Decolonizing the University: A Critical Exploration of the Rhodes Must Fall Movement and the Politics of Reckoning in Higher Education

Abstract

The longstanding and ongoing liberation struggles for a decolonized African university, a search for a modern African identity, an epistemic citizenship, and an autonomous African development raised the question of decolonization when a Black student hurled a pail filled with human excrement against the Cecil John Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, sparking the formation of the RMF movement on March 9, 2015. Grounded in both the Decolonial Critical Discourse Analysis (DCDA) and theory of Decoloniality, the objective of this study was to explore the Rhodes Must Fall movement and analyze the politics of reckoning, epistemic justice, and institutional transformation in higher education. The aim was to critically examine how the RMF movement challenged the persistent coloniality within the African university and fostered a pluriverse knowledge system, decolonized leadership, and pedagogy. Through an analysis of speeches, institutional statements, media coverage, visual and symbolic materials, and peer-reviewed journal articles, the study investigated how Black students sought to make sense of their experiences in a Western-dominated university by de-linking from UCT's Eurocentric curricula and creating their own decolonial frameworks based on Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness, Black radical feminism, epistemic disobedience and Fanonism. This thesis argues that decolonization remains an ongoing yet unfinished project that requires continuous unlearning of colonial structures and the dismantling of systemic hierarchies. The RMF movement served as both an epistemic and political intervention, exposing the limitations of liberal multicultural reforms that fail to address the deeper, more profound issues of coloniality.