Returning to Fees Must Fall: Reflecting on ‘Fallism’ and the 2015/2016 Student Movement in South Africa

2025 will mark ten years since the “Must Fall” movements took off in South Africa. Starting with Rhodes Must Fall, in March 2015, and moving to the explosion of protest action across campuses under the Fees Must Fall (FMF) banner later that year. The FMF protests started at Wits University in Johannesburg and quickly spread, eventually bringing the entire higher education sector to a complete standstill, and fundamentally reshaping aspects of it for years to come. It was the biggest and most sustained student uprising in the post-apartheid era. A new generation - most of whom were born around the time of the transition to democracy - challenged the commodification of education, and institutional forms of marginalisation and exclusion. The protests were initially sparked by fee increases, but students targeted deeper structural issues, demanding free education, the decolonisation of education, and an end to the exploitative practice of outsourced labour, amongst other demands.The student and worker movement surfaced new critiques and contestations in the post-apartheid period, opening up conversations that went beyond higher education, marking it as a crucial period in relation to broader South African politics. At the same time, they resurfaced older political and intellectual traditions, while bringing in new ways of thinking about politics, organising and movements. This paper reflects on Fees Must Fall, specifically probing the idea of ‘fallism’, which has been used in the literature to describe the broad politics and orientation that emerged within the movement and the generation produced through it. The paper looks particularly at Wits University and draws on new interviews conducted with activists, archival work and autoethnographic material. It takes a critical approach to the concept of fallism and the debates that emerged after 2015, situating it within its context but also in relation to other post-apartheid movements.