Over the past few days, universities across South Africa have been rocked by protests against fee increases, registration fees, and the outsourcing of university workers, among other things.
The protests first kicked off at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) late last week, where students effectively shut down the university in protest against a proposed 10.5% fee hike. As with most large-scale movements, the protesters attached a hashtag to their cause — in this case #WitsFeesMustFall.
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On Monday, action spread from Wits to Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape and the University of Cape Town.
The wider action led to the hashtag #FeesMustFall being adopted, very quickly usurping the original hashtag for number of mentions.
While usage of the UCT and Rhodes hashtags have increased in the early part of the week, the Wits hashtag has continued to hold strong.
Interestingly, the #FeesMustFall conversation has managed to unseat Oscar Pistorius’ prison release from the top of the Twitter conversation.
As an illustration of how much of the #FeesMustFall conversation has taken place on social media, take a look at how much more Oscar Pistorius has dominated Google searches over the past 24 hours.
Image: raeesa pather via Twitter.
