Rhodes Must Fall - search results

In this report on an important workshop held at Jimma University in Ethiopia, the authors look at the opportunities for the decolonization of knowledge. This detailed reflection holds important lessons and examples for readers of roape.net, who share a commitment to radical and critical scholarship of and from the continent and who are likewise immersed in decolonizing projects in their respective spaces and institutions.

In February this year, during a protest against the lack of accommodation for poor students in Cape Town, South Africa, students and members of the #RhodesMustFall movement set alight paintings considered to be ‘colonial artwork’. In a conversation with the artist Faith Pienaar, anti-apartheid activist and judge Albie Sachs reflects on the meaning of art in troubled post-apartheid South Africa.

In a far-reaching analysis of the struggles taking place in South Africa, Jonathan Grossman writes that the student mobilisations have directly challenged the myth of the rainbow nation. Grossman also challenges a narrative that says students did for workers what workers could not do for themselves, in fact there is a deep solidarity between workers and students and this is the real spirit of Marikana.

South African writer and academic Heike Becker looks at South Africa's extraordinary student movement that in 2015 brought down symbols of colonialism and exploitation, fought against fee increases in higher education and called for the end of racism and of neo-liberal outsourcing practices of support services at universities. She asks if this was South Africa's 1968.

In the final essay in the series Radical Agendas in South Africa, Vishwas Satgar sees the possibility of a movement for socialism emerging in South Africa grounded in a collective leadership, a democratically conceived and commonly agreed program and a political division of labour in which a party is merely a tactical device in a mass transformative strategy.

In the forth essay in the series Radical Agendas in South Africa, writer and academic Shireen Hassim writes that economic policy debates simply pay lip-service to the gendered forms of production and reproduction, leaving these connections to be made by the small number of overburdened feminist activists. It is a rare event when there is attention to gender dimensions of inequality in the writings of the male left.