#RhodesMustFall: Decolonization, Praxis and Disruption

In 2015, a student at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, took a bucket of feces and threw it against a bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes located on the university's campus (Nyamnjoh 2016). Rhodes, who was recognized as a British imperialist and racist, became a symbolic focal point for #RhodesMustFall (RMF) - a radical student movement centered on the decolonization of education by confronting questions of institutional racism, access to education, and reforming the university curriculum (Gibson 2016; Luescher 2016; Mbembe 2016). Maxwele's defacement of the Rhodes statue fueled an ongoing national debate on decolonization and the cost of higher education that had started in the early 2000s (Booysen 2016). Protests at universities across South Africa erupted following the defacement of the Rhodes statue expanding RMF into the #FeesMustFall (FMF) movement which has demanded free, quality, decolonized education (Booysen 2016; Hefferman and Nieftagodien 2016, Luescher, Klemencic and Jowi; Motala, Vally, and Maharajh 2016). A few weeks after the RMF movement started at the University of Cape Town, students at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom also created a RMF movement using the Rhodes statue located at Oriel College as a symbolic reference point in their call for decolonizing education (Mpofu-Welsh 2016). This paper analyzes the theories and tactics employed by the RMF movements in Cape Town and Oxford through interviews with three of the prominent members involved in both movements.