OPINIONISTA: Then and now: Reflections on the FeesMustFall generation By Asemahle Gwala
The date is 17 October 2016, just little more than 10 months after I first graced the hallowed yet thorny grounds of Nelson Mandela University. After a fairly peaceful sleep, we woke up to the blasting sounds of stun grenades flying through the air in the sweltering weather. The university had just triggered an interdict after rolling mass action under the banner of the #FeesMustFall protests which were sweeping across university campuses with the aggressiveness of an erupted volcano.
The genesis of the protests is a highly contested subject matter , that has divided the student populace in half between the suppressed voices from historically black universities who have been inhaling tear gas since the turn of the century and the newly minted revolutionaries with vast media coverage.
It would be a fallacy to say there has not been much progress achieved since the first #FeesMustFall protests erupted, as it is the protests that ultimately led to the declaration of free education by President Jacob Zuma on the eve of the 2017 ANC Nasrec Conference. When the African National Congress won the first democratic elections in 1994, an elite class of bureaucratic bourgeoisie emerged while thousands of umkhonto weSizwe combatants who fought among them returned to the country to be welcomed by poverty.
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