"The date Oct. 21, 2015, will be remembered as the day mainstream media became old in South Africa. It was the day the hashtags took control. We watched as student protests morphed from #FeesMustFall to #NationalShutDown (and briefly to #ZumaMustFall), and as at least fourteen campuses were shut down. Before we could catch our collective breath, students in Cape Town had left the University of Cape Town's suburban campus and the nearby Cape Peninsula University of Technology to march on Parliament. There they demanded to see the Minister of Higher Education, Blade Nzimande. The students forced open the gates of Parliament and soon — imitating #BlackLivesMatter — were marching inside the grounds with their hands up. Police responded by firing tear gas and stun grenades at them. The students, defiant, began to sing the national anthem, "Nkosi Sikelel iAfrika." By nightfall, six of the main leaders — including the offspring of a prominent liberation movement figure and the son of UCT's vice chancellor — were in custody. There were reports the students were being charged with treason. Their lawyers were quick to react and by nightfall word filtered through they would be charged with trespassing and be in court in the morning.
The protests at Parliament happened while the South African Minister of Finance, Nhlanhla Nene, went on delivering his mid-term budget speech inside. Television stations were forced to choose between broadcasting democratic business as usual, and democracy being remade outside. The split-screen coverage some TV stations opted for brought the point home with alarming clarity. While minister Nene was reciting figures about the "downward adjustment" of economic expectations, students were being choked, man-handled, and arrested outside. But the television coverage was of lesser importance, because the revolution wasn't being televised, it was being live-tweeted. Television news only mattered if it placed a camera where the protests were and left it at that."
- Sean Jacobs and Herman Wasserman
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- Ikhide
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