Contesting the university: black student movements in America and South Africa between 1968-1972 and 2015

This thesis analyzes the factors that lead to universities being contested by black radical students in the context of black intellectual/liberation movements in South Africa and the United States between 1968 – 1972 and the year 2015. Given the parallel historical similarities of the racialized capitalist system operative in South Africa and the United States respectively, the comparative framework of the thesis is split between two chapters. The first chapter historicizes the influence of the Black Consciousness Movement on the South African Students Organisation, as well as the Black Power and the Black Campus Movement in the US. The chapter suggests that, while locally manifested, the proliferation of black intellectual/liberation movements owes much to transnational/diasporic origins, since scholars recognized the shared struggle of fighting racial oppression globally. Emboldened by new notions of self-pride and positive affirmations of blackness, these ideas galvanized black radical student activists into action, beginning at historically black colleges and universities and later developing elsewhere, with the goal of transformation at a university as well as societal level. Chapter Two bridges the two historical periods of focus, by discussing the origins of the myth of post-racialism in both contexts, which emerged alongside the attrition of the movements discussed in the preceding chapter. Indeed, despite the different origins and rationale, the thesis demonstrates that paradigm shifts in both countries were complicit in the implementation of a colorblind national discourse, which shifted the political-social understanding of race and racism. In America, the myth of colorblindness has its origins in the Nixon era which formed part of a wider political strategy to stymie the hard-fought efforts of the Black Power/Civil Rights activists who elucidated the connections between race, racism and economic inequality. Relatedly, colorblindism in South Africa has been at the center of the post-apartheid political narrative since 1994, effectively supplanting race discourse with individualism and meritocracy. Yet for student activists in 2015, the continued systematic decimation of black bodies during a time when both countries’ presidential offices were held by black men, presented a challenge to the notion of post-racialism. Thus, the university, once again, became central for black radical student activists. The thesis argues that this is to be understood in the overarching context of the Black Lives Matter in America and Fees Must Fall in South Africa. Attentive to the struggle of the previous generation of activism as well as the nuances of the 2015 context, the Open Stellenbosch and Concerned Student 1950 collective fought for more just universities as well as equitable societies.M.A.Includes bibliographical referencesby Luke Aron Cadde