Locus of Struggle: The African Campus and Contemporary Protest Forms

ABSTRACT

In this article, we begin from the presupposition that the university campus – historically, in the popular imagination, and in any possible futures worth fighting for – is a terrain of struggle. Drawing from our ongoing study, which has documented and digitally mapped more than 700 campus protest events occurring over the past 20 years across Africa, we explore protest as a lens for interpreting the experience and continued renegotiation of the very idea of the contemporary African university. In our analysis, we trace protest in two ways: (1) as a tactical form, to explore the major catalysts, political strategies, and institutional and state responses to campus protests today; and (2) as a spatial form, to examine spatialities of struggle through which campus geographies are produced, contested and remade. Ultimately, we argue that attention to campus protests confirms the continued importance of the university to popular struggles in Africa.

KEYWORDS:

• Protest
• higher education
• Africa
• campus activism
• universities

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Balsvik (1998) and Hanna (1971) for closer analysis of this post-independence era.

2 See Federici, Caffentzis, and Alidou (2000) for an essential chronology of campus struggles during this period of austerity.

3 We understand this choice to be shaped, in part, by the authors’ focus on “political society” or the “urban underclass” that is often overshadowed by the political activities of so-called “elites.” Here, we are drawing attention to the effect of this elision of the campus, and students, as “significant” political actors, as lending to the erasure of the campus as an important site of struggle that is connected to the broader terrain of popular movements, as they have always been.

4 Most analyses of protests in Africa rely on the Social Conflict in Africa Database (Salehyan et al. 2012) and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Raleigh et al. 2010). We found both data projects to be useful in developing our methodology for tracking school protests and our research website. However, the lack of coding and contextualizing information in this data for schools and school actors prompted us to develop our own methodological approach. Please note that while our current protest data stops in 2018, more recent protest data will be added to our public data in the future.

5 The “other” category in Figure 2 serves as a catch-all for protests that did not fit so neatly into the categories concerning school fees, quality, and policy or grievances with the government. In this category, we recorded 93 protests around issues such as local infrastructure (e.g., a protest about inadequate bus stops organized by students at the Polytechnic University of Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso in 2015) or larger foreign policy matters (e.g., Egyptian students at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport protesting the US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Spencer Foundation [grant no. Small Grant Award 201900023].