#FEESMUSTFALL
PONTSHO PILANE
On Wednesday, October 14, 2015, the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, came to a complete standstill. A handful of students barricaded most of the entries into the university. Their cause? To protest the 10.5 percent fee increment that was proposed by university management for the following year.
Within an hour, a backlog of frustrated students and staff were still unable to make it into the university. The hashtag #WitsShutdown, which would later become #FeesMustFall as students across the nation joined in the call for zero percent fee increase and free university education, was born. What started off as fewer than a hundred people quickly became thousands of students. And then tens of thousands of young South Africans, referred to as “the rainbow nation,” demanded the promises of the liberation movement—the right to equal education. For years, students at poorer, previously Black-only universities had taken to the streets, but it wasn’t until Black students at previously White-only institutions like Wits joined in that the government and the country started to listen.
Twitter, through various hashtags, evened out the playing field and allowed students to tell their own stories when they felt as if mainstream media was misrepresenting them. Twitter was also instrumental in amplifying the story beyond South Africa. For example, students started the #TheRealWitsStory hashtag to refute media reports that protestors were holding the Wits vice-chancellor Adam Habib hostage.
As students rallied around the collective fight for free education, another problem needed to be addressed: the erasure and silencing of Black womxn activists in the student movement. Black womxn at Wits refused to put their womxnhood at the altar of sacrifice in the name of the “collective struggle,” which resulted in #MbokodoLead. The hashtag was created as a way to uplift the various womxn who were part of the disruptions and also to combat the misogyny, patriarchy, and violence they experienced within the movement. #RapeAtAzania was another way the patriarchy was laid bare.
Students from various universities declared October 23, 2015, #NationalShutdown. They marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to hand over the demands for free education to the then-president Jacob Zuma. Meanwhile, students in Cape Town disrupted Parliament. Both groups were met with extreme violence from the police. Three students have lost their lives fighting for free education since 2016: Benjamin Phehla, Katlego Monareng, and Mlungisi Madonsela. These hashtags are among the few remaining active records of the myriad of efforts by students to campaign for educational equality. Former president Jacob Zuma announced free education in 2017, but students have yet to see its realization.
PILANE