South Africa’s Student Activist Turn in the Decolonial Present

In order to understand the tactics and representational strategies of recent South African Student activism, I consider the devised ensemble play The Fall (Baxter Theatre Centre 2017) for instances of performance as protestation. Resistance in the form of #RhodesMustFall protests must be considered alongside the race and class dimensions that continue to structure access to tertiary education. The aim is to demonstrate ‘fallism’ as a performative approach to decolonial student activism. Throughout, I use Achille Mbembe’s (2017, 2019) mode of examining incidents and events that make visible the political, institutional and interpersonal everyday dynamics so that we can get a sharper view of the place of decoloniality and its entanglements with precarity and marginalization.