#RhodesMustFall: Decolonizing Education, Performative Pedagogy and Epistemic Disobedience

When a black student threw feces against a bronze statue of British imperialist, Cecil John Rhodes, located at the University of Cape Town (UCT), it sparked the formation of the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) movement in 2015. The black student-led #RMF movement sought to decolonize UCT by confronting institutional racism and patriarchy through a series of disruptive tactics. In order to make sense of their experiences in a predominantly white, liberal university, black students began de-linking from the dominant model of Euro-American knowledge, adopting pan-Africanism, black consciousness and black radical feminism as a decolonial framework. This process of de-linking or 'epistemic disobedience', generated an emergent idea of 'Fallism' following the fall of the Rhodes statue. Students argued that Fallism disrupted dominant knowledge structures through its radical, performative pedagogy. Furthermore, students at Oxford University who were inspired by #RMF created the #RMF Oxford movement that also focused on decolonizing the university. This exportation of Fallism from the South to the North—from the colonized to the colonizer—constitutes a 'theory from the south.' By adopting epistemic disobedience as a conceptual framework, I argue that Fallism can be constructed as an emergent theory generated through a dual process of de-linking and performative pedagogy.