is a theatre where the min oritisation of Black intellectual thought is audaciously demonstrated. And this is not an accident of history. As Steve Biko once argued: "The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed" (Biko, 2002). To erase the intellectual contributions of Black people in academia is to shape the minds of young people into believing that Black people have no capacity to think and are therefore not rational beings. Ramose (2002) argues correctly that the deliberate invisibilisation of Black thinkers, rooted in the colonial logic of White supremacy, is done to cement the narrative that seeks to suggest that Black people are a White man’s burden – incapable of philosophising and of thinking for and of themselves.
But even where Black academics are present, the curricula itself is exclu sionary of Black intellectual thought, not only because of the deliberate exclusion of their intellectual works, but due, through no fault of their own, to their own coloniality. Maserumule (2018b) argues correctly that: the continent’s professoriate is schooled largely in the white tradition. This imprinted the culture of whiteness in its making, which is not surprising. Western education in Africa as we know it is designed to proselytise blacks. African academics may be reluctant to repudiate their very make-up.
But it must be emphasised that this creation of the Black academic who views the world through lenses of Whiteness is a creation of a system that seeks to fundamentally alienate Black people, to distance them from their own humanity and to ultimately render them subjects of coloniality in perpetuity.
The #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements were a protest against this reality – a protest for true justice for Black people who are still negotiating their existence in democratic South Africa. They were movements anchored on the belief that Black people belong to South Africa and that their existence, experiences and their very humanity, matters.