Theorizing #RhodesMustFall: The Role of Protest in Fallism’s Epistemic Migration from Africa to Euro-America

• In Event: Decoloniality in Afrikan Education

Proposal

When a Black student threw feces against a bronze statue of British imperialist, Cecil John Rhodes, located at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa, it sparked the formation of Rhodes Must Fall (#RMF) in March 2015—a radical student movement centred on decolonizing the university. #RMF incorporated elements of Black Consciousness philosophy, Pan-Africanist ideology, and Black radical feminism into a decolonial framework to confront institutional racism at UCT. In May 2015, two months after #RMF’s formation, students at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom who were inspired by the decolonial movement in Cape Town, created the #RhodesMustFall Oxford movement using the Rhodes statue at Oriel College as a focal point in their call to decolonize the university.
The student movements, which were collectively referred to as the Must Fall or Fallist movement, subsequently inspired the formation of Royall Must Fall at Harvard University, Gandhi Must Fall in Ghana and Manchester, as well as Fees Must Fall across several South African universities. At UCT in particular, students developed the idea of Fallism—initially, as a descriptive term used to characterize their radical activism, but subsequently, as a framework that exposes the coloniality embedded in the epistemic foundations of the university.
During interviews with 98 students, faculty, and workers at UCT and Oxford, some student activists told me that Fallism was a response to what they described as “Black pain”. In the #RMF UCT mission statement, Black pain is defined as “the dehumanization of Black people” informed by the “violence exacted only against Black people by a system that privileges whiteness”.
Fallism however, transcends Black pain by contributing to a new vocabulary centered on Black liberation. Consequently, I experiment with developing Fallism into a nascent decolonial theory based on various articulations of the concept gathered through extensive interviews with #RMF activists. Through Fallism, I demonstrate the paradoxical position of the university for Black and other marginalized people: the university offers the possibility of acquiring knowledge that serves as an emancipatory tool from the violence of socio-economic marginality (Black liberation), while at the same time, the epistemic and pedagogical foundations of the university can create an oppressive, alienating space for Black, queer, and disabled people among others (Black pain).
Furthermore, I also examine how Fallism migrates from Africa to Euro-America through creative protest action deployed by the #RMF movement. Fallism’s epistemic migration from UCT to Oxford and Harvard, demonstrates how protest serves as a catalyst for knowledge transfer from Africa to Euro-America—from the colonized to the colonizer. I introduce the idea of epistemic migration as a playful counter-narrative to the demonization of African migrants by white supremacists in the Global North. I argue that the migration of African knowledge through protest, poses a greater existential threat to Euro-American coloniality than the migration of African bodies.

Author

• A. Kayum Ahmed, Columbia University