RMF: [Pre]Conceptions of a Movement & Interview with Zaynab Asmal

Zaynab Asmal

RMF:[Pre]Conceptions of a M… by AGITATE Journal on Scribd

A Conversation I was Missing: Illustrating Learning Curves that Refuse a Straight Line

Zaynab Asmal, interviewed by Koni Benson

Introduction

RMF:[Pre]Conceptions of a Movement, is a comic book written and drawn by Zaynab Asmal. It was the product of a final assignment for a third year history course “African History Through Comic Books: History for What and For Whom?” designed and taught by Koni Benson, a postdoctoral fellow at the time, at the University of Cape Town in 2016. 

The course was run as a seminar series focused on questions of power and the production and consumption of histories of struggle. We read a range of documentary and comic non-fiction histories of Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa to explore questions of African history for what and for whom. How does the intended audience impact the writing of African history? How does the perspective and politics of history shift when taken out of the conventional academic form of writing? What happens when struggle history meets new forms of art and technology? How can images be read and used in conversation with written sources of African history? In this seminar we explored both the content and the format of these histories in engaging with arguments about the past for the present. We compared a selection of graphic novel African histories with journal articles and academic writings on the same topics, read texts on the role of power in the production of historical writing, and put these sources in conversation with current debates about political education and decolonizing scholarship. In the final research paper, participants could choose to focus on comparative approaches to a particular history, engage in debates on creative approaches to African history or on the politics of narrative formats, or explore designing a new comic book history.

Following this course, Zaynab then went on to do her honours where she expanded this project into a graphic honours thesis “Of Meaning, Memory, and Imagining: A Comic Book Micro-History of #RhodesMustFall Students,” which was completed in Nov 2017. She is currently working on a third graphic history for her MA in the Department of Historical Studies at UCT. Koni is now based in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape.

It was the quality of our connective conversations from the first day of class in 2016 that have continued into the present, and the answer to the first question that inspired outreaching to AGITATE!.

Koni: How have people responded to the work so far?

Zaynab: No one has read either cover to cover except the people who have marked them, including me. My honours project was supposed to get done and then when I finished it, it was supposed to be redone by a better artist, instead of this half-finished messy storyboard. I don’t feel like it’s good enough. I have not yet read it from start to finish since it’s been done. This is the project I did in third year for you, and it is easier for me to reflect on than my honours project, even though it’s highly incomplete. But for both, I see what is missing. So I am still stuck in this mode. 

Let’s look at it now and come back to that later. By way of introduction, what made you decide to do this comic?

The main reason was because of the course we were doing. It was difficult because, on the one hand, I am not an artist. So I was thinking how to think outside my discipline but with something I was familiar with… the challenge of it was nice. Whenever I write an essay, I feel I am not writing enough, and I am trying to hit certain marks. With this, I had no idea how it would go so it was more freeing and more fun. But when I hit the harder pages, I felt the same thing. I don’t think I have said enough. But what is enough in a comic? Those are the pages that have so many words. 

So you like the pages that have less writing?

I would like to have the ability to express things more visually. There are so many ideas in my head that I can imagine drawn but, when I attempt it, it looks different from what I imagined. On top of that, it takes so much time to figure out the flow between panels and the space of a panel, and it’s not something I’m used to thinking about. There are parts in this comic where I just wrote down what was meant to be discussed instead of drawing it, because I just didn’t have the time for it. I regret that, because I’ve lost the flow of thought since then. I also feel like relying too much on writing is a defeat in a way. When you made your comic, how did you find the perfect balance?

For context, one person ended up making a film as their final project, but most people in the course either wrote an essay about comics or the themes we were discussing, or wrote about a comic book idea they had. You took the leap into actually trying your hand at both the imagining and the actualizing of a comic, and that is a really hard, and a brave choice. For me, once housing activists identified the most urgent issues that came out of the historical research and I had an idea of what the core issues to forefront in the comic would be, then I worked with artists to actualize and draw the story out. The Trantraal Brothers are local and experienced political cartoonists from Bishop Lavis, and we had been having discussions about graphic novels and political cartoons and the poetics of everyday life for a very long time before the collaboration was a possibility. And we debated, and still debate, the words to images ratio question. Parts of Crossroads still feel too wordy, but I don’t know how to cut it down even further. So I am not sure we found the perfect balance, but it was a very different starting point and involved many more hands, so to speak… 

Where did you start?

When I did the ‘African History through Comic Books’ course, the final assignment was very open. You could write an essay about the books we read etc. but I wanted to try to draw a comic book and see if I could do it. I spent ages just writing down the ideas. Drawing was difficult. I had big ideas and no ability to draw any of them. I pushed through and made my ugly comic. For me, it was because I struggled to explain RMF to people who were not part of it, that I wanted to make a simple comic to explain it. The terms: why it happened. That would be enough. 

And was it?

Not really. I don’t think this project touched on it enough. I didn’t manage to interview the people I wanted to back then because it was during the 2016 FMF (FeesMustFall) protests and it was a really difficult time for everyone on campus. When I was offered to do honours, they said, ‘Take the comic and make it bigger.’ I didn’t know where I wanted to take it then and I am bad at asking for help. There was a course I did on memory and oral history, so I finally got some interviews about RMF and the memory and narrative theories gave me a different view into it. My new supervisor – because you had left by then – also advised me to think about the imagination part of RMF. So I had this idea to make real the world that RMF activists imagined. What would it be like and would they be happy there? Was their dream able to be realized? That was the idea that started the honours project but I didn’t get there. 

To the world RMF was imagining?

Yes. There were a lot of new and old ideas being bandied about, about all kinds of things! So history itself was being questioned, symbolism, what post-94 should have looked like, what the value is of things like bureaucracy, the Constitution, civil obedience, democracy, nationalism… and alternatives were all being discussed. There was also a lot of just figuring out where people were in the current space and trying to become better people. And that idea of reimagining, of repositioning oneself – or even the past or future – to re-energise or change something, made me wonder what the futures of a sustained and successful RMF could be. Or maybe even a future where RMF wouldn’t have been necessary because post-94 would have been different. I never managed to get to that idea in my honours project (I was too busy trying to fill in all the gaps and discussions missing in the third year project we are sharing here), so I have no idea what that comic would have led to. 

Do you know of any African literature that takes this sci-fi or alternative history route already?

I’m not super familiar, but I think there is a lot of new sci-fi, Afrofuturism, and speculative fiction genre-blurring work coming out that opens up a whole set of interesting questions about binaries and the relationship between fiction and fact/non-fiction, primary and secondary source, critique and creation. Friends are recommending Masande Ntshanga and I have read some Nnedi Okorafor and Saidiya Hartman, but I am not sure any of those do quite what you were experimenting with in the context of a contemporary movement struggling so self-consciously with the relationship between history and the present. 

How would you introduce this comic book to someone who knows nothing about RhodesMustFall (RMF)?

In 2015, there were student protests at UCT campus that started with the protest about the Cecil John Rhodes statue that overlooked the whole of the campus – people questioning its value and worth to the institution and why it has such a prominent place. Within a week, it became a larger discussion on whiteness, privilege, history, inclusion, colonialism, decolonisation in the university. The Rhodes Statue had always been a problem to campus – in apartheid there were Afrikaner students who fought against it and after apartheid they promised to remove it. So they always tell you: ‘there is a process in place.’ But only when students stood up (in 2015), saying enough is enough, then you felt UCT was being moved forward. And RhodesMustFall in 2015 led – on our campus – to FeesMustFall in 2015 and 2016. Because of those conversations, the whole campus was reignited in a push for truly decolonizing – including new staff members and people of colour who had been excluded, renaming buildings, rethinking curriculum. It felt like it only became a thing because of RMF. It is a slow process, obviously, and there are lots of problems and lots of problematic people involved, but it has gone somewhere since then. And it was started by these students. The protest led to the statue being taken down, but it also led to a larger conversation about needing a space for students to really explore something which the university curriculum didn’t allow: African identity, Africanism, those ideas, decolonization of everything that they had learnt in high school which was already a problem. And because of the statue being taken away, the university tried to shut the protests down but students still managed to keep an online presence and host discussion groups on campus or in residences. This is what eventually led to FeesMustFall later. 

What was your response at first to RMF?

When it first happened, I was reading about the statue that day, and my parents were messaging me on the group chat – are you ok? I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t even know where the Rhodes statue was. I spent my first years just hating UCT. The pretentiousness of it. I spent most of my first year avoiding campus as much as possible. When things got real and they were talking about closing campus, it was the first time I was ever involved in a protest. Everyone at home was like, ‘you will not get involved in the nonsense. You will not go march.’ I listened because of my circumstances, but I followed everything online. I didn’t have transport. And I wanted to go for the night meetings and the debates but uber didn’t even take cash yet and I didn’t have a credit card, or someone to take me safely to campus and back. So I would follow on live streams, and do the readings from the links online. Every time the Jammie (campus Shuttle Service) was cut, I had to walk to campus. So I stayed away because of my family and my circumstances. But I was so intrigued by it because, for the first time, someone else other than me was saying that the pretentiousness of UCT was not ok. 

Why did these conversations intrigue you?

It always felt like it was a conversation I was missing. In third year, I read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man where everyone was having conversations that the one character could not understand and everyone was talking over his head and he could not connect. The character was trying to get into university, in a ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ kind of way. He was trying to think within the system and felt like he didn’t fit. But he didn’t engage in the alternative conversation. I feel like that all the time. I always miss things in real life. It’s not something you realize until someone calls you out to say, ‘who do you trust and listen to?’ So for me RMF was that moment that everything started making sense. The moment I started feeling like I didn’t have to just accept this. I felt like I had a lot of apologizing and fixing myself to do. 

What was the relationship between the conversations in your classes and the conversation on campus?

I was in the Humanities department, and you can tell a lot from how the three courses I was taking approached the RMF dilemma differently. They were all told to talk about RMF in class. So in History, the Empires and Modernities course made those conversations happen. In my Philosophy course, which was very white, we didn’t discuss those things. But in History they were having these conversations and putting them with readings and saying think about it. It was great being in those classes. In English, I did the African lit and Shakespeare course at the same time during RMF, and they were polar opposites. The Shakespeare lecturer said African lit is where people go for easy marks and yet he spent all his time talking about potatoes…That divide perfectly captured UCT for me. 

But there were some great courses that I did after the fact. Like the comics book course I took in 2016. When I picked the course, I picked it because I was doing Afrofuturism in lit and thought they would work well together. I didn’t know there was so much African history in comic books. I learned so much from it. Now when I do my own research I still go back to that reading list. I am really sad that that course is not offered anymore. The idea that we could explore something without having to write an essay about it in the end was so good for me. Even years later, people still talk about those projects from that class. How did that course come about? It was a pilot project, right? 

The Department has this really great way of making space for people to test out teaching new ideas that they are researching or wanting to introduce by having the second half of the third year core course divide into smaller working groups which they call Special Topics. I think there were about 8 options on offer the year I was approached to do the comic books course. The year before I had done one on the negotiated settlement years (1990-1994), trying to understand the escalation of internal conflicts in the midst of the ‘transition’ process. It was great – after reading about the negotiation conflicts, students got to do archival research for the first time and present to the class a range of sections from the Goldstone Commission of Enquiry which really disrupts the nationalist narrative and makes sense of where we find ourselves today. I liked how that course enabled people in the Department to dive into something new with interested students, since students had about 5-8 options of courses to do to complete third year, and could then develop honours proposals to take any of that research further. The themes of the seminars in the course we did also tried to open up conversations about production and representation of historical narratives.

Where did you start when deciding how to (re)present Rhodes Must Fall conversations with images?

I think the undergrad project was definitely influenced a lot by the class I had with you and your Crossroads comic. For example, in Crossroads there were a lot of really powerful drawings of political comics and photographs, right? I remember there was a picture of the power struggle in the Nationalist Party as two captains fighting to steer a sinking ship. And that image still stays with me because of how the picture contextualized the words you used in that panel. And when I read your comics, I would often get confused by what I was meant to take away from the picture. Now that I’ve drawn my own attempt, I think I understand my struggle then a bit more. I say Crossroads was influential because some of the methodology I was trying to understand I think I used in my own work. So there’s quite a few panels where I attempted to use historical images of the Queen or Rhodes to put across an idea that my words might not be clear enough to convey. I pulled up some old political cartoons and redrew them for my purposes. I also used powerful pictures from the RMF and subsequent protests, just redrawn, to create some intertextuality. And also because RMF was very visual. 

A strong thrust of RMF was about control of the narrative – of the past, but also of the unfolding struggle on campus for the insourcing of workers, for fees, for decolonizing the university. I liked how you drew on the very intentional archive that was being developed by the movement, in your comic.

I think the images and metaphor of the version I did for your class was so much better than the honours thesis that came next, but the one that became the honours thesis I tried to focus on the characters. Each character was a conversation I had with someone. Two were based on interviews and the other two was an amalgamation of conversations I had with people and was supposed to represent a larger discourse. If you try to analyze each character you come across contradictions within them. At the same time, this is something I was saying about RMF. But I wanted it to be open to interpretation. I used metaphors. When we discussed Trouillot (Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History) in class, one person talked about history as a tree and choosing the fruits to pluck, so that was part of why I added the tree to the comic. I also used the metaphor of a web and spider. I have always thought of history as weaving different narratives together. There was a movie I saw as a kid, The Last Mimsy, and there was a kid who used music and spiders to build a gorgeous bridge. The image has never left my head – spiders putting different narratives together. 

How did the non-essay/creative form change who you imagined as your audience when working on the comic book as compared to when you start writing an essay for an assignment in class?

When I write essays, it’s more that I know it’s going to be for the marker. I can imagine them and the History Department as a whole and I think of the structures I need to work into. It’s a lot easier. When I did the comic for you, you made it very clear that it was pressure free. Something for us to try and see where it goes. That’s why I was okay with handing in something incomplete because even though it wasn’t finished, I still felt like I had shown that it was possible and also good. I was expecting a low to mid pass, but I wasn’t really thinking about the mark. Whereas, when I started the honours comic after you left, there was a whole conversation that came up about it also being a history of reading and a complicated understanding of images that goes into it and about how comics do not necessarily simplify things because images and our understanding of them are complicated.

This is not to say that it wasn’t an important discussion to have. I think I’ve come to understand what they meant as time has passed and I’ve had the space to digest it, but at the time it was a lot of pressure because honours was a hectic year for me. I had to think of all these different ways the audiences could perceive it, and also balance that with the academic importance of the piece and how it fitted into that marking scheme. But I couldn’t go anywhere with the comic until I shoved the thoughts about the History Department aside, even though they were the only people who would probably read it. Still, I wanted to write it for the people at home who ask me, ‘what is RMF and isn’t a terrible thing students did?’ Because, within RMF, people have their own story and own views on it and they will explain it for themselves. The comic wasn’t for them, as they already wrote and knew those thoughts. The comic is for other people who may not know or have been there or remember. But, towards the end of the process, I had to throw in things to make it more formally historical because the Department told me it wasn’t historical enough. 

What is historical enough?

I don’t know, but I have tried to question that feedback and I view it as: talk to the larger structures, show the continuation of history, show how it fits into other narratives. I understand where they came from. But I didn’t think of History as a discipline that says: this, this, this. At first, History felt like it had more freedom than say, sociology. To me it was a very open field of inquiry, and it encompassed a lot. I thought my comic did that. 

So many people try to put RMF into protest history but they ignore the moment and the passion of it. Yes, they spoke of 1976 and a lost generation which was really important, but no one (at the time of RMF) was saying, we are just one of the many. No, it was: this is our moment. So how to put that in a comic and try to convince historians it is historical seemed to be a problem.

It seemed to me that RMF was steeped in and also cracking open history. Colonial history was central –  but the main point was to challenge how it is with us in the present and not be weighted down by the anti-apartheid liberation narrative that says that is past. And ‘who controls the narrative’ was such a core question to the shut-down. So it’s interesting that historians were asking you to insert a framework that contradicted what you were hearing Fallists saying or the pause that you were interested in exploring.

Exactly! And anyway, there are all these books that have come out about RMF that discuss either who was in it, what they did, one strand or issue, or a few key people etc. But the students themselves had to stand up and go through so many discussions to find the words to describe the language they needed and I wanted to celebrate those debates, not the pigeon hole of explaining them or summarizing them or putting RMF as a side note.

I was told to use my imagination and be free, but later these restrictions and pressures came in and I didn’t really know how to navigate them. I don’t think they were ever meant to be restrictive, just reminders, but I did not deal with them well in the time span I had. In that sense, I’m glad I didn’t manage to make my dissertation go beyond the background and debates of RMF. I don’t know how the Department would have dealt with marking a piece where superheroes go off into different worlds based on their ideas of what was needed in the world. How would you mark imaginative pieces created in the historical discipline?

That is still something I am figuring out/experimenting with. I think having reflective pieces that go along with the creative work can work well. For example, when we got second year history students at UCT to do a group exercise of researching and teaching a class to the class on a liberation struggle movement of their choice, we got them to also write up a mock tutorial assignment, a bibliography, and a reflective piece that touched on the decision making process: what did they research, and what did they then include, and what did they choose to exclude in the lecture/class activity and in the assignment they developed. Sometimes it feels like defeat to have to ask for an explanation in words of something creative, in this case illustrated/drawn, but I would want to hear about the process and understand the grappling with history and historical imagination that went into the piece. 

I am interested to hear more about the audience you had (have?) in mind given the debates about representation of RMF that you mentioned, and your own take that “RMF people have their own views on it and they will explain it for them. It wasn’t for them, they already wrote them, that is out there.”  Who was it for?

It was for people at home…Home for me is KZN (KwaZulu Natal), Ladysmith. Ladysmith is a small-town vibe in every sense of the word. When I lived there, you ended up with distorted small-town views. You can have Black and White and Indian friends. There were only a few Coloured people at my school. And you have those friends, but then you leave and you realize that some of the things you said and did and believed were very not ok. There’s a lot of racism and privilege, and all the things RMF spoke to made me rethink all of those privileges. The space we were in was very apartheid oriented, which makes sense. It’s a central place town surrounded by farmland, with a few factories like Dunlop, and lots of townships. Ladysmith… silenced people. It unintentionally created you as a person who still respected and aspired to whiteness. It is really hard going back into that space when you have realized all the ways you were bad, but then people there think you are bad for disrupting space, questioning those things, and saying ‘I now longer listen because you are older, or you are male. Racism is racism.’ So now they say: ‘you think you know better.’  

RMF and FMF caused a lot of friction with friends, from here and there. Some joined the protests just cus of the fee percentage increase. So this was in a way to speak to them. I go back to my high school often and a lot of people are still in the trap that the whole Ladysmith society creates for them: respectability. So this comic was to speak to them and people in Cape Town who think like that – mostly Indian people and White people. In RMF I met people who thought so differently. Were we all playing a part in this respectability in the past? I wanted to have that conversation with people, and maybe put the comic book to be online with links and a comments section – because at my old school they got rid of the library and replaced it with a computer center where you can’t download or print. So I thought this comic could be an entry point leading people to RMF resources to download and a place to debate or disagree with me. 

Has your family always lived in Ladysmith?

My father’s family landed up in Ladysmith from ships from India over a hundred years ago, depending on who you ask. Some say he came as stretcher bearer with Gandhi for the South Africa war, hoping the British will free India. So that means he might have been there during the siege of Ladysmith, as they came and worked as part of the medical corps. If my father is right, then our ancestor came as a chef. My mother’s father lived in Joburg. His father came from Surat, India to be a merchant. Both sides of the family were Gujrati. My father’s family was in KZN as a whole and had a farm somewhere between Newcastle and Escort. My great grandfather had over 20 children and they settled in Ladysmith because they started a family store. They had to fight for it during the Group Areas Act to keep it but it is still there. Both my parents went to study in Durban, and they got married and moved to Ladysmith together. My mother worked as a doctor for the state hospital and after apartheid ended, she started a private practice. My father became an optometrist. I was born 1995 and when I was growing up it was and still very much is apartheid separated – you talk about the Indian area where most of the Indian families live. Rose Garden is the upper middle class Indian area that leads towards the more lower middle and lower economic class of Indians. The White area was to our left. The Black area, if we call it that, was more around town and further out. It is an industrial town, with a lot of protests and taxi violence. A lot of White farmers were leaving and going to Australia around the transition and even now. 

What was growing up and schooling like there for you?

I went to an officially mixed pre-school and the classes were each separated by primary colours, but then you go in and see that inside you see one race – Indian children, Black children. In my class we were one of the few mixed classes. Primary school options for me was an Indian school, or an Islamic school. But my father sent me to what we called the ‘ White school.’ It was very Afrikaner White. We had to do bible class. It was mixed-medium so you had English and Afrikaans classes. When my class started that year, it felt like it was probably the first time Indians and Blacks were allowed into the school in such numbers. In my class there were about 7 Indians and 10 Blacks, but other classes were just Black and Indian kids. Towards the end we did Zulu for two years and we just sat in a classroom where there were some books we could read but no teaching, and it was kind of like a free period. And people started to say: ‘the school is going down.’ They meant, more Black and Indian kids were coming. But still it was not a school you could disrupt. High school it was also the same: what we called White, Black, or Indian schools. I went through with mostly the same kids from my primary school. But then they were starting to call them Ex-Model-C Schools etc., even though we knew which was the White School, the Indian School, etc. 

How did you come to the title: RMF:[Pre]Conceptions of a Movement?

I think the name works because this comic came out of dealing with my own and other people’s preconception of RMF – and movements in general. Even though it mostly talks about the beginning and immediate aftermath of the movement, I also hoped it would be a start of a longer journey (for myself and others) to engage in the ideas of RMF. And in doing so, maybe they can experience a small part of it themselves.

What are your thoughts now of the first comic?

It was so much better than I remembered. There is much more metaphor in the first comic than the second one. There is something better going on. 

What is your favorite panel?

Oh, this one is hard. I really loved the last page ‘a short reflection’ because it was the one that worked the best for me as a comic strip. And there was just so much meaning in it that I think we move on from or forget about unless we experienced it first hand. On the other hand, I really liked being able to use a ‘Year 3000’ song quote in that one random panel at the beginning…

What is the 3000 year song reference? Makes me think of Three Hundred Years, the seminal (and banned) anti-colonial history of South Africa written by the Unity Movement in 1952 as a response to the history being toted at the 300 year anniversary celebrations of Jan van Riebeek coming to the Cape. 

Oh wow, I’ve never even heard of that. That sounds way more in line with the comic to be honest… The line I was referring to goes ‘welcome to the year 3000. Not much has changed but we live underwater.’ It worked so well for my flipping the timeline opening, so I drew Jammie Hall underwater (top of page 2). If any place is going to stay practically the same for 1000 years… 

Speaking of next…. What are the next steps for the comics?

If the first comic, this comic, was good enough, it would be on a free website and links that would lead you back to RMF resources that you could use. I thought it could be an entry point and people could go and disagree with me – there would be a discussion section in the end. That was the dream.  

After the second comic, I decided to walk away from RhodesMustFall – if it was not historical enough for honours then it definitely won’t be for MA. I am trying something new, so the MA is about social science pedagogy in high schools. My hypothesis is that the way social science as a whole, history geography and life orientation, function together to build a very specific view that I felt that RMF and other such movements fought against. The way curriculum has divided things has led to a lot of friction between people and for understanding South Africa today. I’m still figuring it out. I hear you’re doing way cooler things at UWC these days though? Plus you have the visual archive there! 

We teach in teams and there is a lot of interest in creative and innovative approaches to teaching African history, so I am running with that and it’s been great. My second year class on Comparative Slave Rebellions in the Cape and the Caribbean does group project work creating digital stories, for example, and we are starting a new post grad course, Activist Archives: Struggles in and Over History, next year where we will look at critical and creative approaches to anti-colonial archives. The Mayibuye archives are indeed a treasure trove, and growing. Hopefully they become more widely used and interactive in the coming years. Lots to still figure in and figure out. Thank you for the conversations Zaynab – to be continued. 

Additional Resources Curated by Zaynab

The RhodesMustFall Reading List: If nothing else, search the ‘Rhodes Must Fall Reading List’ on Facebook: a treasure trove of articles and books about Pan Africanism, Black Consciousness, decoloniality, etc. that the students created/were provided with.

Some easily accessible articles that contextualise RMF, or add meaning to the students’ struggle:

RhodesMustFall, “Rhodes Must Fall sets Record Straight after Critique.” 

Alexandre Publia, “South African Students’ Question: Remake the University or Restructure Society?”

Maya Surya Pillay, “Coolie Reads Knausgaard.”

Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “‘Rhodes Must Fall’: South African Universities as Sites of Struggle.” LSE Africa Talks. Podcast audio. 

Christopher Mattison, “Delinking, Decoloniality & Dewesternization: Interview with Walter Mignolo (Part II).” 

Eve Fairbanks, “Why South African Students Have Turned on their Parents’ Generation.”

oNe StAB, “On UCT, its orientation programmes and the reproduction of white patriarchy.”

Tad Friend, “Protest Studies.”

Kavita Bhanot, “Decolonise, not Diversify.”

Khaya Sithole, “About market values, social vacuums and the land question…“

Scroll through these pages below (aim for 2015-2016 posts) to find articles, videos, posts and resources to further understand issues that RMF took up, as well as to further the agenda of finding a human-centered, decolonial future:

Please use the comment section below to connect with Zaynab and share additional resources.