Abstract
In 2015, South Africa witnessed an eruption of struggles and protests that swept university campuses across the country. These protests were identified with a number of hashtags, among which the most prominent were #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall. These hashtags were in turn used to name the movements, led by university students and outsourced cleaning staff, that won a number of important victories and concessions. The present chapter defines the emergence, proliferation and memetic character of hashtags incorporating the injunction #MustFall as a ‘meme event’. It also explores the temporalities recalled by the conceptual metaphor of falling as an expression of political desire and, in particular, of the struggle for decolonisation.
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Notes
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I use the plural campus movements because each campus and context produced its own discourses, forms of organisation and struggles. For instance, at some of the historically Afrikaans universities, such as the University of the Free State, the University of Pretoria and Stellenbosch University, much of the focus was on the intersection between race and language. A longer discussion of #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall would have to take into account and unpack the specificities of each campus struggle and movement.
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The tweets were originally acquired using the NCapture web browser extension developed by QSR International to capture social media content, webpages and online PDFs. The data were exported as an Excel spreadsheet, from which the word clouds were generated using the open access online software Wordle. Thanks to Dr Selina Linda Mudavanhu for making the data available to me: she sent me the Excel spreadsheets that were used to generate the word clouds.
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After using private security to repress protesting students and workers (see Duncan and Frassinelli 2015; Times Live 2017), managements at institutions such as the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Johannesburg responded to their demands by insourcing cleaning and other previously outsourced workers, renaming buildings, and organising fora, debates and panels on decolonisation .
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Frassinelli, P.P. (2018). Hashtags: #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall and the Temporalities of a Meme Event. In: Mutsvairo, B., Karam, B. (eds) Perspectives on Political Communication in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62057-2_4
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