Informal Education and Collective Conscientisation in the #FeesMustFall Movement at Nelson Mandela University

Abstract

This paper draws attention to the intellectual life of the #FeesMustFall movement, highlighting how it became a student platform for critical informal education. Freire's concept of conscientisation is utilised to frame the social movement as a learning space of dialogue, critical thinking, knowledge exchange, and formulation of practical political action against higher education injustices. The Nelson Mandela University in South Africa is the site under study where informal education, conscientisation, and active learning occurred in its #FeesMustFall uprisings. Although the #FeesMustFall movement broadly took on a national temperament, each university campus had its own local unique experiences of the agitation. For Nelson Mandela University's microenvironment, the movement took on strong student-worker alliance organising principles and solidarities that yielded promising and continuing material transformations within a short period of time for its low-income university workers and black students. As one of the student leaders of this social movement, I provide here a personal activist experience from that period and space, emphasising the debates, knowledges, learning experiences, and theorising efforts that went with the protests that the #FeesMustFall student-worker alliance movement organised. This study contributes to the decolonisation of university learning spaces by centring alternative "classrooms" provided on the university margins by student social movements as pioneering platforms in the sociopolitical rollout of critical intellectual development and decolonisation of higher education.

Positioning the #FeesMustFall Movement within the Transformative Agenda: Reflections on Student Protests in South Africa

“…In Asian countries such as China and India where there is maximum state funding, legislation limits the investment made in universities (Mzileni 2020). The regulations put in place by the governments have also influenced the quality of education and the degree of academic freedom afforded to academics.…”

“…Universities constantly struggle to maintain a high standard of education and research with limited financial resources (Bloom, Canning, and Chan 2006;Mamdani 2008). Research output in the Global South has declined steadily over the years, except in South Africa where research output has grown consistently (Mzileni 2020).…”

“…South African students' protests for fee-free education did not begin with the #FeesMustFall campaign, as generations of students have fought for the same cause (Mzileni 2020). The 2015 FMF protests reignited the national dialogue about progressive change within the South African higher education sector; they drew attention to the capitalist superstructure that South African universities had become and highlighted that the higher education curricula still reflected colonial, apartheid-era objectives that did not fully equip black African youth.…”