South African higher education language politics post #RhodesMustFall: The terrain of advanced language politics

Abstract

In 2015, South African higher education witnessed student-driven activism in the form of various #movements, beginning with the #RhodesMustFall campaign at the University of Cape Town, which morphed into the national #FeesMustFall movement. A corollary to these #movements was a language-specific #movement namely #AfrikaansMustFall. Very little literature exists on this latter movement in contrast to the sizeable literature corpus on the other two #movements. While highlighting this hiatus in the research literature, through a combination of extensive literature review and polemical analytic auto-ethnographic analysis, the article argues that the language contestations in south African higher education after #RhodesMustFall transcend the provincialism that hitherto defined language politics in the sector. To advance this thesis, the article argues that south African higher education language politics post #RhodesMustFall are an invitation to the terrain of advanced language politics...