I remember it as if it was yesterday, the excitement to go to the university of Pretoria. For many reasons than one, this was one achievement that not only was I proud of but one that my community would also be proud of. This was in 2015. I was an eager first year University of Pretoria law student. One of the many reasons I had chosen to study law was because of the many social ills I wanted to use my degree to address.
This piece forms part of a series of reflections on the 2015 #FeesMustFall movement.
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#FeesMustFall 2015 as it happened from The Daily Vox’s archives
Fortunately for myself, I had managed to get funding for my studies. However being a student activist in a university like the University of Pretoria exposed me to so much inequality that the university community was engulfed with. Living in a university residence, it was easy to decipher students that were well off from those that were not. In all this time I would feel sad not just for them but also for myself who felt like though my marks were good enough for me to be admitted and get funding for my studies but ontologically, university spaces were not made for students who were like us.
In October 2015, the minister of education announced that there would be an increment of fees for the following year. During this time, there were already rumours that this would be the case and institutions like TUT and Wits University had started protesting against the increment.
And so, on a very hot day in the university of Pretoria, after a build up from several events, the university was shut down by its management because of the #FMF protests. Writing and thinking about these protests still bring about a sobering effect. This is mainly because of the way that the university responded to these protests. Their first line of march was obviously the shutdown but this was not until they had to bring private security and the police to get the protestors to evacuate the campus. I had never encountered violence of that magnitude before so this kind of violence was not just a shock to my livelihood but it was later going to live on as an unresolved trauma.
The repercussions of the #FMF movement
The #FMF movement had several ramifications. For most of us, we spent a lot of time running away from the police. The university of Pretoria had made certain that those who disturbed the academic calendar would face severe persecution. I remember how we would hide ourselves. We avoided sleeping in our resident areas in fear of getting arrested. The university increased surveillance on those it had considered to be troublemakers.
Unfortunately for me, at that time I was part of the Economic Freedom Fighters Student Command. This meant that the university treated us with extra disdain considering the misinformation they held against the organisation’s mother body. The university also victimised the students that they had deemed to be disruptive. By victimising, the university would monitor the movements of these students. I remember one instance eating at a local eating franchise, one police officer approached us and told us who we were. To our shock, we asked the officer who they were in which they later told us that they were employed by the university to track our movements.
This is one but of many intimidation incidents that we have had with the university and the different institutional bodies that it was working with. To these day, it is not just myself that have grown much contempt for the police but several students who were involved in the #FMF protests still tell of the triggering effects that they have on seeing a man in the SAPS uniform.
They further tell of the triggers that they live with whenever they would hear loud sounds, likening them to gun shots, stun grenades and tear gas used on the students to deter them from protesting.
What could have been done differently to combat the consequences of #FMF
The university should have used way less stringent means of dealing with students participating in the #FMF movements. A more sympathetic and more humane method should have been used. The more humane way in dealing with student protest could have avoided the triggers that these students would later have to live with. It would also guarantee them finishing their academic qualification and grow to be agents of change in their respective professions.
The university during the #FMF movement called on different stakeholders to have their views heard. However, there has not been a lot of implementation done to make sure that the brutality experienced in the 2015/2016 period never occurs again.
As a result, in March 2021, the police made a fatal shooting where Mthokozisi Ntumba was fatally shot and killed during a student protest. This failure to address the movement in 2015 and the 2016 period will continue to haunt the South African higher education space and in the worst case scenario result in even more fatalities.
Thuli Zulu is a feminist lawyer. She currently works as an advocacy and research officer for the Centre for Applied Legal studies based at Wits University.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policies of The Daily Vox.
