On Decolonisation and Revolution: A Kristevan Reading on the Hashtags Student Movements and Fallism

ABSTRACT

In 2015, clarion calls for a radical change in South African universities sounded. Protesting students demanded a transformed cultural and physical spatiality of South African universities. Their narrative emphasised colonial structures personified in the symbolism of statutes like Cecil John Rhodes, and is driven ideologically by an ‘apartheid culture’ that does not advance an African philosophical and intellectual project but continues to oppress them. They frame their struggle as Fallism [Fallism was coined as a term to describe the ideological drive of disruption, and seeing the fall of something in mobilizing around the symbolism of oppression and struggle, most notably challenges continued discrimination and exclusion on the basis of race, class, sex and the exclusionary nature of capitalism and the commodification of higher education [wa Bofelo, M. 2017. “Fallism and the Dialectics of spontaneity and organisation”. Accessed November 17, 2017. https://www.joburgpost.co.za/2017/08/04/fallism-dialectics-spontaneity-organisation-disrupting-tradition-reconstruct-tradition/]. It is an ideological vehicle advancing a cultural revolution, not just for free education, but for what they have termed the decolonization of spaces of higher learning and, more fundamentally, the decolonization of the mind.]. Their imaginary highlights a contested and militant debate on the spatiality of transformation, underpinned by a notion of abjection. This article explores the notion of revolt embodied in Fallism through a Kristevan lens. I argue that at the core of the students’ revolt is a sense of abjection fuelling the Fallist struggle for the complete structural decolonisation of universities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Joleen Steyn Kotze http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6497-8460

Notes

1 Davids and Waghid (2016) highlights rightly so that student protests are not a new phenomenon in the South African higher education landscape. Rather, a student protest against rising costs of higher education is routine in historically black South African universities since 1994, but was largely ignored.

2 See http://kaganof.com/kagablog/category/categories/politics/page/2/.

3 The ANC has created the catchphrase ‘A better for all’ for its 2004, 2009 and 2014 electoral campaign.

4 Approximately, US$476 per month as per exchange rate on 23 March 2017.

5 Approximately, US$2245 per month as per exchange rate on 23 March 2017.

6 Approximately, US$5120 per month as per exchange rate on 23 March 2017.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the South African National Research Foundation [grant number 90827].