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• 1 2020-10-30T00:45:06-04:00 What and where are the movements? 5 A global movement of local protests image_header 2020-12-18T09:54:20-05:00 It is critical to foreground the fact that the Must Fall movements originated in Africa, because colonialism hinged upon and legitimated by the idea that African citizens were incapable of political and intellectual maturity and decision-making. Decolonial scholarship must seek to expose this fallacy, and that includes highlighting the powerful and political kinds of citizenship that African activists embody. As mentioned, in March of 2015, Chumani Maxwele was inspired by a similar protest of 2013, which quickly built up into the Must Fall movement at the University of Cape Town, building upon decades of Black anti-colonial critical scholarship, and a history of post-colonial governments in Africa using changes of physical infrastructure to communicate a change in political orientation away from colonialism (Ahmed, 2020). The movement used the state as a focal point because it was tangible and recognisable in its egregiousness, but the movement's focus is on the way in which institutions of education are historically founded upon the wealth and ideologies of colonialism, and that the material and intellectual infrastructure of these institutions have continued to perpetuate a specific form of neo-colonialism. This is an act of totemic activism, in which a token is used to try and strike at the heart of the system - neither the point nor end goal are the removal of the symbol, but rather a dismantling of what the symbol represents, and the inequalities it enables (Kaganof, 2016).
  
  
  
  The Rhodes state at UCT was removed a month after the initial protests, although the work to decolonize the education system as a whole continues passionately. The success of the movement in removing the statue led to multiple other movements across the globe, adopting the same principles but adapting them to their local contexts. The Fees Must Fall movement originated in October of 2015 at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, led by Shaeera Kalla, to stop increases in student fees and to demand greater governmental funding of higher education. It quickly spread to universities across South Africa, and other countries across Africa (such as Namibia), emphasizing the way in which Africa 'is not necessarily poor but...materially and epistemically impoverished via (neo-)colonial dispossession and exploitation' (Nhemachena et al., 2017:93). The movement was successful in its initial goal of preventing the planned increase in fees, but the broader work of decolonizing the institutions is far bigger, more diffuse, and more difficult - it is not enough to make 'toxic education affordable without paying attention to the need to detoxify such dangerous forms of education', requiring 'the proactive eradication from Africa's educational system of any knowledge systems that perpetuate the reprehensible wrongdoings, moments, and ambitions of the (neo-)colonialists' (Nhemachena et al., 2017:102-104).
  
  
  
  
  The digital nature of all the movements, which made substantial use of hashtags, virtual groups, and social media networks to share information and mobilize support for the protest, meant that it quickly gained global attention and adaptation. In the U.K., the focal point became the statue of Cecil Rhodes at his alma mater Oriel College, a constituent college at the University of Oxford. The initial response to the protests from administrators was clear - Chancellor Lord Patten suggested that students involved in the campaign might 'think about being educated elsewhere' (Allnutt and Holden, 2016). However, after several years of sustained effort and a rise in the movement's prominence amongst the student population, Oriel College has now committed to setting up an independent inquiry into key issues around the statue, alongside investigating how to improve the access and attendance of BAME (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic) students and faculty (Mohdin et al., 2020).