Lebo does not remember what she was thinking about the day the #FeesMustFall movement started. She had just stepped out of one of the last classes of her undergrad degree; her head was in the clouds. At the university gate, heading home, she heard a familiar voice with a solemn tone declaring that the university was occupied. There was confusion. All gates were blocked. She clued in to what was happening when she realised the person speaking was one of her friends from a reading group on radical black thought. “We are occupying the university,” she said. “Are you in?” She shook off her confused look, ran home to get some clothes and went right back to campus. This would become her new home.

Inside of her, she knew something was about to happen. In a sense, she had been preparing for this movement for a whole year by participating in the reading group. The group was underground and very disciplined: reading would be shared on Mondays and the discussion group hosted on Fridays. Over the course of the year the readings had become more militant and their reflections deeper. An announcement that university fees were going to rise by 10.5 per cent was the spark for the movement. Yet the pillars of the movement were deeper. They had been constructed in long debates around critical black thought and questioning of neoliberalism.

There was a sense of restlessness amongst South African black youth and students. A few months earlier, protesters had thrown excrement at a statue of the British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes, looking peacefully out over the ocean from the University of Cape Town. Protesters expressed their collective disgust at the celebration of white colonialism and requested that the statue be removed: a clear sign that the time for bullshit was coming to an end.

During #FeesMustFall Lebo was the girl on a bike. She put herself at the service of the movement. Everything moved so fast her head was spinning. Things just started happening.

After a week of occupation, the students sent home all the cleaning staff and started managing the university. Living at the university meant they had to clean, cook, organise protests and manage media relationships, among other tasks. Every morning there was an entire team assigned with preparing food for the occupiers. At Lebo’s university, the occupation was managed across four other teams: media, direct action, legal and medical.

How did they manage to resource themselves and coordinate all this work? Lebo explains that the media was giving so much attention to the movement that resources just seemed to flow in: they received, for example, donations of toilet paper, pads, material and food.

Lebo explains that there was much adrenaline in the air but it was hard to see the whole picture: where were the resources coming from and why?

On 23 October 2015, to appease protesters, then-President Jacob Zuma invited students to Pretoria for an encounter. A couple of dozen buses appeared out of nowhere to drive students to the meeting. Lebo still does not know who paid for the buses.

In Pretoria, it was announced that there would be no fee increase in 2016. Yet to many of the student activists, this did not feel like a win.

It eventually became evident that, as well as the individual donations received, a political party had been paying some of the student leaders to co-opt the movement and separate the students into factions. When Lebo and her friends became aware of this they felt confused, disillusioned and angry. The students who were associated with the political party lost all credibility. They were effectively isolated by the rest of the movement.

The movement continued throughout 2016 amidst adrenaline, teargas, rubber bullets, screams, chants, blood, stones, media attention and police brutality. All of South Africa was trembling, says Lebo.

Come 2017, #FeesMustFall had wound down. Activists were left drained and traumatised, struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. Their deeper desires for systemic change remained mostly unaddressed. The movement had lost momentum with a sense of confusion. Who had won and who had lost was not clear.

Lebo observes that CSOs had extracted the language and critiques they liked, but not necessarily the depth of the underlying ideologies. To Lebo it feels like being back in the times before the movement started, except that civil society now ‘speaks like them’.

Some of the former movement leaders have joined CSOs, some are doing community projects, some have started social enterprises and others have gone into politics. Many have been left paralysed by trauma. Some were jailed and later given suspended sentences or kept under house arrest.

The movement diffused. Yet the ideas that grounded the movement left an impression on Lebo’s generation of students. Social movements might flare up and then fade. But thanks to her participation with #feesmustfall, Lebo became an activist.