Introduction
When a statue falls, the plinth becomes a stage.
As the first act of the 2016 South African play The Fall culminates, seven actors encircle a monument of three stacked tables.Footnote 1 They sing:
The actors move slowly around the circle, chanting in harmony, as each speaker recounts their memories in turn. The first to speak, Camilla admits, “I was away when it happened,” but she knew—as did Kgothatso, who steps up next—“Something big is about to happen . . . masses waiting impatiently for him to come down off his colonial throne . . .” (31; ellipses in original). Finally, the moment arrives. The statue of Cecil John Rhodes, which had stood at the administrative center of South Africa's University of Cape Town (UCT) since 1934, is removed as though by invisible crane. Boitshokso narrates: “Rhodes was suspended in the air and he swung a few inches above the plinth” (31). The seven cadres sway together, their bodies mirroring the imagined statue's movement.
The moment the statue lands, Chwaita, a petite Black woman, jumps on the vacated plinth. Her speech crosses oceans, addressing audiences around the globe to describe a world-spanning, transhistorical movement for decolonization:
When Rhodes fell, the world stopped. History was suspended in the air and continued to wash over us, like a salty, healing wave. . . . I heard the slaves who hadn't arrived and the singing on the Mendi. I heard the cameras buzz. I heard Eric Garner across the Atlantic. The taunts of the people around me, reprimands at the excited crowd—we're foaming at the mouth! (34)
The fall of the statue collapses time and space into Chwaita's frame, as her memory draws together remote cities and distant experiences into the present crowd. The networks invoked in her speeches embed the listeners in a global struggle: the murder of a Black American in 2014 echoes together with the deaths of 646 South African sailors, drowned in the English Channel in 1917. Together with her cadres, Chwaita offers an anti-colonial history, challenging centuries of colonial silencing.
The Fall was written over the course of two months by nine recent drama graduates at UCT, recording their experiences as Black students there and in the Fallist movement from 2015 to 2016. For the past year, universities across South Africa had been shut down by a series of student protests demanding the symbolic, curricular, and structural decolonization of higher education. UCT students initially organized in March 2015 to demand the removal of the Rhodes statue before turning their attention to the structural inequalities that continue to harm Black South Africans seeking higher education. The protesters mobilized digital media to build a transnational movement, spurring discussions about higher education and economic access around the world. Since 2016, their movement has been celebrated as a singularly powerful call for transformation in higher education, igniting conversations about the symbols and monuments that shape public spaces around the world (Mpofu-Walsh; Mavunga).
The Fall's nine scenes interweave public demonstrations with private debates and deliberations to recount the movement's complex history from statues to school fees, and finally its fracturing. In the play, though, no narrative rests complete. Refusing to replace one monument with another, The Fall instead enacts a performance-sensitive, anti-colonial theory of history. Performance historiography, following Dwight Conquergood, prioritizes copresence and shared feeling over the singular representation of monumentalism (“Performance Studies”).Footnote 2 Where archival methods prioritize documentation, the repertoire of performance highlights embodied structures of memory, which grow and change in response to collective needs. As Diana Taylor argues, a repertory framework, in contrast with an archival one, enables antihegemonic models of knowledge production (Archive xvii)—models that, in the South African context, represent anti-colonial approaches to the study of history.
If, as Sabine Marschall postulates, “public commemoration [in monuments] is based on selective remembering and strategic forgetting” (204), repertory historiography instead emphasizes collective remembering. Unlike the statue, which monumentalizes a static past, the play insists on conflict, movement, and difference. Unlike the plinth, which hosts a singular representation of singular history, the stage offers a space for collective movement and transformation. When the plinth becomes a stage, then, it opens a space to rewrite national history and to reimagine what constitutes history. By bringing the plinth onto the stage, The Fall makes it an object of contestation, implicitly open to change. Understood within the movement to decenter Eurocentric histories, the transformation of plinth into stage marks an epistemic turning point: from statue, or product, to protest, or process.
In this essay, I evaluate how The Fall theorizes historiography, positioning the play first in relationship to the history it presents and second through the longer trajectory of theater as historiography in South Africa. I draw on close readings of the play and interviews with the two curators and the facilitator—Ameera Conrad, Thando Mangcu, and Clare Stopford—to illustrate The Fall's repertory, anti-colonial approach to history. Bringing together Taylor's paradigm of the archive and the repertoire with Achille Mbembe's critique of the archive as monument, I argue that The Fall's historiographic structure reflects broader shifts against monumentalism and toward the repertory epistemologies of the protest. By offering a repertory response to monumental history, The Fall positions the Fallist movement as itself a response to shifting media paradigms that enable youth voices to articulate their own historical weight.
The Fall and the Fallists
The Fall tells the story of the 2015–16 #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall protests at UCT.Footnote 3 The Fallist movement began with a spectacular action: during a small demonstration on 9 March 2015, the UCT student Chumani Maxwele threw excrement on the statue of the imperialist Rhodes at the heart of campus. The Rhodes statue, which had stood since 1934, signaled the school's debt to the colonial administrator on whose bequeathed land it stands.Footnote 4 The university's founding debt consigned it a colonial legacy at odds with claims to a liberal past, and in direct conflict with growing pushes to decolonize university curricula. Marschall argues that the bronze statue, “an idealized frozen likeness of the ‘enemy’” occupying a uniquely prominent position on campus, was “an affront and provocation” to the university community (210). Responding to the provocation, Maxwele's spectacular action inflamed ongoing debates about colonial legacies in education, launching a series of protests collectively known as #RhodesMustFall.
The Rhodes statue became a synecdoche for the legacy of the apartheid-era educational system, which left Black communities structurally underserved.Footnote 5 Educational inequality in South Africa has garnered regular protests since the advent of majority rule in 1994. South Africa's constitution promises access to “basic education” for all, including adult education, and “further education, which the state, through reasonable measures, must make progressively available and accessible” (Constitution, ch. 2, sec. 29). But the country's long-standing division of schooling—between rural and urban districts, poor and rich, Black and white—persists, as under-resourced provincial ministries of education struggle to redress enduring infrastructural imbalances: schools in majority-Black areas have unusually low numbers of teachers per student and low amounts of classroom resources, and concurrently low graduation rates (Essack and Hindle).
These inequalities, together with the unfulfilled constitutional promise, have fomented blistering frustrations with the state of educational opportunity in South Africa (Healy-Clancy; Proposal). Rhodes's presence at the center of South Africa's most prestigious, most exclusive, and whitest tertiary institution was a constant reminder of the country's broader issues with racial and economic inequality: its founding shit. As Veronica Baxter and Mbongeni N. Mtshali argue, “Since 2011, human waste, excrement—shit—has been mobilized as part of protest actions . . . linked to the housing, sanitation and safety crisis in [Cape Town's] townships” (70).Footnote 6 By giving shit a place of pride at UCT, Maxwele highlighted the way broader spatial inequalities in South Africa reverberated in educational access. Lwandile Fikeni elaborates, noting that “by literally collecting the social reality of black life and dumping it on its cause, in the symbol of Cecil Rhodes, the [#RhodesMustFall] movement has been able to offer a profound lens that rejects poverty as a function of history” to insist on a reckoning with the unequal status quo (2).
The protests succeeded: the statue was removed a month later, on 9 April 2015. But Rhodes's dethroning did not address broader complaints about Eurocentric curricula and structural inequality. Student demonstrations resumed the following year, when Minister of Education Blade Nzimande announced a nationwide fee raise. Calling out the failed promises of twenty-five years of democratic governance, protesters argued that raising school fees would violate the constitution. Students shut down the University of the Witwatersrand, Rhodes University, and UCT within days before closing most higher education institutions in the following weeks. For many protesters, the call of “fees must fall” was a revolutionary follow-up to the anti-apartheid movement of the late twentieth century.
Digital mediation brought Fallism into every interested household, distributing the university campuses into a broadly connected landscape. The movement quickly spread around the world, first surging as #RhodesMustFall at Oxford University in the United Kingdom and Harvard Law School in the United States before fomenting broader discussions about the role of statues and public memorials around the world (Mpofu-Walsh). Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, who helped lead protests at Oxford, suggests that Fallism offered a “programme of political action” (82) that subverts “the directionality of colonial logic as a theoretical strategy” by calling “us to embrace practice from the South” (83). The Fallist protesters did not merely demand access to higher education: they questioned the compromises the African National Congress (ANC) government had made, situating issues of education alongside housing equality, transportation, and rising structures of contingent employment. They proposed models of education, credentialization, and employment outside the European norms that structure the South African university.
Social media engagement heightened the visibility of the Fallist movement. Communication over Facebook allowed rapid organizing, and the phrase “hashtag fees must fall” became shorthand for the complex movement. The hashtag #FeesMustFall trended on Twitter, bringing the movement to international attention and keeping it there the following year, when fees were raised and protests renewed. Facebook and Twitter offered platforms for students to voice their own claims, even before the South African press started reporting on the movements; WhatsApp and private Facebook groups helped students organize events and gain legal support; and all offered communal spaces outside the university yet within its grounds, where students gathered.
The distributed structure of social media suited the movement's horizontal ethos. Social media has transformed the nature of social activism since 2008. Users’ ability to skirt censorship, anonymize their identities, and communicate in real time with large groups has had tremendous effects on contemporary activism (Tufekci). But for Fallism, in particular, social media played a key symbolic role: the digital emphasis on users’ “voices” legitimized the movement's focus on prioritizing student voices. And digital repositories, so vast as to be illegible, confound monumentalist approaches to the past: anyone can inscribe their own dissent. The Fallist movement offered new approaches to historiography and university structures by insisting on the role of community members in creating meaning.Footnote 7
In The Fall, students’ perspectives bring Fallism to life. The seven characters embody the diverse constituencies that made up the movement: Camilla, a radical feminist from the Cape Flats; Cahya, a nonbinary student drawn in through their work with the Trans Collective; Kgothatso, a studious protester who wishes to effect structural transformation from within; Zukile-Libalele, a Xhosa man who struggles when confronted with the harms of the patriarchy; Chwaita, a young woman from a wealthy background who initially questions the movement; Boitshokso, who calls for action as he faces growing student debt; and Qhawekazi, who unwittingly becomes the peacekeeper and leader of the group. These archetypal characters become human, as Mangcu notes, through stories drawn from the cast members’ experience. Through their research, the cast members created “an archive of the experience, so that people would know what had happened,” even as they created an artistic representation of that archive (Mangcu).
The slogan of the movement—“Nothing about us without us,” voiced by Chwaita early in The Fall (Baxter Theater Collective 20)—became the slogan of the playwrights as well, who worked with one another and with their fellow students to draft a living history of the movement (Conrad; Stopford, Interview). This performance-sensitive approach runs counter both to the archival impulses of broadcast media and to the monumentalizing approaches of the state, offering instead a method that reflects the importance of voice and representation in digital discourse. The proliferation of individual voices online makes claims to singularity or stability impossible, emphasizing change and time instead. The repertory production threatens the possibility of future inscription and monumentalization.
The play uses the words of community members to write the movement's history. The fourth scene, for instance, recounts the “Mass Meeting,” in which members of the university community discussed their experiences with racism and Eurocentrism at UCT. With a Facebook video of the event playing in the background, the actors stand in a line, their lips duct-taped closed. Momentarily freeing her mouth, Chwaita tells the audience, “This was the first time that black academics got up to speak about their experience” (Baxter Theater Collective 31). Zukile-Libalele recounts, “A cleaner got up and spoke about how she was constantly disrespected by white lecturers and students,” while Camilla remembers, “Adam Haupt said something that really stuck with me, he said: symbols matter; signifiers matter. But this is just the beginning of the decolonial process” (31). In each case, the performers reimagine others’ words and ideas, honoring the imperfection of memory over the solidity of history. Names are lost in memory's shroud: Qhawekazi recalls, “For me, the clearest thing was, this guy—I think he said his name is Mohammed—said that institutionalised racism isn't overt, it's what happens between the lines” (31). The individual becomes significant not through their singularity but through their contributions to a collective cause. The play's networked logic honors communities in motion over individual monuments.
Instead of elevating the front-stage spectacles that peppered newspapers and documentaries, The Fall focuses on backstage conversations and intimate reflections. Some audiences were uncomfortable seeing internal conflict staged: Conrad recalled that some students who attended preview performances were upset by the representation of fissures and discontent among the Fallists. But most—as Mangcu noted—were supportive, because this insistence on representation reflected the movement's own logic by bringing the conflicting voices to the fore. The play bridges historical gaps, writing private events into public archives. The writer-actors’ bodily engagements transform the archival work into one of repertory memory, which offers recourse against the illegibility of sprawling digital archives. The play's repertory historiography continues the work of the student movement: honoring anticolonial, Afrocentric epistemologies to reshape South African politics and policies.
Workshop Theater as Counterhistoriography
The Fallists contended that, twenty years after the end of apartheid, tertiary education was neither more available nor more liberated than it had been. As the characters in The Fall recount their respective moments of insight, Kgothatso recalls:
Ya neh, Cecil John Rhodes. I learned about him in my second-year African History course. It was then that I realised that the history they are teaching us is not the history of Africa but rather the history of how Britain and the Superpowers stole Africa and carved it up. . . . All I learned about Africans was how weak we were. Weak in weaponry, tribal in clothing—how we had to be “civilised” by the great Christian nations. Masepa, whose history is that? (Baxter Theater Collective 17)
Kgothatso's closing question—“Whose history is that?”—lingers throughout the play, which draws on workshop theater traditions to challenge the colonial histories that pervade education. In their stead, Kgothatso, like The Fall more broadly, insists on creating historiographic approaches that take collective memory into account, a difference Mbembe summarizes as “the way in which we put history to rest, especially histories of suffering, trauma, and victimization” (“Decolonizing the University” 30). Social media platforms gave students unprecedented opportunities for promoting their own voices, helping “question notions of documenting and who gets to tell the story” (Godsell et al. 109).
By moving between the official histories of education and the lived histories recounted in stories and family memory, the script calls into question “Eurocentric utterances on African history”—as Bhekizizwe Peterson demonstrates workshop theater did in the twentieth century (238). The historiographic work of The Fall reflects its connections to the workshop tradition in South Africa, where theater offered a means to reclaim Black histories. The Fall—like the protests themselves—grew out of two separate moments: 1976 and 2016. In their authors’ note on the text, the writers describe the play “as a reply to and follow-up of Black Dog, but simultaneously as a retrospective gaze and reflection on the events after the #RhodesMustFall Movement started—most importantly, from the perspectives of students of color” (Baxter Theater Collective 8). Workshop plays like Barney Simon's Black Dog / Inj'emnyama (1984), about the student uprisings of 1976, relayed an alternative vision of the African past and present to both domestic audiences and international observers.Footnote 8 The Fall was developed through a month-long workshop that drew on cast members’ experiences researching and performing in Black Dog / Inj'emnyama the year before. They studied their own and their peers’ experiences to tell the Fallist story from the students’ perspective. The Fall continues workshop theater's legacy as a means for Black South Africans to tell their own histories and have them heard.
Workshop theater's collaborative structure resists monologic approaches to history. All cast members are equally involved in the research and scripting of the play, creating a horizontal production process. As Conrad explained, the cast “wanted to work with the same ethos that #RhodesMustFall had: horizontal leadership, a more socialist structure of working as opposed to a playwright who gives you a text and then the director interprets a text and puts their vision on it and then the actors interpret the vision.” The play's entirely Black cast ensured that the narrative centered historically marginalized perspectives. In this sense, the play's performance historiographies redress the monumentalist histories of apartheid to insist on Afrocentric epistemologies and to decolonize theater.
Following Augusto Boal's model of the “theatre of the oppressed,” workshop theaters seek to liberate audiences by integrating their responses into the production of the work itself. Their approach to revolutionary theater takes for granted, as Boal writes, that “all of man's activities . . . are political. And theatre is the most perfect artistic form of coercion” (39). But where other models of political theater seek to coerce, workshop theater catalyzes audience engagement by offering outlets for extant frustrations.Footnote 9 In Kenya, for instance, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Ngũgĩ wa Mirii found that participatory processes could create politically potent theater, empowering audiences as agents. The “bottom-up” approach of development theater and workshop theater carries implicitly revolutionary possibilities, both through the social structures it brings together and through the narratives it stages.
During the apartheid era, workshop theater gave Black artists a means of telling otherwise invisible or silenced histories.Footnote 10 Censorship laws heavily guarded what plays could be performed, when, and to which audiences. Recalling her experiences in South Africa, Janet Suzman writes poignantly of the censorship office's idiomatic selection process: “When I directed Othello in 1986–87—a play about race and sex if there ever was one—no bans were served. . . . Shakespeare—bless him—was never listed as a bannable person under any sub-clause in any legal act. And is one surprised? I mean, who would dare?” (160). Suzman's recollection pinpoints two key components in the development of workshop theater: first, that certain (European) cultural productions provided shelter from censorship; and second, that censorship was haphazard at best, leaving theater makers to divine the best way around censors. The first of these shaped the content of workshop theater; the second shaped its aesthetics.
Like the theaters themselves, South African schools taught a history based on colonial and apartheid ideologies.Footnote 11 Black histories, if they were to be told, would require alternative, unofficial approaches to documentation and reporting. As the historian Pierre Nora argues, “At the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory. History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it” (9). Workshop theater rejected Eurocentric historiography to celebrate instead a temporal awareness rooted in memory. Peterson argues in his study of “Black performance initiatives from the Seventies” that “the representation of history has been an important preoccupation of black performance” (237), because “playwrights are . . . committed to negating Eurocentric utterances on African history” (238). Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona's play Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1971), for instance, highlights the material effects of apartheid pass laws on Black lives—a story rarely seen at the time. In a more direct historiographic intervention, Simon's Black Dog / Inj'emnyama drew on its cast members’ experiences in the 1976 Youth Revolt, together with their research into soldiers’ and bystanders’ experiences, to give South African audiences new perspectives on that story (Stopford, Interview). These messages worked, like revolutionary theater elsewhere, to transform theatergoers into political activists, while using theater's claims to invention to avoid direct censorship.
Workshop plays were largely produced on limited budgets and with a characteristically bare form. After 1948, funding for Black cultural production was relegated to rural Bantustan governments. Urban Black communities—which were seen, “in accordance with Verwoerdian ideology, as temporary sojourners” in white spaces (Peterson 233)—were left without access to theatrical funding or venues. Performances took place in “local community and church halls and cinemas. These venues are literally empty spaces, or all-purpose venues if you prefer” (233). Material constraints fostered a common aesthetic among the diverse range of plays: “spartan and highly mobile” (Okagbu 700), workshop theater relied on simple sets—proverbially as little as a blanket and a sleeping pad—which could be packed up at a moment's notice before the censor or the police arrived (Conrad). Bare sets and didactic writing allowed performers to take advantage of these changeable spaces.
The Fall's set recalls this earlier aesthetic: its stage is bare save for three tables, variously configured to evoke different settings; it combines active scenes with narrative monologues that break the fourth wall; and the cast uses familiar protest songs, punctuated with marches and claps, to invite audience participation. Although this emphasis on participatory theater and defamiliarization evokes Brechtian approaches to resistance theater, it refuses Brecht's vision of action through alienation (Crow). Instead, the play's “hyperrealism” acknowledges the audience's role in the performance's meaning, in order to “reconquer the empathy that is always lost every time a performance tends toward a high degree of abstraction” (Boal 181). Although the writers did, briefly, consider a more experimental style, they ultimately found that the realist tone reflected the play's goals: “to answer the question: what does the public need to know to understand why black students . . . are calling for the decolonization of the entire institution of the University of Cape Town?” (Stopford, “Witnessing” 1). The playwrights inscribed youth voices as primary historical definers, continuing the work of the students who had used social media to displace the discursive authority of the faculty and administrators.
The Fall wrote the first history of the Fallist movement. And its focus on students’ perspectives diminished the administration's narrative control, threatening the administration's power more broadly. According to Stopford:
When Max Price (our vice chancellor then) came to see The Fall he challenged us saying we had not given the full picture. . . . When asked why the play should not favour the students’ point of view, Mr Price's reply was: “it's the only archive out in the public sphere at the moment, that is my concern.” He had missed the entire point. . . . Theatre was doing what the hegemonic logos of science, law and journalism would not do—tell a story of pain and struggle undiluted by a rotating perspective. (“Witnessing” 4)
Price's concern was justified, though, in that the play was truly “the only archive out in the public sphere at the moment.” When the play was produced in early 2016, no major histories could have been written about Fallism: the movement was ongoing, and the cast members collaborated with organizers to ensure that their work would not interfere with the university shutdowns (Conrad). A collection of scholarly essays, cowritten by students, would come out later that year, at academic warp speed. Rehad Desai's Everything Must Fall, a documentary about Fallism at Wits University, came out in 2018. A stream of academic books and articles have expanded the analysis since. But in early 2016, the primary narratives available were those documented on social media, which highlighted students’ views, and those reported on broadcast media, which relied on university administrators as primary definers. The cast's polyvocal, performance-sensitive approach to history reflected the movement's anticolonial demands and resisted the monumentally singular narratives of the broadcast media.
The Fallist movement's story and ethos shaped the play's narrative and construction, respectively. The Fall rejects monologic history—which Nora defines as “a representation of the past”—in favor of collective memory, an “affective and magical” relationship to the past, that “nourishes recollections” (8). Throughout, scenes from plenary meetings tie the story to its history, reminding us of the dissenting desires, experiences, and values that threaten to tear the movement apart at any point. In The Fall's third scene, for instance, during an impromptu open mic between protest actions, Zukile-Libalele recites his lineage in a praise poem, which ends with a challenge: “Memory knows our history, yet books fail to recognize it. Clan names paint history right before our eyes in rich images of our sovereign past” (Baxter Theater Collective 29). Positioning praise songs as historiography, The Fall challenges the division between memory and history, and the authorities that honor one above the other. It insists on the tension and transformation of the repertoire over the stable vision of the monument. Unlike the plinth, which accommodates only the static bronze figure, the stage is a space of movement, change, and complexity—the forces that motivate any protest movement.
Monument and Repertoire
The Fall's historiographic sensibility emerges in its first scene. As the play opens, a voice rings out of the darkness, singing, “Nobody wanna see us together” (Baxter Theater Collective 11). Others join in, “Zumba, zumba, yo.” Their song blends the familiar apartheid-era isiXhosa protest “Tlosang Magwala a Che Che” (“Get Rid of Cowards”) with lyrics from Akon's 2006 single “Don't Matter.” Seven pairs of footsteps sound in unison, and as the lights come up, the cast marches in, bound shoulder to shoulder. The blended musical traditions, and the histories they evoke, speak to the play's larger point: the movement is intersectional, it is Black-led, and it is fractious. Gradually, the lighting transforms, from a cool light illuminating the whole group to a warmer tone focusing on individual actors, as each steps forward in turn to recount their first experiences of the movement.
This opening scene sets a hopeful tone. Characters describe their memories of protest, which transforms them—in Cahya's words—“from UCT students to uMkhonto weSizwe [fighters for the nation] real fast” (11). The transformation from individual students to militant collective, from English speakers to isiZulu speakers, realizes the movement's pan-African aspirations—voiced in Zukile-Libalele's declaration that “I march because Africa is all I have” (11). This is one of the few fully public moments the play recounts, and it does so in an insistently polyvocal manner, as individuals jostle with one another to take up the collective telling of their collective story. The blocking mirrors these concerns: characters stand or sit together; they march in a circle, facing one another and highlighting their nonhierarchical structure; even standing still, their movements are relatively synchronized, suggesting their connection to one another. They sing together, learn together, and, in Cahya's words, “become Biko blacks” together, educated in the theory of decolonization and radical in their demands (15).
The collective effervescence of public protest momentarily sweeps aside political and personal differences. Yet fractures emerge. The inclusion of private scenes allows The Fall to preserve the complexity and inconsistencies that characterized the movement and thus to resist the monumentalist impulses of the statue. In the second scene, the Fallists’ “First Plenary,” a debate breaks out over how to handle the statue. Zukile-Libalele calls for its immediate removal: “We must be violent with a system that is violent towards us” (17). Kgothatso rejoins, “We must force [the administration] to do the work themselves” (17). Their argument grows, each speaking over the other, until Chwaita intervenes to demand clarification about decolonization. She asserts, “Actually, I am made up of a very wide genealogical range, as are most of you in this room. It is not just black or white. All I am saying is that we must be careful of sounding racist” (18). Chwaita's point is dismissed, and the group quickly returns to debate the proper means of statue removal: hammer and chisel or truck and rope? But her question reverberates throughout the play, as women, nonbinary people, and mixed-race people all question their representation in Fallism, resisting the sometimes-essentializing impulses of the movement's anticolonial efforts.
The Fall prioritizes the complexity of bodily experience over the singularity of immovable monuments. It thus presents a repertory approach to history. In this framing, I draw on Taylor's paradigm of “the archive and the repertoire” as alternative modes of establishing and maintaining historical knowledge. Taylor builds on Conquergood's exhortation to respect the nontextual transmission of knowledge. According to Conquergood, “Whereas a textual paradigm privileges distance, detachment, and disclosure as ways of knowing, . . . a performance paradigm insists upon immediacy, involvement, and intimacy as modes of understanding” (“Beyond the Text” 26). By demanding involvement, performance transforms the relationship between history and the present, making the historical actors copresent with their contemporary audience. Indeed, as Taylor argues, “The repertoire requires presence: people participate in the production and reproduction of ‘being there,’ being a part of the transmission. As opposed to the supposedly stable objects in the archive, the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same. The repertoire both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning” (Archive 20).
While the repertoire demands copresence in a shared moment, the archive's materiality relies on spatial stability: Mbembe writes, “The archive has neither status nor power without an architectural dimension” (“Power” 19). The archive building, “a type of sepulchre” (22), makes the archive above all else “a matter of discrimination and of selection, which, in the end, results in the granting of a privileged status” to particular documents and their narrative force (19). The building transforms the archive into a “talisman” that “softens the anger, shame, guilt, or resentment which the archive tends . . . to maintain, because of its function of recall” (24). Viewing the archive in terms of its relationship to the state, Mbembe recalls the power, as well, of the historical monument to establish a singular past that unites its public into a “community of time . . . over which we might exercise the rights of collective ownership” (21).
While Taylor focuses on the materiality of the archive, for Mbembe it is the archive's ordering function that empowers certain narratives over others. The archive, like the monument, requires erasure to create legibility. By insisting on memory over history, time over space, and bodies over monuments, then, The Fall enacts Conquergood's performance-sensitive approach to historiography. In asking “Whose history is that?” Kgothatso questions the nature of national historiography and public memory. He echoes Taylor's inquiry: “Whose memories, traditions, and claims to history disappear if performance practices lack the staying power to transmit vital knowledge?” (Taylor, Archive 5). These questions take on new force in digital contexts, which complicate tensions between documentary preservation and ephemeral interactions. Digital discourse, Taylor noted in 2010, insists on change and action as key to the production of documentary resources; in doing so, it collapses divisions between action and object, memory and history (“Save As …” 7–8). The play refuses the stasis of the archive and the singularity of the monument to insist on the rhizomatic structures of performance: embodiment, polyvocality, and contradictions that challenge both static-textual and singular-monumental readings of the past.
Like the archive, the monument singularizes collective history, leading the art historian James E. Young to ask, “How does a nation memorialize a past it might rather forget?” (240). In South Africa, the response has been to embrace the varied memories and collectives that make up the national public. In their study of South African public memory, Carolyn E. Holmes and Melanie Loehwing argue that the democratic government has replaced the apartheid regime's “monologic commemoration” strategies, which aimed to “construct a singular vision for the South African nation” with a “multiplicative approach . . . that might facilitate the expression and validation of multiple voices and points of view” (1209). The multiplicative strategy follows the conciliatory politics of the transition-era regime: “the post-apartheid government pursued multiplicative commemoration because it allowed them to reject monologic form without also calling for the removal of the products of monologic commemoration—namely, the statues of colonial and apartheid rulers” (1222).Footnote 12 South Africa's postapartheid government embraced reconciliation in their approach to commemoration. The statues’ continued presence embodies the broad strategy of compromise that eased the transition to democracy and that the student protesters would challenge. Its removal rejects those compromises.
In the moment of the statue's removal, the plinth hosts historiographic transformations. In The Fall, Rhodes's platform—represented as an empty table—is suddenly occupied by a moving body: the scene of abdication is inverted, as his pantomimed removal opens new possibilities for movement and narrative. Because South Africa has no singular public history, the monument, with its claims to simple collectivity, could never have been fully present onstage. Instead, it is through the embodied memory of the repertoire that diversity speaks. This is itself an anticolonial act: rejecting the homogenization of colonization in order to honor the varied and conflicting experience of decolonization. The plinth was always implicitly a stage for moving bodies, whose connection is simultaneously temporal and spatial.
The repertoire, in contrast to both the archive and its monuments, insists on temporal specificity and mutability. The repertoire creates a mutual relationship to the past, wherein “forms handed down from the past are experienced as present” (Taylor, Archive 24). Indeed, as Rebecca Schneider suggests, theater produces composite histories: theatrical explorations of history create “the recomposition of remains in and as the live” (66). If, for Taylor, the repertoire is what remains from performance, then for Schneider, the repertoire is not simply a reproach to archival history: it is a remaking of it. These remainders collapse the past and the present. The past is renewed, made new, in each engagement, just as a stray comment can bring an old digital post rushing back to the present. Performance, as it engages the material, reveals the instability of material history and the vulnerability of the monument. The Fallists’ epistemological revolution insisted on instability over permanence, creating contestable performances that stand against the unchanging sepulcher of the monument.
Monuments and performances represent conflicting historiographic models, because performance's polyvocality erodes the monument's singularity. Performances actively engage an audience that merely observes monuments: as Conrad remarked, “No one wants to watch ten people agree for an hour.” This difference is key to both the production of solidarity and the possibility of difference. When the plinth becomes a stage, the performance that replaces the monument insists on the complexity of lived experience. Citing Frederick Douglass's approach to analysis, Conquergood articulates performance historiography as “a hermeneutics of experience, copresence, humility, and vulnerability: listening to and being touched by the protest performances” (“Beyond the Text” 27). Humility and vulnerability are possible only in intimacy; the statue may be touched, but it is not vulnerable until it is removed. The spatial logic of the monument gives way to the temporal logic of the stage, replacing the archive's objects in space with the repertoire's movement in time.
Social Media as Repertory Archive
The repertoire draws the past into the present to insist on a coeval approach to history. In this sense, The Fall's performance historiography reflects the Fallist movement's connection to digital engagement. Social media communication during the movement transformed the nature of individual connections. It creates what Nick Couldry calls “group liveness,” or “the ‘liveness’ of a mobile group of friends who are in continuous contact via their mobile phones. . . . It enables individuals and groups to be continuously co-present to each other even as they move independently across space” (357). This “group liveness” prioritizes shared time over space, creating a shared experience across global space and establishing an emphasis on movement over stasis.
The Fallists relied on digital platforms for organizing, promoting, and documenting their work. Private WhatsApp and Facebook groups allowed students to plan upcoming action and to find resources for colleagues in jail or lacking food (Godsell et al. 110). Public Twitter feeds and Facebook events, meanwhile, enabled students to tell their own story. Gillian Godsell, Refiloe Lepere, Swankie Mafoko, and Ayabonga Nase summarize the value protesters found in digital platforms:
Using personal stories, metaphors, videos and photographs, students and workers were able to create their own counter-narratives interpreting their community and discourse. . . . Hashtags consolidate personal stories under a common label. . . . Using social media may bring people closer to political or other topics that might otherwise be too public and distant for them. (Godsell et al. 108)
In our conversation, Conrad emphasized students’ sense that describing the issues for themselves would be key to gaining public support. The official #RhodesMustFall Facebook group tracked every major event and debate in the movement. Amateur videos and photographs of the protests recorded protesters’ pacifism amid police brutality. Social media accentuates the multiple, contradicting narratives that emerge from every protest movement. In lieu of a historical monument, social media deposits lived, embodied experiences—contradictions and all.
The interactive frame of social media is embedded in the play's structure, content, and design. The Fall is multimodal, incorporating song, dance, and film to create a theatrical history. Social media literally backed up the performance: videos found during the playwrights’ research were projected during the play, contextualizing the actors’ engagement and bringing other bodies and voices into the action (Conrad; Stopford, Interview). Voices overlap in the performance, creating a chaotic soundscape that evokes the many conversations overlapping online.
The live and digital venues of protest filter through the set design. The single note the script includes about its set reads: “The surfaces of the set (walls and floor) are textured with a wallpaper of multiple, enlarged hashtags” (Baxter Theater Collective 11). The crisscrossing marks of the hashtag are intimately familiar, recalling #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall, and #decolonizeeducation. These phrases connected a range of concerns for South African students, brought inward-facing conversations among the protesters to the global press, and joined the movement to global anti-austerity protests. The blank canvas of the black box stage becomes a backdrop for a range of experiences and expectations, which are projected in videos and photographs during key scenes like the “Mass Meeting,” described above. These visuals link specific spaces through a single, universally accessible platform.
Social media collapses space and expands time. It heightens the role of “homogeneous, empty time” that Benedict Anderson argues incorporated a national public (33). For Anderson, the mass ritual of information consumption, structured by the regular printing of the newspaper, united a geographically dispersed community (35). But unlike the newspaper—which proceeds in calendrically marked time—digital communication proceeds in microseconds, requiring the temporal proximity of conversation: major social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram organize content, first, according to the recency of their publication; that content is renewed, in turn, according to the recency of audience engagement. On Twitter, for instance, posts older than seven days will not be retrieved through the platform's own search function unless they have been retweeted and thus renewed. Conversations can span the globe, but they are strictly time-bound, creating what Kimberly Quiogue Andrews has called “the viral esoteric.”Footnote 13 The digital public is bound through the shared time of an experience removed from specific national spaces—a connection that enabled the movement to spread from Cape Town to Oriel College, Oxford, in a day (Mpofu-Walsh 79–80).
The Fall's script reflects this shifted sensibility. In the play's first line, Zukile-Libalele declares, “I will never forget that Friday, the 20th of March 2015” (Baxter Theater Collective 11). Recounting the day's events, Zukile-Libalele goes on to describe the physical experience of protesting “outside of UCT's administration building, iBremner. We stood in the heat for hours, singing and dancing, finding shade under our posters and trees. And then, a wave of bodies . . . sho!” (11; ellipsis in original). The protest is an embodied one: a march that creates collective effervescence. Yet its meaning is defined, first, by the date, “the 20th of March 2015.” This is a marked shift in how South Africa remembers its uprisings: the student uprisings of 16 June 1976 are often referred to as the “Soweto Uprising,” in reference to the Johannesburg neighborhood where they began. Although the annual Youth Day brings the event back to national consciousness, it is always named and marked through space. Other key events in the apartheid era similarly reference specific suburbs and townships, such as Sharpeville, Rivonia, and Church Street. These events are marked by their relationship to space, which operates across time to attach its residents to their past—memories concretized through memorial plaques and monuments.
The Fallist movement, in contrast, relies on markers of shared time. #RhodesMustFall spread globally: a single event debated simultaneously across Oxford, Accra, and Cape Town. Geographically dispersed communities were drawn together, in time, for a shared set of goals and through the shared, rhetorical link of the hashtag. In The Fall, the empty, unmarked space of social media becomes the empty, blackened stage, delineated only by performers’ voices and the crisscrossing marks of the hashtag. Connection through displacement introduces the play's first climatic moment: “I was away when it happened,” Camilla admits, as her comrades prepare for the removal of the Rhodes statue (32). But she counts down the minutes with them: “I managed to live-stream it. It was supposed to happen at 5pm, but the truck driver was late—you know mos, African time—so I watched the crowd, instead. . . . And I was on the couch of my AirBnB rental in Istanbul. But then, it was finally 5.30” (32). The AirBnB, itself a marker of the relationship between labor and digital production, becomes a staging ground for the scene taking place a continent away as Camilla counts down the moments to the event's live stream. Individual participation, in the digital age, is enabled not by geographic proximity on campus but by temporally specific attention—in this case, at 5:30 p.m. South African Standard Time on 9 April 2015.
The scene brings Camilla's experience into direct proximity with Kgothatso's, despite their geographic distance: their voices overlap as Kgothatso marches “up from Bremner (now Azania House) where there were lots of speeches” (32). In person, he feels himself linked to South Africans across time: “On our way to Upper I swear I could feel the bones of our ancestors moving with us, supporting us in our first step of decolonisation” (32). In Kgothatso's body, experience reverberates through time and across space. History is not archived in a singular space but felt through shared and repeated physical experiences. Ironically, it is precisely the disembodied media of the social that most strongly resists the alienating, atomizing experience of the archive to offer a historical repertoire.
Social media, of course, is neither archive nor repertoire. Rather, it contains a repository for historical moments. These moments are legible as archival documents only within particular technological and material frameworks, which themselves lack the organizational schema that marks the archive. Social media, then, flows. Raymond Williams defines the structure of “flow”—a fundamental shift from the “programme” structure that divides broadcasts into discrete events—as “always accessible, in several alternative sequences, at the flick of a switch” (198). The flowing feed, polyvocal and loud, refuses the neat organization of the archive and the static monument. It insists on the imbrication of daily life with the spectacular. And it is through this coexistence that the play refuses a monumentalist approach to history. Instead, voices ring out together, and in opposition.
The tension between connectivity and isolation haunts the play's final moments. Until its closing scene, The Fall focuses on the possibility of establishing platforms for previously suppressed voices. It recapitulates the utopic optimism of social media itself, echoing Facebook's promise to “bring the world closer together.” But the play's closing sequence refuses the ideological closure promised in such an imagined community. The students confront an impossible choice: continue the university shutdowns to achieve their demands, or allow the medical students to provide patient care and complete their exams. Qhawekazi, forced to make the decision, stands alone for the final monologue. Six cadres stand two paces behind her, singing, “Mfundi uyingwe” (“student, you are a leopard”). Their voices, amplified in harmony, suggest the support of a large group—a group united and transformed through their convictions. Standing beneath a spotlight, Qhawekazi muses:
We used to be people. We used to dream about a future where we didn't need to protest anymore, or call ourselves brave and fearless. There are reasons we call ourselves that. There are reasons some of us are losing our humanity, one protest at a time. . . . I'm tired. My soul is tired, but the reasons I came the first time won't let me leave. They won't let me live a normal life. (57)
The dream of a protest-free, humane future has faded to an unimaginable reality, refusing the illusion of catharsis or closure. Flow refuses closure; instead, it stages a constant stream of confrontations with our collective pasts. Qhawekazi insists on the eternity of the present, which persists antithetically to the past of the monument. The spatial intimacy Conquergood desires emerges in a temporal intimacy, defined by the individual's relationship to the collective. Time shrinks, bringing past and future into a present confrontation with history.
In her lyric essay “Boarding the Voyage,” the Black American poet Robin Coste Lewis challenges the impulse to “take down one monument and replace it with another!” asking instead: “[W]hat if the real neurosis stems from our desire for monuments of any kind? Perhaps instead of looking up for an icon, we need to look down and cherish and adore, even worship, the people working quietly right beside us, or even more subtly—via memory—right within us” (145). In Lewis's framing, the impulse to monumentalize is itself an erasure: monumentalism limits connections in favor of the singular. The monument becomes the site of resistance rather than of memorial. In its stead, Lewis calls for memory: the history that lives in the body. Zukile-Libalele's invocation, that “[m]emory knows our history, yet books refuse to mention it” (Baxter Theater Collective 29), reverberates for Lewis in the work of those beside and within us. Memory answers monumentalization. Read this way, the play becomes an archive in performance, a restitution of Black voices and history. Without any one of these voices, the history would be lost, an incomplete record and an ungracious memorial. With them together, it becomes simultaneously record and event, at once recording and resisting historical completion. As such, The Fall offers a form of public memorialization responsive to the iconoclasm of the present moment. Neither monologic nor purely multiplicative memorial, it is instead repertory, bringing a past moment to bear on the present.
