Interrogating the Rhodes Must Fall Student Protests Through Fanonian Sociogeny: A Psychosocial Analysis of Historical Trauma and Political Violence in Postapartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT This article employs Frantz Fanon's sociogenic method to analyze the MustFall# student protest movement as an illustration of the psychic afterlife of colonialism in postapartheid South Africa. Fanon's sociogeny, which locates the formation of subjectivity in the reciprocal interplay between the psychic and the political, offers a framework for understanding how the failures of the democratic transition—moral, subjective, political, and symbolic—are inscribed within contemporary forms of racial melancholia. By reworking Freud's notion of Nachträglichkeit (deferred action), Fanon reveals that colonial trauma is experienced belatedly through the failure of assimilation. Reading MustFall# through this lens, in this article I interpret the movement's eruption as the deferred return of unassimilated colonial violence: the psychic repetition of exclusion and alienation within institutions that remain structured by whiteness. Sociogeny enables a psychopolitical reading of MustFall# as both a symptom of and response to South Africa's ongoing inability to mourn. The myth of “white genocide” and the persistence of white victimhood are read as melancholic defenses that displace guilt and sustain colonial fantasies of innocence. At the same time, the internal fractures of MustFall#—around gender and sexuality—demonstrate that failure can be generative, producing what Samuel Beckett calls a “better failure”: a repetition that engenders new possibilities. By centering Fanon's dialectic of failure and invention, this article argues that MustFall# exposes the limits of post‐apartheid reconciliation and gestures toward a revolutionary humanism grounded in the ethical work of mourning, repetition, and repair.