ABSTRACT
In March 2015, a wave of student protests started at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, with the purpose to ‘decolonise’ the University and rid it of offensive colonial symbols such as the statue to Cecil John Rhodes. Media coverage of the protests was extensive, including front-page articles by all major local and international media houses. After nearly a month of protests, sit-ins, teach-ins, seminars and relentless meetings, the UCT Senate and Council both agreed that the statue would be removed and matters of institutional culture and the Africanisation of academic staff and curriculum receive reinvigorated attention. Following the removal of the statue on 9 April 2015, the #RhodesMustFall movement, known mainly by its Twitter handle, became an inspiration to students in other South African universities, who asked themselves, if at UCT it was the Rhodes statue that had to fall, what ‘must fall’ in their respective contexts? On a number of campuses, discussions between student leaders and university management began on matters of institutional culture and symbols, the whiteness of South African higher education (HE) and its transformation to make it more responsive to, inclusive and representative of the black population. Acknowledging the need for a national discussion on matters of HE transformation, the Ministry of Higher Education and Training invited all stakeholders to a summit which issued the Durban Statement on Transformation in Higher Education on 17 October 2015. The statement shows that by October, the primary focus had shifted: while matters of institutional culture were still on the agenda, the top three resolutions for the immediate and medium term all related to questions of HE funding, student fees and financial aid for students (DHET, 2015: 2-3). Students’ response to the statement was vigorous. Student protests over pro-
posed tuition fee increases had started at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg on a large scale just days before the summit. They escalated nation-wide to an extent that three days after the summit most university campuses were shut down. The immediate demand of students was to halt fee increases and take up the government on its erstwhile promise to provide free education. The national student protests became known as #FeesMustFall; like its inspiration
#RhodesMustFall, it proved extraordinarily successful. In addition to campus shutdowns across the country, students mobilised huge protests at the gates of Parliament in Cape Town and the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the seat of government. Within a week of the summit and just over ten days since the beginning of protests at Wits University, the South African government agreed to the student demands and committed to a 0 per cent fee increase for 2016 (Presidency, 2015). In addition, students on various campuses negotiated additional concessions from university managements. We propose that #FeesMustFall had several typical characteristics of Internet
age social movements (Castells, 2015) and student protests witnessed across the globe since the start of the global financial crisis in 2009 (Brooks et al., 2015). It represented a diffusion of a small but effective and emotively charged protest movement into a palette of institutional protest movements with localised student grievances, which eventually galvanised nationally around the common opposition to tuition fee increases and the unaffordability of HE to the poor. As indicated by its naming, it used social media, and particularly Twitter, not only as conveyers of information but effectively as decentralised organising platforms. Moreover, #FeesMustFall represents a new kind of activist politics in the context of postapartheid South Africa: it was a multicultural, multiracial and multiclass movement; it was multipartisan, in that frequently the full range of party-aligned national student political organisations were acknowledged; and it was an Internet age network movement, insofar as its organisational centre was a virtual one, linking highly localised and in most cases formal leadership structures, such as campus Students’ Representative Councils (SRCs) and the branch leadership of national student organisations, into a multinodal virtual network which only rarely met physically beyond campus level. Conceptually speaking, activist student movements such as #FeesMustFall must
be distinguished from formally constituted representative student organisations. While both serve as platforms from which student politics is collectively organised, a first distinction is that formal student associations are ‘membership organisations’ while activist student movements are ‘broader entities, typically consisting of several organisations with no formal individual membership’ (Badat, 1999: 22). In Altbach’s writing, a student movement is defined by students’ sense of common cause in ‘a combination of emotional response and intellectual conviction’ (Altbach, 1966: 180). Gill and de Fronzo (2009: 207-209) add a social change orientation as a criterion, arguing that student movements represent a collective effort of ‘a large number of students to either bring about or prevent change’. Conversely, formally constituted student associations tend to be more enduring
organisations, including a distinct membership, and they come in various types. Our focus is specifically on representative student organisations, which seek to play a political role. They are differentiated in a number of ways: they may be aligned to a political party or non-partisan; they may operate at the supranational, national or institutional level of the HE system; they may be freely created associations or legally established with a statutory role in HE policymaking; they may have
voluntary memberships or include the national or an institutional student body statutorily as members. The latter represent a peculiar type. They typically go by the name of student union, student guild or student association; they are officially recognised to represent the student body in consultative and decision-making structures of HE. At institutional level the elected members of a union or guild forming an SRC or the like typically constitute the student government, while the executives of national student associations often form part of policy networks and formal sector bodies (Klemencˇicˇ, 2012; Luescher-Mamashela and Mugume, 2014). Against the headline-capturing quality and impact of activist movements, the significance of representative student associations lies in their relatively enduring nature and their ongoing political engagement in HE policy networks to defend student interests. Many African student organisations such as the Association des Etudiants de Rumuri in Burundi, the National Union of Ghana Students and the South African Students Congress can trace their histories back decades to student organising in the 1960s (Badat, 1999; Birantamije, 2016; Gyampo, 2013). In this chapter, our purpose is to provide a systematic overview of contemporary
student politics and the emerging character of systems of student representation in national and HE politics in a selection of African countries. We pursue this task conceptually and empirically. We first provide an overview of trends in contemporary African student politics, arguing that four broad structuring factors have a massive impact on student life in general and student political organising in particular. They show why contemporary African student politics appears ‘fragmented’ (Oanda, 2016) and involves new forms of activism and of formal representation. At the conceptual level we draw on the work of Klemencˇicˇ (2012, 2014) to present a classification of systems of student representation and analyse the results of a survey among HE experts regarding the characteristics of African student organising.
