Journal of Student Affairs in Africa | Volume 10(2) 2022, 239-244 | 2307-6267 | DOI: 10.24085/jsaa.v10i2.4371   239

www.jsaa.ac.za
AFRICAN 
MINDS

Book review

#FeesMustFall and its aftermath: Violence, wellbeing and 
the student movement in South Africa by T. M. Luescher, 
A. Wilson Fadiji, K. G. Morwe, A. Erasmus, T. S. Letsoalo 
& S. B. Mokhema (2022). Cape Town, South Africa: 
HSRC Press.
Reviewed by Relebohile Moletsane*

In a period where university management and the public have labelled students and 
student activists as violent and not focused on their studies, the book #FeesMustFall 
and its Aftermath: Violence, Wellbeing and the Student Movement in South Africa (Luescher 
et al., 2022) is not only significant, but it is also timely. #FeesMustFall and other 
student campaigns in 2015 and 2016 across South Africa’s higher education institutions 
reminded the university system of the need for relevance in programming, including 
curriculum and research. The book contributes to deepening our understanding of 
who our students are and what has shaped and continues to shape their experiences and 
outcomes in our institutions. The found poem below synthesises some of the themes and 
issues covered in #FeesMustFall and its Aftermath. Located within the broad area of poetic 
enquiry in which words from research transcripts or fieldnotes are used, a found poem 
uses the actual words of research participants to highlight the various messages or themes 
communicated in the piece (SAGE Research Methods, 2017). The poem is comprised 
of captions and comments from interviews with the participants cited in #FeesMustFall 
and its Aftermath.

Protest 
The battle of liberty or the epitome of violence? 
No retreat, no surrender 
No VIP in the revolution 
A betrayal of hope
The calm before the storm 
Spirit of unwanted peace
Strategic 
Conscientize and mobilize
Walk for a just cause
Mobilise, educate and strive
For our wellbeing

*  Relebohile Moletsane is professor and the JL Dube Chair in Rural Education in the School of Education 
and Pro Vice Chancellor: Social Cohesion at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Email: 
Moletsaner@ukzn.ac.za.

http://www.jsaa.ac.za


240   Journal of Student Affairs in Africa | Volume 10(2) 2022, 239-244 | 2307-6267 | DOI: 10.24085/jsaa.v10i2.4371

Escape to safe spaces
Spaces of strength
Joyful rebellion
(Re)Chillaxing! 

Presented in the form of a photo essay (Angelo et al., 2021), #FeesMustFall and its 
Aftermath is organised into 18 chapters that tell a story of “35 student activists from five 
South African universities and their experiences of violence and wellbeing in relation 
to their involvement in the student movement” (Luescher et al., 2022, p. 9). Hence, the 
book is a form of visual storytelling, made up of photographs that “operate as a form 
of collage… [of images that] aim not only to construct a comprehensible narrative and 
to communicate information, but also to achieve visual and emotional impact through 
editing and design” (Sutherland, 2016, p. 116). As the found poem above suggests, the 
photo essay presented in #FeesMustFall and its aftermath is made up of three sections, 
which the authors describe as three sets of exhibitions, each made up of several chapters.

In the first section, Chapter 1 introduces the notion of student well-being as a 
precondition for learning and success in university, especially for those students from 
poorly resourced communities and schools. The chapter locates the idea of student well-
being within the broader decolonisation imperatives and debates currently occupying 
curricular and institutional reforms in South Africa. Chapter 2 introduces the project 
and the book, providing the rationale for its focus on violence, well-being, and the use 
of photovoice “as a mode of inquiry and representation, and as a mode of dissemination 
and engagement” (Mitchell, 2011, p. 5). The project and the book use the participants’ 
photographs as both the methodology (Pink, 2001) and the subject of analysis, including 
their production and interpretation (Margolis, 2004). Concluding this section is 
Chapter 3, which focuses on the history of struggle in South Africa, juxtaposing the 
#FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall movements with the 1976 student protests against 
apartheid education legislation in South Africa. 

The second section is made up of nine chapters (chapters 4–12) which document, 
through photovoice, poetry, and dialogue, the students’ experiences of violence and its 
aftermath in the context of the 2015/16 #FeesMustFall protests. The issues documented 
range from oppressive spaces in and around universities or the geographies of the 
violence in the various universities (Chapter 4), the violence within the institutions 
(Chapter 5), and the students’ activism in terms of conscientizing and mobilising others 
to act (Chapter 6). Chapter 8 analyses the #FeesMustFall protest and its links to violence, 
which notably contrasted with earlier movements that saw participants resort to stone/
rock throwing (1976 anti-apartheid movement), littering (the late 1990s and early 
2000s), and fire setting (burning buildings and other structures) as weapons. Chapter 9 
outlines the project’s methodology and mode of dissemination, focusing on the book as 
a photo essay and the travelling exhibition, in which the photographs produced by the 
students are curated and exhibited to raise awareness and facilitate dialogue in various 
universities across the country. 



Relebohile Moletsane: Review of #FeesMustFall and its aftermath: Violence, wellbeing and the student movement …   241

#FeesMustFall and its Aftermath makes a critical methodological contribution. The 
book draws from a research tradition which aims to study the world (of South African 
higher education) from the perspectives of students as a group most impacted by the 
phenomenon (Maclure, 1990), viewing them as knowers and actors in their own lives 
(Oakley, 1994). To do this, the project on which the book is based used participatory 
visual methodology (PVM) with 35 students across five South African universities to 
investigate their experiences and perspectives of “violence on university campuses and 
the impact this has on student wellbeing … and to create awareness in the public, in 
government and among higher education policymakers and university leaders to ensure 
that student grievances are taken seriously without the need for protesting” (Luescher, et 
al., 2022, p. 16). Located within community-based participatory research, PVM uses the 
visual artefact, in this case, photographs, produced by participants, in this case, university 
students, to co-construct knowledge, including around difficult and controversial topics 
such as violence and marginalisation safely, and together, imagine alternatives to the 
social phenomena negatively impacting their lives. Its basic assumption is that the people 
who experience the problem are in the best position to describe and analyse the issues 
or conduct research on the subject. This is based on the understanding that to improve 
the lives of marginal groups, such as students in universities, researchers must enlist 
alternative research paradigms, drawing on the participants’ insights (Maclure, 1990). 
Importantly, with participatory research often functioning as an intervention, it makes 
it possible for researchers, working with participants to inf luence social change (Schratz 
& Walker, 1995). 

Specifically, #FeesMustFall and its Aftermath and the project on which it is based 
use photovoice as a participatory visual method. Photovoice is often traced back to 
Paulo Freire’s work in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and Caroline Wang’s work which 
investigates the experiences of Chinese peasants working in rice paddies (Wang & 
Burris, 1997). Wang et al (2004, p.  911) argue that as “a participatory-action research 
methodology based on the understanding that people are experts on their own lives”, 
photovoice involves placing cameras in the hands of the participants, particularly those 
who are often not listened to, such as students. The aim is to document their experiences 
and the inf luence of social phenomena (e.g. violence linked to student protests) in 
their lives. This enables them to tell stories that were “previously rejected, silenced, 
or overlooked … [with] the photograph’s narrative becom[ing] a participatory site for 
wider storytelling, spurring community members to ref lect, discuss, and analyse the 
issues that confront them” (Singhal & Devi, 2003, p. 7). 

Therefore, using photovoice (and other arts-based methods such as poetry), the 
project and the book, #FeesMustFall and its Aftermath, aim to open up democratic spaces 
for participants and other students who bear witness through the exhibitions and the 
dialogues linked to them, and extend participant students agency through the process 
of telling their own stories as students in higher education institutions in South Africa. 
In the hope that policy- and decision makers at universities are compelled to confront 
these issues, since ignoring them when they are visually (through the images) in their 



242   Journal of Student Affairs in Africa | Volume 10(2) 2022, 239-244 | 2307-6267 | DOI: 10.24085/jsaa.v10i2.4371

faces is harder to do. Thus, the book challenges higher education institutions to think 
seriously and creatively about what to do about violence, including structural, symbolic, 
and physical violence in and around institutions and the interventions needed to ensure 
the well-being and success of the students these institutions enrol. As Caroline Wang, 
pioneer of photo-voice, concluded, 

Images contribute to how the participants see themselves, how they define and relate to 
the world, and what they see as significant to address or change. The lesson an image 
teaches does not reside in its physical structures but rather in how people interpret the 
image in question. (Wang, 1999, p. 186) 

Other chapters in the section include a focus on gender (and gender-based violence) 
within the student movement (Chapter 10), the fear and trauma instigated by 
intimidation, police (and private security company) brutality against protesting students 
(Chapter 11), and the negative outcomes of protests (Chapter 12). 

The third section of the book responds to Schratz and Walker’s (1995) notion of 
research as social change. Chapters in this section document how student activists and 
their allies advocated for change (Chapter 13), how they developed unity and solidarity 
among themselves and other students (Chapter 14), how they sought and nurtured their 
own and others’ well-being (Chapter 15), and how they found escape from the violence 
and safe spaces to cope with its aftermath (Chapter 16). Challenging the widespread 
belief that student protests are simply violent undertakings with no real purpose and 
that students engage in them because they are not serious about their education, Chapter 
17 documents the student movement as purposeful and students as active knowers and 
actors focused on achieving success in education and contributing to their own and 
others’ well-being in the process. 

Chapter 18 concludes the book and foregrounds the volume’s contribution to 
scholarship, activism and social change in the South African higher education system. 
Using photovoice and other participatory research methods, #FeesMustFall and its 
Aftermath highlights the nature and manifestations of violence within the student protest 
movement in South Africa and its negative impacts on student well-being and success 
in their studies. Importantly, it is a call to action for student activists to find alternative 
ways of protest that do not involve violence, and for university and higher education 
system policymakers to understand, from the perspectives of the students themselves, 
the nature and inf luence of violence and strategies needed for social and curricular 
change, including the decolonisation of the university and its programmes. Through the 
images or the various sets of exhibitions and captions it presents, as a photo essay, the 
book “open[s] up dialogue and asks questions about the numerous forms of [violence] 
materiality and altered landscapes that the authors have chronicled” (Angelo et al., 2021, 
p. 154).

Finally, #FeesMustFall and its Aftermath raises the bar on methodological relevance and 
rigour in investigating students’ experiences of violence and well-being in universities. 
The book generatively and creatively draws on and contributes to contemporary 



Relebohile Moletsane: Review of #FeesMustFall and its aftermath: Violence, wellbeing and the student movement …   243

theoretical thinking and empirical work on violence and student well-being in higher 
education institutions, such as the book, Studying While Black, by Swartz, Mahali et al. 
(2017), and their documentary, Ready or Not! Black Students’ Experiences of South African 
Universities. Swartz and her colleagues also used photovoice and other arts-based methods 
(storytelling, video documentary) to document the experiences of black students in 
eight universities in South Africa. Their study concluded that skills and systemic change 
are needed to address inequality, including disparities among students linked to socio-
economic class, race, gender and other markers of identity, and the exclusion, violence 
and exploitation many students experience in universities. 

As such, it is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on student activism and 
violence and strategies needed to address its aftermath. 

References 
Angelo, D., Britt, K., Brown, M. L., & Camp, S. L. (2021). Private struggles in public spaces. Journal of 

Contemporary Archaeology, 8(1), 154-184. https://doi.org/10.1558/JCA.43379.
Maclure, R. (1990). The challenge of participatory research and its implications for funding agencies. 

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 10(3), 1-19.
Margolis, E. (2004). Looking at discipline, looking at labour: Photographic representations of Indian 

boarding schools. Visual Studies, 19, 72-96.
Mitchell, C. (2011). Doing visual research. SAGE. 
Moletsane, R. (2018). ‘Stop the war on women’s bodies’: Facilitating a girl-led march against sexual 

violence in a rural community in South Africa. Studies in Social Justice, 12(2), 235-250. DOI: 
10.26522/ssj.v12i2.1655.

Oakley, A. (1994). Women and children first and last. Parallels and differences between children’s and 
women’s studies. In B. Mayall (Ed.), Children’s childhoods observed and experienced (pp.  13-27). 
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Pink, S. (2007). Doing visual ethnography. (2nd ed.). Sage Publications.
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Methods. https://methods.sagepub.com/video/lynn-butler-kisber-defines-poetic-inquiry.
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Routledge. 
Sutherland, P. (2016). The photo essay. Visual Anthropology Review, 32(2), 115-121. 
Swartz, S., Mahali, A., Moletsane, R. Arogundade, E., Khalema, E.N., Cooper, A., & Groenewald, C. 

(2018). Studying while black: Race, education and emancipation in South African universities. HSRC 
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Wang, C. (1999). Photovoice: A participatory action research strategy applied to women’s health. Journal 
of Women’s Health, 8(2), 185-192.

Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology and use for participatory needs 
assessment. Health Education & Behaviour, 24(3), 369-387.

Wang, C., Morrel-Samuels, S., Hutchison, P., Bell, L., & Pestronk, R. (2004). Flint photovoice: Community 
building among youths, adults, and policymakers. American Journal of Public Health, 94(6), 911-913. 
DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.94.6.911.

https://www.researchgate.net/deref/http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.26522%2Fssj.v12i2.1655


244   Journal of Student Affairs in Africa | Volume 10(2) 2022, 239-244 | 2307-6267 | DOI: 10.24085/jsaa.v10i2.4371

How to cite: 
Moletsane, R. (2022). Review of #FeesMustFall and its aftermath: Violence, wellbeing and the student 

movement in South Africa by T. M. Luescher, A. Wilson Fadiji, K. G. Morwe, A. Erasmus, T. S. 
Letsoalo & S. B. Mokhema. Journal of Student Affairs in Africa, 10(2), 239-244. DOI: 10.24085/
jsaa.v10i2.4371