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Chapter 15 - Towards an Emergent Theory of Fallism (and the Fall of the White-Liberal-University in South Africa)

from Part III - Confronting Marginalisation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2020

By
A. Kayum Ahmed
Edited by
Jacqueline Bhabha ,
Wenona Giles  and
Faraaz Mahomed
Jacqueline Bhabha
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Wenona Giles
Affiliation:
York University, Toronto
Faraaz Mahomed
Affiliation:
FXB Center for Health and Human Rights
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Summary

When a Black student threw faeces against a bronze statue of British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, located at the University of Cape Town (UCT), it sparked the formation of the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) student movement in March 2015. The Black-led #RMF movement sought to decolonise the university by delinking from UCT’s dominant model of Euro-American knowledge to construct their own decolonial framework comprised of Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness and Black radical feminism. A few weeks later in May 2015, students at the University of Oxford who were inspired by the student movement at UCT created the #RhodesMustFall Oxford movement, using the Rhodes statue at Oriel College as a focal point in their call to decolonise the university. This chapter explores the formation of the #RMF student movements at UCT and Oxford – referred to as the Fallist movements. I first consider what led the #RMF UCT movement to adopt a decolonial framework and then examine how #RMF’s framework generated the idea of ‘Fallism’. Finally, I experiment with developing Fallism into an emergent decolonial theory to unveil the paradoxical epistemic architecture of the white-liberal-university.

Keywords

#RhodesMustFallFallismdecolonialityepistemic disobediencestudent movementsuniversity
Type
Chapter
Information
A Better Future
The Role of Higher Education for Displaced and Marginalised People
 , pp. 339 - 362
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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