Abstract
This article is an explication of the student protests that erupted throughout South African universities in the latter part of 2015. These protests are symptomatic of greater governmental failings and are evidence that protest action has become one of the only means of effective civic participation in contemporary South African politics.
The South African student protests in the latter half of 2015 were an important turning point for South Africa’s young democracy. For the first time since the 1976 Soweto Uprising, mass youth mobilization called for the accountability of the state in promises made to the still disenfranchised majority.
What began as reasonably small groups of student protestors quickly turned into a nationwide social movement that highlighted the growing frustrations of the youth with the slow pace of economic and social transformation in the post-Apartheid state.
But the student protests are only a small part of a greater number of protests present in South African society. In 2014 alone, there were 218 protests across the country, an increase that reversed the downward trend that was evident after 2009. The prevalence of violence associated with protests has also grown with a 30% increase in evidence of violence on the part of both participants and the authorities. The year 2007 saw just less than half of protests associated with some sort of violence, while in 2014 almost 80% of protests involved violence of some kind (Powell, O’Donovan, & De Visser, 2015).
In recent years, South Africa has established a culture of favoring contentious politics over formal channels aimed at enhancing citizen engagement in governance (Piper & Von Lieres, 2008). This may be because while in theory these platforms can enable government to inform and enable citizens to give feedback to government and to monitor performance, in practice these channels have proved ineffective.
This along with other trends points to the importance of studying and understanding protest action and social movements in South Africa. With protests across South Africa becoming more commonplace in society already deeply entrenched in protest culture, it is increasingly important to understand these movements in order to better appreciate their role in South Africa’s democratic process.
This article is an attempt to explicate the student protests that erupted throughout South African universities in the latter part of 2015. These protests are symptomatic of greater governmental failings and are evidence that protest action has become one of the only means of effective civic participation in contemporary South African politics.
The #MustFall movements
On 9 March 2015, University of Cape Town (UCT) student, Chumani Maxwele, threw human feces onto the statue of Cecil John Rhodes. He was calling for the mobilization of his fellow students to remove the colonial hero’s statue from its prominent position on the campus grounds. He claimed the statue was symbolic of the oppression experienced by Black South Africans under colonial rule. As the calling for the statue’s removal gained national support, so did the corresponding Twitter hashtag which in itself sparked a new social movement. This movement became known as the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) movement, “a collective movement of students and staff members mobilizing for direct action against the reality of institutional racism at the UCT” (Chaudhuri, 2016).
By the time the issue of the statue was resolved on 9 April 2015, protests had spread around South Africa’s universities, defacing statues and calling for the “decolonization of education” in South Africa—a problem that has long plagued South African higher education (Cronjé, 2015). Here, the #RMF online movement began with students and other actors taking to social media, both condemning and condoning the defacing of other colonial images. The protests also grew in meaning, becoming symbolic of the inevitable fall of White supremacy and privilege on university campuses and society at large (Chourhuri, 2016). Black academics called into radio stations to complain about how campuses were still dominated by the older White establishment and “an Anglo-Saxon world-view.” Black students also voiced concerns of belittlement, and racism, “of the way their accents, and first languages still condemn them to a second-class status in their own 21-year-old democracy” (Harding, 2015).
As the tension of the #RMF movement started to subside, a proposed university fee increase of 10.5% caused a renewed surge of protest action (Fihilani, 2015). The proposed tuition increase that would take effect at the beginning of the 2016 academic year further agitated the student population. This renewed contention between students and other societal actors culminated in a march to the South African Union Buildings in November 2015. These protests were again accompanied by an online presence, this time with the Twitter hashtags #FeesMustFall (#FMF) and #NationalShutDown. The online presence with the corresponding hashtags again played an important role in developing and maintaining the larger movement.
On 19 October 2015, students at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) barricaded campus entrances in protest (Falkhof, 2015). They argued that the 10.5% fee increases would limit the ability of poorer (mostly Black) students from further attending tertiary education, effectively limiting access to higher education by class and race. This would mean that higher education would become even more of a privilege for the elite, in turn limiting opportunities for a better life and collective upward mobility of lower income youth.
Similar protests erupted on all major South African university campuses in what became the national Fees Must Fall movement. Campuses affected by these protests included Wits, UCT, University of Pretoria, University of Stellenbosch, and the University of Johannesburg, with academic activity on many of the campuses being suspended throughout the time of the protest.
For the first 2 days of the national #FMF movement, 19 and 20 October, protesters focused their attention on university administrators, demanding that fee hikes be lowered for the coming academic year. On 21 October, students in Cape Town took their march from the universities to the National Parliament, attempting to disrupt the mid-term budget speech being delivered by former Minister of Finance Nhlanhla Nene. This marked a directional shift in who should be held accountable for the fee change. The #FMF movement turned its attention to the state.
So far, it is evident that the protests’ primary motivation has everything to do with resource deprivation. Although the protests originated out of frustration with tuition fees, they are about so much more than that. As student Katlego Disemelo writes, “Don’t let the name fool you: the #FeesMustFall protests at South Africa’s universities are about far more than a single issue. Our protest is not just about ‘one thing’, even if that ubiquitous hashtag suggests otherwise.” It is inherently intersectional, spanning various interrelated sociopolitical and economic issues.
Social media as a protest tool
As already briefly discussed, the online presence that accompanied these protests was within themselves significant. Social media is playing an increasingly important role in the lives of South African citizens. Currently, 48.9% of the South African population have access to the Internet and 20% of the population use social media in some or other form (webAfrica.co.za).
A study by Felbert for Nielsen Online (2009) showed that 53% of users in South Africa fall in the age range of 25–44 and nearly one-third (29%) are aged 16–24. The statistics further showed that 50% of South Africans who use the Internet are White, 33% are Black, 7% colored, and 4% Indian. The large percentage of White users suggests that Internet usage in South Africa is still largely for the wealthy or educated—an assumption that seems correct considering 52.46% of Internet users have a tertiary education.
According to the study, 87% of people use a mobile phone to access the Internet, and of those, three in five use their mobile phone to access Twitter. This is largely unsurprising considering South Africa’s 128% mobile penetration (of which there is only a 39% data usage penetration).
This would certainly explain why the student protests received such a large online presence. These statistics, however, also mean that to what extent the trends discussed below could be applied in a larger context remains to be seen outside of the educated student population.
Twitter and the protests
In his Twitter analysis of the protests, Daniel de Kadt, a political analyst at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, relays some interesting figures, which are quite substantial by South African standards. From 14–16 October, the hashtag #WitsFeesMustFall received 20,000 tweets per day. On 19 October, the more general #FeesMustFall hashtag had started to trend, with just under 50,000 tweets, and on 20 October, it was tweeted 75,000 times. On 21 and 22 October, the protests became national, no longer isolated to university campuses. The primary hashtag #FeesMustFall was featured over 200,000 tweets, and #NationalShutDown featured in just over 100,000.
Along with these figures, the fact that the social media revealed itself as a major element in the student movement is worth noting. There was no formal organization of the protests by any institution, but instead all the protests were organized through anonymous postings on social media (Nyamhunga, 2015). Social media did not, however, replace physical participation in the movement but rather supplemented the physical protests. Participation in the protests nevertheless relied solely on decentralized coordination through social networking sites, namely, Facebook and Twitter.
Political participants
In addition to the organizational role, the increased use of social media in South Africa has allowed for better analysis of the communication and political strategies of South Africa’s main political parties. In order to analyze political response to the protests, de Kadt (2015) collected the tweets and retweets from official Twitter accounts associated with South Africa’s three major political parties: the African National Congress (ANC: @MyANC_), the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF: @EconFreedomZA), and the Democratic Alliance (DA: @Our_DA). From the data collected, the following analysis of the online Twitter reactions to the student protests can be made.
The ANC remains essentially all powerful in South African politics, and following the actions of the protest, it seems to “have adopted a strategy of patronage politics, including and compensating those who threaten their power.” Opposition parties, on the other hand, instead attempted to score political points and shape public narratives in the face of mass protest.
The two primary opposition parties, the DA and the EFF, both jumped on the protests as a vehicle for their own agendas. The DA through its communication attempts to overcome the struggle to find support among young Black South Africans, while the EFF’s manifesto (on the extreme end of redistribution) lended itself to supporting the student narrative. This appears in the differences in both the party’s response and the strategic approaches they take. The DA, a wealthier and more institutionalized party than the EFF, had a faster and more coordinated public communication campaign. Furthermore, the DA attempted to shape the Twitter narrative to target the ANC’s minister of education, Blade Nzimande. By contrast, the EFF appears to have simply shown solidarity with students, largely following the students’ narrative rather than attempting to shape it themselves.
The ruling ANC, it seems, endorsed the protests while the ire was not focused on them. After the narrative of the protests turned to government accountability, however, the illusive silence of the ANC further illustrated the lack of government responsibility toward issues brought up by the citizens of South Africa. While the protests were focused on university campuses and administrations, the ANC encouraged students but still remained distance—not explicitly supporting the protests online. Once the protests targeted the ANC government, however, it swiftly changed tack, first adopting a stoic silence and then a rapid outreach to students and policy capitulation.
As anger became increasingly directed at government, the protesters whose marches had been largely peaceful until this point were met by public order (riot) police. Tear gas, stun grenades, and tazers were used to disperse the crowds of students gathered outside parliament; 29 students were arrested and detained by police following encounters with police. On 23 October, students (and many others) engaged in a day of action, which included a march on the Union Buildings, the administrative center of South Africa (Falkhof, 2015).
In the late afternoon, President Zuma announced that the ANC government’s response to the protesters was a capitulation to the immediate demands of the students, 0% fee increases for 2016.
Understanding citizen mobilization in democratic South Africa
Since the end of colonization in Africa, young people have played an important role in periods of political transition. Nkinyangi (1991) notes that student protests have been commonplace in at least 29 counties across the continent in post-independence. Since continental democratic success, youth along with labor unions and religious organizations have been at the forefront of demands for political and economic reform. Resnick and Thurlow (2015) found that youth were also the primary protesting group throughout Africa, yet protesters still tend to be the minority among African youth in absolute terms.
The #FeesMustFall protests certainly reaffirm these past findings. However, what is clear within these protests is that larger issues with weak governance were introduced into the national dialogue. These protests along with many current national social movements have aided South African citizens in developing a dialogue with the state (Ranchod, 2007). Although it was effective in meeting the short-term goals, a need for sustainable channels of communications and action need to be established in order to fully engage in debates of long-term solutions.
Active citizen participation is a prerequisite for democracy and transformation (Sekyere, Motala, Ngandu, Sausi, & Verryn, 2015). It has been suggested that there are substantial developmental gains to be had from enhancing active citizenship (Putnam, 2000; Sheedy, 2008). Public participation is therefore crucial to the transformation, development, and strengthening of democracy in post-Apartheid South Africa.
To prevent contentious political practice from being entrenched in society, the state must actively support citizen engagement, and citizens should create an environment in which they can seek opportunities for advancement, learning, experience, and opportunity (National Planning Commission (NPC), 2012). This seems unlikely in the case of South Africa, however, given the lack of further action by the ANC since the protests last year. While the 2015 student protests have illustrated a need for the ANC to engage more directly with issues facing their constituents, failure to do so has shown support for other political parties grow considerably.
While the online presence of the student protests has made for more effective analysis of participants and authorities, they seem to have had little long-term effect on political or social change in South Africa. Furthermore, the low social media and Internet penetration in South Africa proves that the short-term use of this platform for mobilization remains ineffective for larger political or social movements but could prove powerful as Internet and social media become commonplace in South Africa’s social and political landscape.