Tweeting #FeesMustFall: the online life and offline protests of a networked student movement

Abstract

In 2015, students made history in South Africa. The wave of the so-called hashtag,"MustFall," or Fallist" protests started with RhodesMustFall at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in March 2015. Soon after the inception of RhodesMustFall, student activists and disaffected students in other universities, especially historically white universities, joined the UCT students' call for a "decolonization" of higher education under various, mostly campus-specific banners emulating the #RhodesMustFall campaign as #SteynMustFall, #AfrikaansMustFall, #OpenStellenbosch, and so forth. And they were highly effective within their respective contexts: Within a month the controversial statue of Cecil John Rhodes was removed from the Upper Campus of UCT; language policy review committees were hurriedly set up in historically Afrikaans-tuition universities; the institutional culture and whiteness of academia in the historically white universities came under renewed scrutiny; and curriculum review committees and projects to "decolonize" the curricula, especially in the Humanities, got to work. After a few weeks of frantic agitation, some of the campus-based student formations seemed to be losing steam and getting caught up with matters of internal ideological and organizational consolidation as well as the demands of the formal university decision-making processes that now got underway.