Fallism ten years on

Reflections on the impact of the Rhodes Must Fall movement

Abstract

On 9 April 2025, I had the privilege of delivering the keynote address at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) 10th year anniversary event commemorating Rhodes Must Fall (RMF), a landmark movement in the history of the university that had an impact on higher education in South Africa and in the rest of the world. The event was hosted at UCT’s Centre for African Studies, which was a generative space for RMF students 10 years ago and one that continues to produce critical scholarship in the academy. This paper is an extended version of my keynote address enriched with added theoretical grounding as well as a commentary on some of the intellectual shifts that have emerged in higher education post RMF.  The focus is on contextualising black students’ affective and embodied experiences of racialisation at UCT and how these  were expressed during RMF in ways that have contributed to the resurgence of a decolonial intellectual  movement.