Sub-Saharan Africa in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter

• In Event: 42.038 - Black Like Me: Urban Education and State Violence in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter

Abstract

Among its contributions, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has offered a grammar of political praxis for a growing wave of activism on American campuses and in urban schools. This paper explores this critical axis of contemporary struggle—activism in and through schools—in Sub-Saharan Africa, a geopolitical context, which has remained peripheral to analysis of activism in the BLM Era. Over the past decade, the African continent has witnessed an extraordinary wave of popular uprisings that have been mostly ignored in discussions of recent global protests. Like BLM, these uprisings are youth-led, mostly urban, social media-activated, and center issues of educational equity and revolutionary transformation. This paper examines two sites of youth activism at the intersection of urban education and popular protest: the 2015 “Fees Must Fall” student movement in South Africa and the growth of “Occupy” protests across cities and university campuses in Nigeria beginning in 2012. The author considers the nature of young people’s political claims making in both cases—particularly their powerful critique of gerontocratic misleadership—and how this articulates the structural and sociopolitical factors that imperil the futures of African youth. The author also makes the case for a more meaningful engagement with the struggles of young people in the African region in analysis and solidarity practices that have as their aim the full valuation of Black lives everywhere.

Author

• Krystal Strong, University of California - Berkeley