The Student Protests Roiling South Africa

One afternoon last week, I went to the supermarket near my flat in Cape Town. The shop was almost empty, and as I stood and dithered over different kinds of spaghetti I could hear a woman and her friend in the next aisle discussing the protests. For nearly a year, students at many of South Africa’s public universities had been rallying against proposed national tuition hikes. The demonstrations had recently intensified, and the focus had shifted. Fee increases were no longer the issue; the protesters now demanded higher education that was both free and decolonized—scrubbed of its apartheid-era European bias. Campuses across the country, including the University of Cape Town (U.C.T.), were shut down. It seemed to be all people could talk about.