Duduzile Unathi Ndlovu
March 2025 will mark the ten-year anniversary of the RhodesMustFall (RMF) movement’s emergence at South Africa’s ‘leading’ university, the University of Cape Town. With it, a series of commemorative events, publications and activities are taking place throughout 2025. Through Collective Memory Work, my doctoral research project hopes to offer an archive that counters mainstream and institutional perspectives ‘about RMF without RMF’, towards enriching the upcoming moment of historical reflection/commemoration. As a fallist through and following collective reflection with other fallists, my doctoral study further attempts to critically consider undertheorised (im)possibilities of the movement’s praxis of ‘Fallism’. Ultimately, and through CMW, my project attempts to centre from the margins archive(s) of Black Radical Feminists’ knowledge(s) and perspectives about the movement. This, towards critical scholarship about the movement’s pitfalls and potentials in trying to understand and address unresolved demands for social transformation or decolonisation within South African Higher Education and beyond.
In pursuit of the above study, and scheduled to take place just over a month before the symposium, my CMW project will have involved applying the method with and about feminist activists of the RhodesMustFall (RMF) movement, towards critical and collective reflection on the (im)possibiliRes of the movement 10 years later. As a novice practitioner of the Collective Memory Work (CMW) method, my intention with this presentation is to invite more experienced practitioners and scholars of the method to join me in reflecting on my experience applying CMW for the first time. This presentation will express itself as a reflective discussion prompted by the questions emerging from my first attempt applying CMW with my RMF feminist comrades, further contextualised by the origins of CMW as emerging as a “practical intervention in the women’s movement, and socialist politics; … a ‘call on the many’ (Haug 1999: 15) and definitely not meant to be restricted to uses within university settings” (Hamm 2021, p3). In this way, this presentation hopes to initiate discussion around the possibilities and limitations of CMW’s theoretical and practical underpinnings, in the context of contemporary social movements. How (if at all) does CMW make it possible to collectively articulate, archive and critically analyse the ‘stories’ or ‘myths’ we silence and/or tell ourselves about African Decolonial Feminist – ‘fallist’ – organising for radical change in South African Higher Education and beyond?