Students mark 10 Years of Fees Must Fall with theatre, film, and reflection
The Market Theatre will be showing ‘The Fall’, a student-led production created in 2015 during the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall protests.
Several events have been planned to mark the ten-year anniversary of the Fees Must fall movement.
Fees Must Fall (FMF) was a student-led protest movement that began in October 2015. In a number of demonstrations that took place all over the country, students demanded free, decolonized education and an end to rising university tuition fees.
The Market Theatre will be showing ‘The Fall’, a student-led production created in 2015 during the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall protests.
The creators of Theatre Duo will be staging this production from 9 April to 4 May.
When the statue of Cecil John Rhodes located at the University of Cape Town was taken down on 9 April, founders of Theatre Duo Billy Langa and Mahlatsi Mokgonyana said this birthed the play which is “about the crosscutting roles that race, class, gender, sexism, colonialism and the ideologies of patriarchy have to play in the perpetuation of discrimination in our country.”
Producer Ketsia Velaphi said the co-creators of the play who are also part of the cast, all from different backgrounds, came together to give the piece diversity.
“In the play, the actors try to figure out what the fight means for each of them, how each of them contributes, and also how they are affected by, the reminder of, colonialism and how it infiltrates in our institutions of study, because this road statue was still up.”
Historically, especially in the past ten years, the beginning of the academic year has been met with the same challenges of students who form part of the missing middle being unable to afford registration, accommodation and just the general cost of higher education.
Velaphi said “It seems government does not have a plan on how to address these things, if they did, I think something would have been implemented. It's been ten years, and students are still fighting various challenges. That's why the play also doesn’t offer solutions because it’s raising issues that are ongoing."
She said the importance of using theatre as an art form to tackle these topics is because “theatre acts as a mirror, for our reality and experiencing the story being told to you in person, in close proximity, as opposed to like, a film, which you can easily pause and maybe distract from.”
THE Right2Protest PROJECT
In 2015 the Right2Protest project was founded as a coalition of civil society organisations providing solidarity to students during the fees must fall protests by assisting with pro bono legal services and advocacy.
Right2Protest’s Omhle Ntshingila said, “It played a crucial role in assisting students nationwide with mass arrests, as well as monitoring and reporting on police and private security brutality.
She added that now the project has expanded, operating across the SADC region to support human rights defenders and safeguard the right to protest.
The project will be hosting a series of events throughout 2025 with the first being a webinar on 12 April offering a discussion on a critical reflection from youth-led movements on the state of higher learning education and its governance in South Africa.
UPRIZE - THE FEATURE DOCUMENTARY
This is while the Wits Graduate Centre has begun its hosting of film screenings to commemorate fees must fall, with the intent of hosting more.
On 14 March 2025 Uprize was the first film to be featured, a feature documentary written and directed by Sifiso Khanyile. The filmmaker describes the film as something that “looks at the political, social, and cultural conditions that shaped the 1976 student uprising, and how those ideas were transformed into liberatory action, and how those actions helped shape the democratic society we live in today”.
Its producer said it is the embodiment of a phrase by philosopher Frantz Fanon who said, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its own mission, fulfill it or betray it.”
The documentary stars 1976 student leaders, anti-apartheid activists, journalists, founding members of national student movements such as Duma Ndlovu, Seth Mazibuko and Fatima Dike to name a few. These individuals share their lived experiences of the time that they say shaped the history of South Africa.
The imagery of the film depicting the fateful day (16 June,1976) shows little to no violence, something most films and documentaries led with. Khanyile says this was deliberate, “You start to get desensitized to humanity because of the depiction of dead bodies or people in distressing circumstances that diminishes the humanity of the subjects, the context is gruesome but we did not want to show it in that light”.
She added that they wanted the film to show the human experience in totality, “The people that were part of the protest were normal people who were able to affect change around them. The fact that they had their own ambitions, plans, dreams and fears but managed to stand up against what they thought was wrong about their surroundings”.
This makes the film relatable to the youth of today, specifically the generation of Fees Must Fall movement which is another student-led-protest that began in 2015. The objectives of the movement were free, decolonised education, something Khanyile said she can draw parallels to the protest of 1976.
She said fees must fall is a baby of 1976, “The 1976 generation came into consciousness and realized that a lot of the structural inequalities that we were present under 1976 had still remained largely the same when they came into their young adulthood.”
Khanyile said protest culture has changed with the tools of use such as technology, like phones being used to communicate and social media being used to spread the message.
“The benefit is the message spreads further and wider, but you cannot control how people react or if they shut down what it is you have planned”.
She added that the message spreading wide also does not translate to the attendance and in that way, there is a distrust in the medium.