“Until the people govern”: the Black students’ movement at Rhodes University in the 1980s

Abstract This paper examines the emergence of the Black Students’ Movement (BSM), a black organization formed at Rhodes University in the 1980s. The BSM aligned its anti-apartheid politics with the United Democratic Front (UDF) and black consciousness philosophy. It emerged due to the conservative disposition of the Student Representative Council (SRC), and sought to address both the issues that black students faced on campus and to draw attention to the broader political context of the time. The central argument of the paper is that the BSM, as an anti-apartheid students’ organization, used protest as a tool to represent the issues of black students at Rhodes. This paper demonstrates that the BSM’s demands were largely recognised by the Rhodes senate, and its politics created small but significant changes in the university’s policies. During the 2015 period, Rhodes University once again saw a formation of a new BSM, raising the issues of ‘decolonization’ and transformation.