Generational Framings of Injustice: South African Student Protests Under and After Apartheid
As a democratic state that grew out of a racial authoritarian regime, South Africa is marked by both its apartheid past and its legacy of anti-apartheid protest. The legitimacy of public protest and of human rights-based messaging is rooted in this history of resistance and mobilisation. Contemporary protests frequently draw on frames, language and methods of earlier protests to link contemporary struggles to historical ones. The experience of struggle is also a key claim to legitimacy for the governing party since independence, the African National Congress (ANC). As the generation of young people born after the of fall apartheid come of age, however, these assumed links, legacies and allegiances are increasingly called into question. The 2015-2016 student protests are the first major demonstration of this generation, and have been seen as an important manifestation of their political power, with political parties across the spectrum making efforts to gain their support. Do “born free” protesters employ the language, frame and methods of their parents’ generation? Are these protests a reflection of, or a divergence from similarly-themed protests a generation ago? Do these protests frame injustice the same way or differently? This cross-generational comparative project examines two student protest movements, one under apartheid (Soweto Uprising), and one after apartheid (#FeesMustFall), with a view to comparing the manner in which such protests are framed, what messages they employ, and what methods they use.
Working Papers
‘Born Free’: it’s cute, but it’s a lie’: #FeesMustFall and Youth Counter-Narratives of South African History (with Juliana Coughlin and David Bosc)
A nation’s historical narrative is a text, both literally, as it is printed into history books, and metaphorically, as it shapes wider discourse and culture, marked on calendars and celebrated through heroes and reflected in anthems.This chapter interrogates the ways in which youth, through participation in the #FeesMustFall protests, are countering and rewriting a key tenet of the South African national text through the manifestation of a new generation’s youth protest culture. We argue that in articulating their protests primarily as an expression of continuity of the 1976 Soweto Uprising, they challenge the dominant idea of radical change between the apartheid and post-apartheid eras, thus framing their protests as the latest iteration in a long struggle against inequality and injustice. This paper examines youth counter-narratives expressed through the #FeesMustFall protests, through interviewees with student participants at Pretoria universities and, an analysis of online rhetoric under this hashtag, focusing particularly on the ways in which these collaborative, participatory and iterative movements and rhetoric engage in the active process of rewriting the dominant narrative of South Africa.
Kenyon, Kristi Heather, Juliana Coughlin and David Bosc. 2021 “‘‘Born Free’: it’s cute, but it’s a lie”: #FeesMustFall and Youth Counter-Narratives of Continuity in South African History,” In Young People and Youth Culture in Africa. Ed Paul Ugor. University of Rochester Press. [forthcoming]
‘Rainbow is not the new black’: #FeesMustFall and the Deconstruction of South Africa’s Liberation Narrative (with Tshepo Madlingozi)
The first generation never to have lived under apartheid has come of age. The so-called ‘born free’ generation mobilised for the first time on a mass scale in the 2015-2016 #FeesMustFall (#FMF) student protests at universities across the country. Although initially focused on financial accessibility of higher education these massive protests also questioned the rhetoric and temporal narrative of the 'new' South Africa (including terminology such as 'post apartheid'). This paper interrogates the ways in which students challenged heroes (with a focus on Nelson Mandela), discourses and assumptions of progress embedded in this dominant narrative. We argue that these protests were more than struggles for the transformation and/or decolonisation of institutions of higher learning. Protesters also sought to deconstruct a hegemonic discourse on which the ‘new’ South Africa is built.
Copyright Kristi Heather Kenyon 2021, all rights reserved.