In the years that have passed between the interviews conducted for this book and the writing of its conclusion, a new generation of young, black female activists have come to the fore in South Africa through the university-based ‘Fallist’ movements of RhodesMustFall and FeesMustFall, which arose in 2015 and 2016 out of demands to decolonise the country's higher education sector. In many ways these women's activism has diverged from that of their female comrade predecessors: they are slightly older and generally better educated; they self-identify as radical feminists; and they have found a louder and clearer articulation of the multiple inequalities they face through the concept of ‘intersectionality’. They have refused to let their involvement in post-apartheid student politics fade into obscurity or be side-lined by the actions of young men, and have taken to journalism, social media, and academic writing to ensure their voices are heard.

Yet there are clear continuities as well as changes between these two groups of young female protestors, despite the thirty years and profound political changes that separate them. Both groups chose not to initially organise separately as women around explicitly gendered issues but joined wider political causes with shared motivations to their male counterparts. Yet once politically active, both groups also found that issues of race and class cannot easily be separated from those of gender and sexuality. While female students have occupied prominent positions in the Fallist movements, they have also encountered misogyny and sexual violence within its ranks. After a female student was raped in a University of Cape Town building occupied by RhodesMustFall activists in 2016, a new effort – EndRapeCulture – was started by the movements’ female members. Across several South African campuses young women staged protests, often while topless, promoting a ‘liberatory construction of the black female body.’ Some women even carried sjamboks as a symbol of their fight back against rape culture – a characteristic that made these 2016 protests starkly reminiscent of female comrades’ use of sjamboks against suspected rapists in Soweto in the mid-1980s. Both groups thus initially joined their respective movements in the hopes of affecting political change, yet within them also staged a wider challenge to gender inequality, sexual violence, and patriarchy.