Asinamali: Aspiration, debt and citizenship in South Africa's #FeesMustFall protests

Abstract

South Africa's #FeesMustFall protests have widely been seen as a reckoning with the limitations of post‐apartheid citizenship and young people's frustrations over the slow pace of socio‐economic transformation. This paper seeks to analyse how working‐class students from one township community interpreted these protests. It argues that the protests reflected collective aspirations toward social mobility among working‐class students and concerns over the threat that high levels of future debt posed to this mobility. It contributes to geographical research on young people's experiences of debt by highlighting how the burden of debt intersects with experiences of racialised poverty and inequality. It suggests that young people's aspirations, even in the context of neoliberalism, frequently focused on collective social mobility and family well‐being. Finally, it proposes global comparative research on young people's experiences of debt and economic uncertainty in order to understand this increasingly globalised phenomenon and its political consequences.