The path to free education: exploration of student revolts in South African Universities from an archival perspective

Abstract

Forms of student resistance for social change have challenged and shaped the political customs of South Africa for decades. This was shown in the recent 2015/16 student uprisings in tertiary institutions that brought the public to a standstill and provided immediate debate on the future of education in an unequal society left by the Apartheid regime. As such, the protests challenged the social inequalities that poor students encounter consistently, referencing previous encounters with colonial propaganda like the BCM agenda in the 1970s, which became an analytical discourse between activists, management and the state respectively, with mainstream media a source that generates public debate. As a result, it often ignores archival sources that provide an opportunity to proclaim a different lens to student protestation in context, and its value to student resistance in its entirety. The mini dissertation seeks to understand and outline the importance of archival sources as sites of exploring student resistance history in South Africa. Furthermore, it serves to suggest and highlight the importance of historical sources underutilized by the wider public discourse and mainstream media. It also provides clarification on the discourse using popular archival sources in South Africa today such as the South African History Online (a widely recommended archive) and the Publica[c]tion archive (2017) respectively to cover and unpack the activist nature of students against the state in different eras. This includes contextual situations, similarities and differences of different student movements within the broader scope of challenging colonial propaganda. Nonetheless, the investigation, through its exploration on two different eras of student mobilization, takes on the approach of exploring underutilized or silent historical accounts rarely spoken by academics, and thus, shedding light on its history to illustrate the involvement, nature and impact of student resistance in the social and political landscape of South Africa.