The Everyday Politics of Being a Student in South Africa

Posted: 21 Mar 2016 Last revised: 14 Jul 2016

Date Written: 2016

Abstract

Over the past year, a student movement that has come to be known as "Fallism" has swept South Africa. Student protests under the banner "Rhodes Must Fall" advocated the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes and the "decolonization" of the University of Cape Town and peer institutions; subsequent protests have demanded that "Fees Must Fall" at universities across the country. This article examines the history and historiography of student politics in 20th century South Africa, at this time when both unresolved tensions and nostalgic visions of past struggles are pressing up urgently against the present. Student politics has long been a major topic for South African scholars. Indeed, in the wake of 1976, many historians conceived of the history of black education in South Africa simply as the history of student protest. The study of resistance has remained integral to the field. Yet since the end of apartheid in 1994, the ways that historians look at student politics has been changing, in three interconnected ways. The first is our attention to political imagination — tending not only to possibilities that were embraced as key organizing strategies, but also (and more so) to possibilities that fizzled in their time, to fail or to reemerge later, in new forms. This interest flows from the circumstances of our present: like historians working elsewhere in post-colonial Africa, many of us are disappointed with how things turned out. We have ever-growing analytical distance to ask questions impossible at the height of anti-apartheid struggle, and the technological capabilities to access many obscure sources more quickly. These same factors explain a second shift in our field: we are seeing the spaces of politics differently. We are moving beyond familiar narratives of student resistance because we are looking not only at the campuses that played emblematic roles in the making of African nationalism and anti-apartheid struggle. We are also looking at stranger places — such as an elite mission school for African girls that thrived during segregation and apartheid, or a rural art school created by the apartheid government. These new vantage points enable us to see different political actors — for whom education was clearly a question of power, but a question with many different answers than those that an earlier generation of scholarship would have led us to expect.

Suggested Citation

Healy-Clancy, Meghan, The Everyday Politics of Being a Student in South Africa (2016). ASA 2016 Annual Meeting Paper, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2751105

Meghan Healy-Clancy (Contact Author)

Bridgewater State University ( email )

Tillinghast Hall, 234
45 School Street
Bridgewater, MA Massachusetts 02325
United States
8478142002 (Phone)

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