Beyond #FeesMustFall: Power-Building and Youth Organizing in Post-Apartheid South Africa

• In Event: Perspectives on Youth Community Organizing: Young People Transforming Structures, Building Power, and Healing Beyond the Self

Abstract

Background, Purpose and Theoretical Framework
Much has been written on student movements to transform South Africa’s higher education that began in 2015 (Bosch, 2016; Godsell et al, 2016; Ndlovu; 2017; Strong, 2018). While the centering of the 2015-17 university students’ movement is crucial in highlighting the injustices and challenges faced by non-white students in South Africa educational system, there has been little work that focuses on youth organizing efforts to challenge the country’s educational inequities at the primary and secondary levels, which occurred in the period leading up to the start of #FeesMustFall movements. This paper leverages a study of a high school student-led organizing group, Equal Education (EE), between 2013-2015 to broaden insights on contemporary student organizing in post-apartheid South Africa. Building on the growing body of work on in the learning sciences about how people transfer their learning to new contexts and challenges (Bransford & Schwartz, 1999; Goldstone & Day, 2012), we illustrate the ways in which high school students claimed power by learning across multiple environments and using their knowledge and skills to address injustices in their schools.

Methods
We draw on data from an ethnographic case study of EE (Atkinson & Hammersley, 2007). Between 2013-2015, the authors and another researcher hung out with EE youth as part of a research team that examined youth organizing across six different cities in the world. While our data corpus includes interviews, field notes and artifacts, this paper predominantly uses data from a focus group that featured Sizimisele high school-based EE members. We highlight the experiences of this subset of EE youth because they successfully transferred organizing skills learned from EE and other spaces to organizer peers and lead a direct action about structural injustices at their school (Tshabalala, 2014).

Findings and Implications
High school members of EE skillfully build power and navigated complex political systems by leveraging, applying and adapting political knowledge gained across various spaces address contemporary challenges in South Africa’s educational system. We illustrate the organizing skills of these high school students by examining the ways in which they navigated challenging school and provincial government structures to compel the government to address dire teacher shortages at their school. Given that the government’s first reaction to the students legitimate demands was to deploy heavily armed police to quash the students’ protests, we show how the students expertly juxtaposed the images of heavy-handed police with the repressive apartheid government to quickly gain political legitimacy in the publiuc sphere. Consistent with these findings, we argue that a) a sound understanding of contemporary student movements in South Africa necessitates a deeper engagement with the ways in which young students encounter, and learn to address injustices prior to attaining university age, and b) the ability of EE members to skillfully adapt knowledge learned from various spaces is yet another example of the robustness and ubiquitous nature of sociopolitical learning, which sheds insights on how students apply knowledge beyond fixed contexts (Goldstone & Day, 2012).

Authors

• Tafadzwa Tivaringe, Spencer Foundation

• Ben Kirshner, University of Colorado - Boulder