FeesMustFall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation and Governance in South Africa
- Susan Booysen
WSG and Wits Press are giving 100 free copies to current Wits students who cannot afford to purchase the book.
WSG and Wits Press are giving 100 free copies of FeesMustFall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation and Governance in South Africa to current Wits students who cannot afford to purchase the book. Write to us about your #FeesMustFall experiences to stand a chance of getting a free copy.
FeesMustFall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation and Governance in South Africa dissects the influence of the days of the 2015 student protests that shook the government and would be repeated in 2016. The book’s reflections represent a snapshot in time, reflecting on a segment of the overall revolt and its impact. In convening the voices to write this book, we at the Wits School of Governance argued that the 2015-2016 voices of revolt deserve scholarly and activist exploration, even while the longer-term impact continues to unfold. The analysis ends in mid-2016, as disillusionment with the implementation of the early gains of #FeesMustFall set in, as rumours of a second cycle of revolt solidified, and as government and university managements worked to persuade a politically diverse (and by now confident in their abilities) student generation that more profound change was on the way.
We forefront students’ primary voices, and let them relate the narratives of what the students did to power in South Africa. This collection of voices within a broad, flat structure and diverse movement speaks the issues and reflects the contradictions of the time. In their writings, this book’s student and activist authors reveal, with no holds barred, how coloniality, race, patriarchy, structural and physical violence alienate, colour and continue to taint life in South African society and its universities. The students write, or co-write with workers, their lived experiences in the section that contains the core narratives on ‘The roots of the revolution’. Students Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh (Chapter 3), Omhle Ntshingila (Chapter 4, in conversation with workers Richard Ndebele and Virginia Monageng), activist-academic Gillian Godsell with student Kgotsi Chikane (Chapter 2), and in Chapter 5 with students Refiloe Lepere, Swankie Mofoko and Ayabonga Nase bring the texture of the struggles and the gaping holes in the 1994 ‘rainbow’ into the heart of political praxis and the student revolt.