Wandile Kasibe
It was during his visit to UCT on June 6, 1966, that former US attorney-general Robert Kennedy uttered these words: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
And 49 years later these compelling words found expression in Chumani Maxwele’s institutional critique against the glorification of white supremacy embodied through the presence of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes and other colonial and apartheid symbols on UCT’s upper campus.
This year marks six years since the birth of the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) movement at UCT on March 9, 2015, when Maxwele threw human excrement at the statue of the colonialist par excellence, Cecil John Rhodes. This political intervention set in motion a process that can now never be undone for it came at an opportune time when a renewed effort to critique the glorification of white supremacist ideals was needed.
Through his action of courage and daring: armed with human faeces from Khayelitsha, a whistle, African drum, pink helmet and a board with an inscription around his neck, he catalysed a movement that later captured the imagination of the country and then of the world.
Six years later and looking back at that catalytic moment, it is perhaps safe to suggest that as a generation we have not yet found the precision with which to describe the gravity of that very point at which he decided to stand at the time when it was not fashionable to do so.
Just like the Arab Spring uprising in 2010, it took the act of a street vendor, Mohammed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire to spark a political rapture that shifted the contour lines of power in Tunisia. Both Maxwele and Bouazizi’s individual acts that challenged the status quo seem to suggest to us that there can never be a revolution or required change without a degree of “madness” and sacrifice.
But as they say, history has no blank pages, and the same logic could be extended to the fact that March 9 was neither spontaneous nor an accident of history as many were made to believe by those who later came to usurp power and parachute themselves as political paragons into a political rupture that they knew little about.
For some of us who were there from the beginning we know that March 9 was a calculated manoeuvre decided upon at my flat in Trill Road, Observatory. After those long hours of trying to find an effective way to deal with the statue of Rhodes, we looked at all possible actions and reactions, but settled with the idea of throwing human faeces as a simple but effective political strategy that would give us the desired outcome.
As a proponent of this idea, I must admit that I did not know the extent to which throwing human excrement at the statue of Rhodes would bring the world to a standstill, all I knew at the time was that throwing human waste at the statue of Rhodes would agitate the university and particularly white people, and that agitation would in turn generate the necessary conversation that would allow us to deal with much deeper transformational issues that affect the university.
In preparation for March 9, we assembled all the materials we thought we would need and went as far as inviting journalists to witness this important moment in history. One other thing that most people don’t know, and understandably so because they were not there, is why March 9, specifically. The answer is that March 9 coincided with the official opening of the “Infecting the City” public art festival that was taking place across the City of Cape Town, and we felt it was most appropriate for us to do our action on that day. The rest is history.
As an organic movement whose mission sought to cut across different sectors of society, RMF weaved through intersecting ideas of Black Consciousness, Pan Africanism and Black Radical Feminism as tools of analysis and the socio-political lens through which it viewed society. It was through the intersection of these cardinal pillars that the movement succeeded in influencing the ways in which the academy thought about the production of new knowledge across South African universities, and abroad.
While it remains an undisputed fact that it was through the activism of RMF that deeper questions about decolonisation, the meaning of “Fallism” as an institutional critique, curriculum transformation and confronting institutional racism were resuscitated, it is, however, deeply concerning that since its birth six years ago there has not been any legacy project initiated to acknowledge and preserve the important contribution made by RMF to the academy and society at large.
In seeking new trajectories in what remains the complicated set of intersecting ideas in different fields of academic exploration, RMF sparked exigencies to pose critical questions about the lack of de-colonial thinking in the structural design of the university curricula and representation. In rethinking an alternative curriculum, the movement introduced what it termed “Fallism”. This is a de-colonial process of required structural changes and a school of thought resuscitated by the RMF movement.
In an academic context “Fallism” could be understood as an active collective critical response and an institutional critique to systemic repressive colonial violence. It also acts as a tool of analysis that presents a paradigm shift in a political zeitgeist that calls for change in institutions of knowledge production such as universities. “Fallism” extends to critique current societal structures and ideologies to question whether they should “Fall”.
In the broader context of the battle of ideas, “Fallism” has intellectual roots in critical theory, decolonial reasoning towards realising critical pedagogy, praxis and alternative options for the oppressed. As Christian Fuchs argues, critical theory is defined in sociological terms as “an approach that studies society in a dialectical way by analysing political economy, domination, exploitation and ideologies”. And that, in its true function, critical theory questions “all thought and practices that uphold domination and exploitation” and critiques ideology that attempts to essentialise ways of human existence that are actually “historical and changeable”.
Stephen Eric Bronner points out that: “Critical theory is not a system nor is it reducible to any fixed set of prescriptions” but is, as Fuchs earlier suggested, “connected to struggles for a just and fair society, it is an intellectual dimension of struggles”. To a large extent, it draws on Marxist thought, which rejects philosophy as static: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” It is precisely at the core of this call for structural change that “Fallism” as a “de-colonial” tool finds its perfect expression.
In the context of what I have already presupposed, it is perhaps safe to suggest that, without RMF, there would have been no Fees Must Fall as a movement. In fact, I can go as far as even suggesting that Fees Must Fall owes its existence to RMF and that it cannot define itself outside of the genesis of RMF.
This statement cannot be misconstrued to be suggesting that there were no attempts to fight the commodification of education before the birth of RMF. What I am putting across can be understood in the following logic: RMF is the parent and FMF is the offspring of that parent. Though this is the case, it is important to highlight the fact that their (FMF & RMF) ideological orientations are not the same. These orientations were characterised by the fact that RMF was an exclusive, pro-black space that rejected the participation of whites in its activities, whereas FMF was the opposite in that it allowed whites to participate under the illusion of the “rainbow nation” perpetuated by the ruling party. It was these very differing orientations that would later create chasims that would put the two formations on opposite sides on the table.
At places such as UCT where the ideological chasm between RMF and FMF was sharpened, FMF became a compromised space in which whites could easily masquerade as allies, but behind closed doors in the comfort of their affluent suburbs and at dinner tables they continued with the same violence of their parents, forefathers and forebears. Some of these white activists went into FMF to get some political credence and activism credentials in order to win scholarships to study overseas so that they could generate popularity for themselves. On the other hand, white academics used black struggles to advance their own academic careers, while black academics continue to be undermined and denied opportunities.
There were also those black askaris who infiltrated both RMF and FMF spaces to spy on us and report back to their political principals who regarded these formations as enemies of the state, or a “third force”.
In retrospect, RMF was and still is a defining moment in the unfolding processes of South African history, and its institutional critique against colonial continuities is a sine qua non in the continuous struggle against various forms of oppression. The ongoing work of decolonisation to deal with multiple layers of colonial legacies in broader society simple suggests that the physical statue of Cecil John Rhodes may have fallen, but his spirit lives on through institutional racism, the normalisation of perceived white supremacy, inequality and all other colonial and neo-colonial anomalies that still subject black people to a state of “non-being”.
So long as oppression exists in an anti-black world, RMF will not die for it is the antithesis of these oppressions. Its spirit of daring lives in all of us and through our individual and collective acts of courage against the white supremacist establishment.
* Dr Kasibe is a Chevening Scholar who holds a Ph.D. in Sociology at UCT. He writes in his personal capacity.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of IOL.