History, Naming and Intellectualism in the #FeesMustFall Protests

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intecritdivestud.2.1.0041
• Published date: 01 June 2019
• Date: 01 June 2019
• Pages: 41-55
• Author: Quraysha Ismail Sooliman
• Subject Matter: student protests,black activists,public intellectual naming,identity

International Journal of CRITICAL DIVERSITY STUDIES 2.1 June 2019

History, Naming and Intellectualism in

the #FeesMustFall Protests

Quraysha Ismail Sooliman

Political Sciences, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

Dr. Quraysha Ismail Sooliman is a postdoctoral research fellow with the University

of Pretoria’s Humanities/Mellon Foundation Public Intellectual Project.

Quraysha is a freelance journalist and hosts her own show on DSTV347. The

show entitled Finding Me explores identities in cosmopolitan societies and

interrogates through conversation, the wicked questions of our times. She

was also a participant and activist in the #FeesMustFall student protests at the

University of Pretoria. She is passionate about animals and the environment

and takes care of stray and feral cats.

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the black student as an emerging representative of the public

intellectual’s confrontation with history, institutional culture and language in the

#FMF student protests. It pursues the manifestation of this confrontation through

an analysis of specic episodes of articulation and events where the student as

public intellectual encounters an academia that is incapable of comprehending or

conceptualizing their demands. The protests animated the emerging black student

public intellectual’s projection into being and their confrontation with history,

violence and academia. This paper examines the collaboration between the state

and university as mechanisms of control to preserve the system and structure of

neo-apartheid in a post-1994 South African society. I argue that the xation with

subjective violence, detracted from the greater, yet hidden narrative—that of the

possibility of violence as ubiquitous in human social relations. Violence is also

used to negate power. In confronting a powerful racist history and systems of rac-

ism, the #Fallists reference to the on-going complex levels of violence lived as a

reality by black South Africans, could be understood as a form of social power to

unchain the forced consensus that has been perpetuated around black violence and

black ineptitude.

KEYWORDS

student protests, black activists, public intellectual naming, identity