Locus of Struggle: The African Campus and Contemporary Protest Forms

Abstract

In this article, we begin from the presupposition that the university campus–historically, in the popular imagination, and in any possible futures worth fighting for–is a terrain of struggle. Drawing from our ongoing study, which has documented and digitally mapped more than 700 campus protest events occurring over the past 20 years across Africa, we explore protest as a lens for interpreting the experience and continued renegotiation of the very idea of the contemporary African university. In our analysis, we trace protest in two ways: (1) as a tactical form, to explore the major catalysts, political strategies, and institutional and state responses to campus protests today; and (2) as a spatial form, to examine spatialities of struggle through which campus geographies are produced, contested and remade. Ultimately, we argue that attention to campus protests confirms the continued importance of the university to popular struggles in Africa.