ABSTRACT

A political act of university student protest should not, ordinarily, be surprising if it is occurring in the South Africa (SA) public sphere. However, the 2015/16 FeesMustFall (FMF) protests, even by the country's established standard of and conditioning about protests, were different. Highly resourced and historically white universities that also did not undergo institutional merger experienced comparatively fewer acts of protests, until the FMF 2015 protests. Apart from critically questioning Mandela's compromises in the 1990s, FMF protesters, in 2015, seemed to be taking on the very post-apartheid social and political order as articulating itself through various public institutional cultures, including those of the higher education system and political parties. In March 2015, South African Student Congress (SASCO) suffered an embarrassing election defeat by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) at the Vaal University of Technology. Protests grew in the context of the launch of the vibrant, pro-poor and youth-centric EFF in 2013.