‘Rainbow is not the new black’: #FeesMustFall and the demythication of South Africa’s liberation narrative

In the 1990s, South Africa transitioned from apartheid to liberal democracy. Heroes, place names, holidays and symbols were revisited and replaced to reflect a ‘new’ nation and delineate a clear break from the ‘bad old days’. Central to this nation-building narrative is the figure of Nelson Mandela as a unifying hero exemplifying the ideals of this new nation. South Africa is now experiencing another transition. The so-called ‘born free’ generation mobilised for the first time on a mass scale in the 2015–2016 #FeesMustFall (#FMF) student protests at universities nationwide. Initially focussed on financial accessibility of higher education, these massive protests also questioned the rhetoric, narrative and heroes of the ‘new’ nation, reprising counter-hegemonic and hidden scripts to deconstruct the post-1994 hegemonic discourse and expose enduring inequality. Centring our analysis on interviews with Pretoria-based protesters, we position the students as experts on themselves distilling theoretical insights that emerge from their articulated experiences. We show that students engaged in a powerful project of dismantling a national narrative, questioning Nelson Mandela as ‘father’ of the nation, rejecting the unifying and temporal terminology that rhetorically placed apartheid’s inequalities in the past, and calling for the deconstituting of South Africa, the settler-created polity.