‘Rainbow is not the new black’: #FeesMustFall and the demythication of South Africa’s liberation narrative

ABSTRACT

In the 1990s, South Africa transitioned from apartheid to liberal democracy. Heroes, place names, holidays and symbols were revisited and replaced to reflect a ‘new’ nation and delineate a clear break from the ‘bad old days’. Central to this nation-building narrative is the figure of Nelson Mandela as a unifying hero exemplifying the ideals of this new nation. South Africa is now experiencing another transition. The so-called ‘born free’ generation mobilised for the first time on a mass scale in the 2015–2016 #FeesMustFall (#FMF) student protests at universities nationwide. Initially focussed on financial accessibility of higher education, these massive protests also questioned the rhetoric, narrative and heroes of the ‘new’ nation, reprising counter-hegemonic and hidden scripts to deconstruct the post-1994 hegemonic discourse and expose enduring inequality. Centring our analysis on interviews with Pretoria-based protesters, we position the students as experts on themselves distilling theoretical insights that emerge from their articulated experiences. We show that students engaged in a powerful project of dismantling a national narrative, questioning Nelson Mandela as ‘father’ of the nation, rejecting the unifying and temporal terminology that rhetorically placed apartheid’s inequalities in the past, and calling for the deconstituting of South Africa, the settler-created polity.

KEYWORDS:

• #FeesMustFall
• South Africa
• decolonisation
• Mandela
• student protests

Acknowledgements

Kenyon extends her sincere thanks to (1) the #FMF activists who participated in this research, for their time, trust and openness; (2) Tshepo Madlingozi for embarking on this article together; (3) the scholars and activists who provided feedback on earlier drafts, including colleagues at the universities of Winnipeg, Saskatchewan and Pretoria, CIFAR’s Successful Societies Program, and the conferences of the Prairie, Canadian, and American political science associations, the International Studies Association, the Canadian Association for African Studies, and the African Studies Association; and (4) Sarah Steidl for her assistance with notation and formatting. Madlingozi is grateful for the support and camaraderie of the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education at Nelson Mandela University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by a University of Winnipeg Major Research Grant, and funding from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) (to Kenyon).

Notes

1 Also referred to, in #FMF, as ‘The University Currently Known as Rhodes’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristi Heather Kenyon

Kristi Heather Kenyon is Associate Professor and Program Director in the Human Rights Program at the University of Winnipeg’s Global College (Canada). She holds a PhD in political science from the University of British Columbia (Canada), and completed post-doctoral fellowships at Dalhousie University (Canada) and the University of Pretoria (South Africa). A significant area of focus in her research is activism in sub-Saharan Africa in areas related to human rights, social justice and health, with an emphasis on techniques and language of advocacy, protest and mobilisation. Her research is informed and inspired by a previous career working in the non-governmental sector in Southern Africa and South East Asia.

Tshepo Madlingozi

Tshepo Madlingozi is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at Wits University. He is Research Associate at the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education at Nelson Mandela University. He is the co-editor of the South African Journal on Human Rights. He is a co-editor of Symbol or Substance: Socio-economic Rights in South Africa (Cambridge University Press) and a co-editor of Introduction to Law and Legal Skills in South Africa, 2nd edition (Oxford University Press South Africa). He sits on the boards of the following civil society organisations: amandla.mobi; Centre for Human Rights, University of Free State; the Rural Democracy Trust; and the Mining Affected Communities United in Action/Women Affected by Mining United in Action. He is also a member of the Steering Committee of the African Coalition for Corporate Accountability (ACCA), and a member of the advisory board of Health Justice Initiative.