'"Fees Must Fall" in a neoliberal university?': A socio-political interrogation of the 2015-2016 student protests and the state responses in South Africa

The changing nature of higher education and government policies with respect to economic liberation through neoliberalism has become the subject of growing intellectual and scholarly attention. A great deal of the debates, discourse, and analysis of the changes address multiple social consequences of economic liberation including the growing dissatisfactions among students. In the context of post-apartheid South Africa, the government was expected to redress racial inequality perpetuated by the apartheid regime. The education sector was one sector (among others) within which the redress was expected to be employed. However, the government surrendered power to neoliberal globalisation by changing the legislation. In response, the years 2015 and 2016 were marked by a series of university student protests called the hashtag Fees Must Fall (#FeesMustFall or FMF) where students voiced grievances ranging from university fee increment, institutional racism, Eurocentric education system, youth unemployment and many more. This study investigates how the movement evolved and later devolved and considers the role of state repression on the movement. It furthermore explores the role of race, class, gender, and political apathy on the momentum of the movement. This study does this by building qualitative insights using in-depth interviews with 27 student activists from two universities in South Africa and interrogating government documents. To clearly understand the FMF movement, this study employed theories including: the Sociology of Dissident Knowledge (SDK); Decolonial theory; Protest Policing; Militarisation of Protests; and the Panopticon/Surveillance. The findings of this study indicate the following: first, FMF activists used their knowledge of lived experiences to form the FMF movement of 2015 & 16; second, although the movement faced state repression it also had achievements including an increased subsidy for poor students, and zero-fee increment in 2016; third, race, class, gender, and apathy affected the momentum and solidarity of the movement; lastly, the movement suffered internal conflicts such as patriarchy and toxic masculinity, imbalanced solidarity and thus contributed to the change in momentum.