Too Rich to Care? Southern African (SADC) International Students Navigating Transnationalism and Class at South African Universities

The 2015–16 fallist student protests across South African university campuses highlighted the shortcomings of the post-apartheid political system in resolving persistent inequalities based on race, class and gender. However, the experiences of Southern African Development Community (SADC) international students at South African universities have received little attention. Using qualitative interviews with SADC students studying at Rhodes University in Makhanda during the campus protests, this article argues that the protests also created new forms of exclusion. The protest movements adopted identity politics that attacked all perceived forms of privilege, and SADC students on South African campuses felt excluded from the protests because they were described by the protesters as ‘too rich to care’. SADC students themselves rejected this assumption and instead emphasised their specific challenges regarding their status as immigrants, and the precariousness of the middle classes in southern Africa. By drawing together the concepts of migration, social class and higher education, this article addresses the important subject of transformation at South African universities through the intersections of transnationalism and class.


Introduction
Since the end of apartheid in 1994, abolishing inequalities based on race, class and gender has become the 'Fanonian moment' 1 for the so-called born free generation in South Africa. 2 Tertiary education has been prominent in this pursuit, both in terms of government priorities and as a site of struggle towards transformation. The plight of South African students gained global recognition during the fallist campus movements of 2015-16, 3  have addressed the position of African international students in South African higher education in terms of tuition fees, xenophobia and the tension between transformation and internationalisation. However, none of these studies focuses on the lived experience of international students through interview data.
Institutional diversity strategies within higher education often concentrate on the 'big three' of class, gender and race identities, whereas transnationalism is more commonly neglected. 21 On the other hand, research on international student identities typically focuses on nationality without considering students' other intersecting identities. 22 Referring specifically to the considerable Zimbabwean community at Rhodes University, Goga identifies a need to further explore the intersection of race and class with nationality. 23 This article will take on that challenge.
The 2015-16 fallist protests were an example of hardening identity boundaries among students, which led to new forms of othering at South African universities. Students who did not participate in the protestsincluding many SADC studentswere marginalised because they were assumed not to support the fallist objectives. Although SADC students mainly explained their non-participation with reasons related to their precarious immigration status, they often faced accusations of being 'too rich to care' about rising fees. While identity politics can be useful in challenging dominant structures and questioning prevailing silences at South African universities, it can also create divisions between students who claimor indeed, are ascribedcertain identities. 24 This article maintains that contentious identity politics on South African campuses result from conflicting appeals for recognition. 25 The fallist protesters' objectives were to gain recognition for the plight of poor black students and to encourage others to recognise their own privilege. 26 SADC students, on the other hand, were uneasy about being potentially misrecognised as more privileged than they believed themselves to be. This study explores these fissures, beginning with a discussion of why and how SADC students felt marginalised by the identity politics of the fallist protests. I then examine how concepts of identity and intersectionality have been deployed in the context of protest discourse at South African universities. I then move on to problematise SADC students' narratives by illustrating how they also contributed to the argumentative climate during the fallist protests. By highlighting the concerns of both these groups, this article illuminates the intersections of transnationalism, race and class in South Africa and the SADC region.

'The Struggle is Yours but Not Really Yours' -How Campus Protests Marginalised SADC Students
Most SADC students interviewed for this article considered economic inequality and insufficient state support for the poorest students as a legitimate rationale for the 21  #FeesMustFall protest. As mainly black Africans, they also understood the reasoning of the #RhodesMustFall demand for universities to make reparations for their colonial past because it was making the increasingly diverse student body uncomfortable and resentful. Concerns for gender equality and women's safety were also taken seriously, and the anti-rape campaign #RUReferenceList 27 had the support of several SADC students. Still, most of them did not actually participate in any of the protests, as conveyed by two female SADC students: As evidenced by these narratives, some SADC students felt anxious when protests broke out at Rhodes University during 2015-16. The danger of violence was either all too familiar or completely alien to them, but in both cases avoiding engagement with the protests seemed to be the preferred response. This issue may not have been fully understood by South African students, who had grown up in a country where risk and sacrifice related to protest were historically important narrative tropes as mass mobilisation eventually helped to terminate apartheid rule. 30 Furthermore, South African protesters' rights wereat least in theoryprotected by the Constitution. 31 In addition to the bewilderment generated by South African protest culture, SADC students were also apprehensive due to their precarious immigration status, as the following testimony reveals: I couldn't do anything … [S]ometimes people would get arrested if you walk to the library and haven't done anything. If you get arrested, you go to jail, and if that happened to me, I wouldn't be able to come back and study in South Africa, so that's already my education gone. So, I had to consider that. 32 These SADC students feared that getting a criminal record would mean an effective ban from higher education in South Africa. Given the increasingly strict immigration regulations in many countries worldwide, obtaining a visa anywhere would also likely become more difficult for someone holding a criminal record. Although still scarce, some scholarship has emerged linking international students' non-participation in the fallist movements to fears of encountering xenophobia. 33 Furthermore, news reports from 2015-16 confirm that many 27 In April 2016, a list of male students accused of sexual violence at Rhodes University was circulated on social media, instigating an anti-rape campaign known as #RUReferenceList. J. Jansen, As by Fire. international students across South Africa were concerned about the additional financial cost and visa problems caused by protest interruptions to their study, and uneasy about the protesters' violent strategy and seeming lack of respect for authority. 34 Finishing their degrees was thus often the highest priority for SADC students who had strict visa timelines for completing their studies, as a Zimbabwean student succinctly articulated: [T]he struggle is yours but not really yours … As a foreigner, you have so many things weighed against you, and you have deadlines to meet! You can't be toyi-toying on the road for eight hours when you have a thesis that is waiting to be done. 35 The greatest objection for the majority of SADC students, however, was the violent means of the protests, and there was simply no sympathy for destructive action. Another Zimbabwean student argued: '[Y]ou can't campaign for free education and then go trash one of the buildings. In other universities, they burned down uni buses, they burned down a Law library. I mean gosh, you guys just literally shot yourself in the foot.' 36 As conveyed by the above comments, SADC students had manifold reasons for their non-participation in campus protests. Although many local students were also affected by the disruption caused by the protests, 37 this article illustrates that international students shared some specific concerns. Raghuram et al argue that, despite common assumptions, 'not all international students are privileged' and in fact they often face an extra financial burden due to foreign levies and unfavourable economic circumstances in their home countries. 38 Furthermore, Majee explains that the contradiction between local transformation pressures and global trends of internationalisation restricts SADC students' ability to claim belonging in South African higher education as they fall between the binary of local and global. 39 Building on the idea of belonging and claim-making, I suggest that the genuine concerns of SADC students have generally been misrecognised in the struggle for transformation in South African higher education, which otherwise has attracted a lot of attention in academic and other writing. However, I also argue that some of the SADC students' grievances stem from the divergent ways in which they and the fallist protesters identified themselves. Indeed, students were not excluded on the grounds of their nationality or class per se but based on how they were perceived to be positioned within the fallist discourse.
SADC students' non-participation in the protests irritated some protesters because they assumed that SADC students were too wealthy to relate to the problems faced by poor students or to be concerned about rising fees. SADC students themselves were insulted by these allegations and felt that the motives for their non-participation had been misunderstood. Unable to make their voices heard, SADC students withdrew from the protest action and the reasons for their non-participation were left unrecognised.
SADC students' experience of misrecognition was partly related to the transnational nature of their identity. SADC students are not a visible group in South Africa, and they are even considered home students in terms of fees and accommodation. 40  is not an exotic destination but a place to go shopping or attend boarding school. Although SADC students generally identified according to their nationality, their lived experience was characteristically transnational. 41 This was reflected in SADC students' self-identification. I argue that with its 'processual and in-becoming character', 42 transnationalism rather than internationalism best describes these young adults who use their cross-border connections to build their identities and thus to confront the prevailing 'local-global dichotomy'. 43 However, in South Africa, this dichotomy was sometimes difficult to escape as the pressure to prioritise the needs of disadvantaged South Africans was immense. Most SADC students interviewed for this article emphasised that they were just as affected by the deficiencies of South African higher education as local students. Instead of being entitled and unconcerned, they were restricted by both their specific position as international students and the harsh attitudes of the protesters. This left SADC students feeling misunderstood and unfairly victimised, as poignantly expressed by a Zimbabwean female student: The onset [sic] was that they were only fighting for free education for South Africans and international students don't have a say. 'If they're here, they can afford it.' And I was thinking, you don't know what my parents have to go through [for me] to be here … In terms of social class, it placed us on a pedestal that wasn't necessarily true and reflective of where we actually stood. 44 Isdahl has identified feelings of exclusion and non-belonging based on gender, language, race and national origin as reasons for some students' non-participation in the #RhodesMustFall protest. 45 She concludes that the movement 'has certain characteristics that make up its reputation of who belongs. For those who do not match this description, it is a time of grappling with questions of belonging, understanding, and support'. 46 According to Ahmed, this hardening of group identity boundaries within #RhodesMustFall happened partly due to internal fragmentation. 47 I argue that this was further reflected in the movement's worsening relationship with non-participating students, and that this pattern was also repeated during #FeesMustFall and #RUReferenceList.
Despite pan-Africanist rhetoric within fallist thought, international students were never fully included in the movements. 48 This contradiction suggests that the fallist protesters adopted a characteristically South African form of pan-Africanism that was more focused on a socialist struggle at a national level and solidarity with the rest of the continent rather than on transnational African unity. 49 Following this tradition, pan-Africanist thought within the fallist movements was centred around local South African problems like land redistribution and persistent black poverty. 50 Indeed, it appears that the transnational ideals of pan-Africanism in fallist rhetoric were often only referenced in terms of the decolonial theories of Frantz Fanon and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'oboth non-South Africansand interpreting Steve Biko's Black Consciousness as 'universal blackness'. But while international students were largely ignored in the fallist movements, some argue that they were also actively victimised. Despite the efforts by some pan-Africanists within the fallist movements to include international students in the struggle, 'there [wa]s [also] a lot of Afrophobia and xenophobia'. 51 The 2015-16 student protests coincided with xenophobic attacks in Makhanda and across South Africa, and some students became victims of xenophobic violence. 52 Even within fallist rhetoric, foreigners were occasionally seen to be taking jobs and scholarships from locals. 53 Despite their general non-participation in the protests, international students were thus caught in the middle of the fallist politics of identity and belonging.

Protests and Identity Politics at South African Universities
Identity politics was a central motif in the South African campus protests of 2015-16. But how did identity politics become such a force behind the fallist protests? And why does a particular type of identity politics make sense to some students at South African universities?
Many people identify themselves according to such categories as nationality, race and gender, and may feel a strong connection to some of them. They may do this in order to understand 'how they differ from others' 54 or to feel part of a 'shared culture'. 55 This, in turn, can help create a sense of 'permanence amidst manifest change, and of unity amidst manifest diversity'. 56 However, identity is a fluid and unstable phenomenon: as situations change, some identifications may become more important than others. Even the categories themselves are not fixed but constantly reinvented. 57 Identity, therefore, is '[n]ot an essence but a positioning'. 58 Universities are settings in which young people attempt to find their place among their peers, which occasionally generates rivalry and antagonism. 59 Indeed, Bourdieu has described higher education settings as 'fields of struggle' in which participants compete for 'symbolic mastery'. 60 They are also sites in which students are 'exposed to new knowledge, skills and ideologies that evoke a sense of consciousness'. 61 In post-apartheid South Africa, a discourse on identity has become pronounced due to apartheid legacies of inequality and discrimination. 62 Because higher education in general is expected to be a site of upward social mobilityand in South Africa, often a 'way out of poverty' 63universities can also be places where 'the experience of being the abject is most pronounced'. 64 This experience of marginalisation has politicised the identities of many South African students, and mobilised them to challenge prevailing injustices. South African universities are therefore especially fertile grounds for identity politics, as they are simultaneously sites of institutional and societal change as well as sites of personal transitions from childhood to adulthood. 65 Identity politics can be seen as young people's meaning-making of themselves and the surrounding realities. 66 On South African campuses, this meaning-making has sometimes been expressed in an openly frustrated manner, which was especially visible during the 2015-16 protests. The fallist protests are often seen as a part of a worldwide tradition of student movements 67 as well as a continuation of the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa especially the 1976 Soweto uprising. 68 Writing in 2004, Johnson and Jacobs noted that the 'discussion of the content of democratic rights has only just begun' and thus predicted growing 'demands pressing historical claims and … collective rights'. 69 Indeed, the end of apartheid in 1994 was 'the opening of the door, not an achievement in its own right' and the fallist protests therefore represented a logical next step in the process of democratisation. 70 This 'unfinished business' was underlined, for example, when students invoked antiapartheid discourse through songs of struggle. 71 For protesting students, the question of democratic rights translated into a lived experience of identity misrecognition. Declining state funding for higher education has resulted in rising tuition fees, which make attending university in South Africa unaffordable for a large part of the population. 72 Students are therefore often assumed to come from middle-class backgrounds. In reality, however, the student profile has changed significantly since the end of apartheid following governmental massification policies and support initiatives such as the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). 73 Despite their growing numbers, many students from poorer backgrounds feel that their experiences are neither understood nor valuedin other words, their existence in higher education institutions is not recognised. This phenomenon, in which disadvantaged students become more expressive about their exclusion when their presence increases, is known as a 'paradox of integration'. 74 Experiences of lack of recognition within institutions can amplify students' craving for a 'right to identity', which then often results in identity politics. 75 The fallist protests employed theories of black radical feminism, Black Consciousness and pan-Africanism as building blocks of their collective identity. 76 The protesters related their experience to Fanon's idea of colonialism as structural violence, which could only be resolved by counterviolencesuch as that of the protests. 77 Biko's Black Consciousness, on the other hand, inspired the protesters to lead their own grassroots emancipation struggle rather than relying on conventional politics or channels within white institutions. 78 The focus on identity politics and intersectionality came from radical feminists such as the Combahee River Collective, who had famously stated in 1977 that 'the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come out of our own identity, rather than working to end someone else's oppression'. 79 The idea of interlocking oppressions appealed to the born free generation in South Africa, where economic deprivation and cultural disadvantage were connected to intersecting race, class and gender identities. This feeling of marginalisation also explains the magnitude of antagonism that identity politics induced during the fallist protests. Cunha has argued that 'peaceful protest is a privilege of those safely in the mainstream culture', 80 which raises the question of whether 'only non-violent protests [are] valid and moral'. 81 Just as decolonisation struggles across the world encouraged feelings of 'shared culture' and 'oneness' for nation-building purposes, 82 the born free generation in South Africa used identity politics to create what they hoped to be a united moral position against the persistent legacy of apartheid.
Yet this unity was not realised within the fallist movements. Identity politics has long been accused of accommodating totalising tendencies and relying on invented primordiality, 83 and the fallist protests were no exception. The black pain-derived identity politics relied on two rather ambivalent and contested identities: blackness and social class. Blackness had different interpretations and 'grades' within the movements 84 and, class-wise, the protesting students represented a range of economic conditions. 85 From an essentialist point of view, this raises the question of whether it was more important to be black or to be poor. The movements' existence depended on a collective identity, but due to the diversity of the protesters, this was difficult to achieve. It thus became important to consolidate group boundarieseven if that meant some had to be excluded.
While the fallist protests have often been understood as post-class politics focusing largely on racial identity, this approach neglects the complicated class relations within the student body. 86 Along with a large number of deprived students, the protests also attracted some white students 87 as well as many so-called 'missing middle' students 88 who are excluded from financial support when their parents' earnings exceed a certain threshold, even though they are clearly unable to pay the high fees charged by South African universities. 89 Overall, indebtedness of students has been increasing sharply. 90 Some of the 'missing middle' students have been especially radical in demonstrating their solidarity with poor black students, which has given the fallist protests a middle-class image. 91 This article maintains that while the class identities of the fallist protesters were complex and diverse, a poor black identity came to dominate the discourse. The accounts of SADC students interviewed for this article indicate that identity boundaries at Rhodes University are often drawn between 'authentic' blacks and those deemed middle classoften derogatively referred to as 'coconuts'. 92 Similar findings regarding this politics of 'are you black enough?' have been made in studies about Rhodes University 93 and other South African higher education institutions, 94 as well as in discussions beyond higher education. 95 The experience of being poor and black was thus a central theme in the fallist protests, raising the dual imperatives of addressing the issue of poverty and harnessing one's identity and agency in order to do so. The question of who has the right to speak for the poor thus became the context in which a poor black identity took centre stage as it had the best claim to authenticity. 96 This meant that white and middle-class students had to be relegated to an assisting role and even that was conditional on their acknowledgement of their own privilege. 97 Interestingly, South African students from middle-class backgrounds were occasionally able to tap into the discourse of poor black identity, whereas SADC students generally were not. This may be explained by the fact that South African middle-class students shared with their poorer black counterparts an intergenerational memory of apartheid and the frustration of being part of the born free generation. Rising fees, inadequate funding opportunities and the ensuing indebtedness in particular had likely rendered the idea of being middle class meaningless to them. 98 Middle-class South Africans were therefore able to recognise their privilege while at the same time pointing out that the post-apartheid state had failed the born free generation collectively. Most importantly, they were taking a risk by participating in the protests.
By affirming their desire to abolish all inequalities, protesting South African middle-class students refused to identify with the self-interested post-colonial bourgeoisie that Fanon had cautioned about. 99 Compared to SADC students, they were also more familiar with the prevailing moral discourse in the country, especially in terms of the rhetoric of race equality and social justice. This meant that they could, for example, use linguistic code-switching 100 to downplay their class advantage and to affirm their solidarity with 'authentic' poor black students. These code-switching opportunities were often more limited for SADC students, who lacked familiarity with South Africa-specific cultural codes.
According to Ahmed, 'the formation of a collective black identity [was] a helpful way of articulating the feelings of isolation that black students encountered'. 101 However, this collective identity was used in a way that also alienated many students. Although social categorisation is something that we all tend to do, it can sometimes lead to groupist thinking and flat stereotyping. 102 More than any political agenda or self-identification, the paramount divisive feature of the fallist protests seemed to stem precisely from this groupism, which then resulted in identity politics that were violent and retaliatory.
Although seemingly its antithesis, groupism emanates from a flat form of individualism that tends to treat groups 'as collective individuals, and as collections of individuals'. 103 Polarisation in political discourse pushes individuals to form groups of like-minded people which then skews their social interactions 104 and produces further group polarisation. 105 Interacting within these political 'echo chambers' can encourage virtue signalling and moral grandstanding, 106 through which like-minded people wish to advertise how well they represent the shared values and virtues of the group, or hope to convince outsiders of their group's moral superiority. 107 The fallist movements dealt with the fundamentally ethical issue of social justice. The contentious identity politics that the protests evoked was thus both a cause and effect of political polarisation, virtue signalling and moral grandstanding. I will now move on to analyse more closely how this moral discourse was experienced and deployed by SADC students at Rhodes University as they navigated their racial and class identities within the South African framework.

'Coconuts' and 'Authentic Blacks' -SADC Students, Race and Class
The narratives of SADC students interviewed for this article portrayed South African understandings of race and class as different from those they had been used to in their home countries. Some SADC students claimed that coming to study in South Africa was the first time that they had to encounter issues of race and racism. For black students from township or missionary school backgrounds, race had not been a tangible concern in what they described as rather racially homogeneous social circles. On the other hand, those students (from all races) who had been introduced to multiracial life at private schools felt that race had never been a decisiveor divisivefactor. Remarkably, some students seemed to have had a sudden realisation of their own race when arriving in South Africa: '[M]oving to [South Africa] was actually the first time when I was like, oh my goodness, I am black'. 108 Students' narratives often had a romanticised tone in which they positioned 'racialised' South Africa as the antithesis of their home countries, as conveyed by a Zimbabwean student: It's only when I'm here that I'm constantly reminded on a daily basis that I'm a black woman in a space where I'm not necessarily supposed to be, or welcome. It only happens here. When I go home, no, we are one with the people, we are happy. 109 Similar claims of non-racialism have been reported in Pierre's study among Ghanaians, who did not consider race and blackness as important issues in a country that never had a large settler presence. 110 However, Pierre demonstrates that race does matter in all post-colonial societies through the way in which colonialism racialised black people into 'native subjects' rather than full citizens and therefore tied their experiences to the racist structures of 'global white supremacy'. 111 Ironically, many of the SADC students who described their home countries as colour-blind dreamlands were talking about Zimbabwea country previously ruled by a racist settler government. This suggests that while SADC students' shock about the prominence of race in South Africa must be taken seriously, their perspective is influenced by prior experiences and patriotic identity politics.
For SADC students, class identities and differences at Rhodes University also appeared more pronounced than back home. Many described having not had much contact with people from outside their own social class while growing up in their home countries. The additional cost of studying abroad and the shortage of bursaries available for SADC students meant that South African universities were often out of bounds for less well-off SADC citizens. Coming to university in South Africa, many therefore identified themselves as middle class. However, they felt that this was often mistranslated by their South African peers as being rich or privilegedan assumption that SADC students themselves firmly rejected. Instead, they emphasised that their families had valued education and made financial sacrifices to send their children to South Africa. Just like many South Africans, 112 families of SADC students had pooled their resources, sold livestock or taken loans. Furthermore, unfavourable economic conditions in countries like Zimbabwe meant that, at home, these middle-class students often found themselves washing out of buckets and had little hope of finding a paid job after graduation.
While these accounts reflected SADC students' pain of misrecognition, they were also moral narratives through which SADC students were hoping to de-emphasise any potential unearned privilege they may have had. But however morally justified their emphasis on resilience and upward mobility may have been, SADC students could not claim black authenticity in South Africa. Whatever the lived reality of SADC students was back home, at Rhodes they were often seen as bourgeois. Being identified as middle class came with baggage, as the fallist movements adopted Fanon's idea that the post-colonial bourgeoisie would maintain colonial inequalities by becoming an 'internalised master' that promotes its own class interest over the emancipation of the entire nation. 113 Factors such as flying home instead of taking the bus during vacations or having the exchange rate on their side were frequently mentioned by SADC students to explain why they felt they were seen as better-off than local South African students. However, one of the most commonly accepted indicators of class privilege was language. A majority of the interviewed SADC students were unable to speak locally dominant African languages and therefore mainly relied on English, which they often spoke with an unmistakable private school accent. Nyamnjoh argues that language has become an important marker of belonging or non-belonging in South Africa 114 through what Taylor might call an appeal for recognition. 115 Many immigrants in South Africa therefore do their best to learn a local language in order to avoid harassment from the authorities, who often target foreigners. 116 For SADC students, this language politics undermined their experience and reminded them of their non-belonging in South Africa. Indeed, speaking English in public rather than a non-local African language was sometimes seen as the lesser of two evils if the choice was between Afrophobic discrimination and being called a coconut. Treated as a measure of one's blackness, language was thus used to exclude those who could not fit into the very limited race-class bracket in which 'local' translated as 'poor but authentic', while 'nonlocal' indicated either a 'rich coconut' or 'poor' in a negative, xenophobic sense.
Taylor argues that the ideal of authenticity is connected to our right to recognition because we need the recognition of others to validate our authenticity. 117 In a university setting with conflicting expectations of authenticity, class identity becomes a performance that students canand sometimes have toadjust according to the situation in order to circumnavigate the polarisation between being authentic blacks and coconuts. 118 However, this article has explained that SADC students were for the most part denied a way out of antagonistic identity politics during the fallist protests because their identification options were limited by others' perceptions of them.

'They Breathe Snowflakes' -SADC Students and Moral Boundary-Making
In addition to remarking on their different understandings of race and class, SADC students at Rhodes University highlighted how unfamiliar they were with the ways in which moral discourse was deployed in South Africa. They described South Africa as having a climate of belligerence, as exemplified by this observation by a student from Eswatini: Witnessing crime, poverty and inequality in Makhanda had helped SADC students understand the roots of their South African peers' anger, which they located in the legacy of apartheid. But despite their awareness of the persistent problems in post-apartheid South Africa, SADC students did not accept the violence of the anger that these arduous conditions had created. Rather than the post-apartheid inequality crisis itself, SADC students often interpreted the belligerent climate at Rhodes University as a result of totalising identity politics. Comments like 'South Africans are entitled' and 'South Africans need anger management' were regularly repeated phrases with which SADC students underlined their dislike of what they perceived as South African students' lack of manners and sensitive, self-absorbed outlook. Another Eswatini student declared that these South African students were people who 'breathe snowflakes', adding: People critique everything … Like, I have a problem with this, you know, I'm sitting here and I'm looking at your green dress, and I'm looking at the colour green and the colour green reminds me of the time when I experienced this emotion, and you know … It's a place that, I would say, can easily swallow people. 120 In talking about their experiences of race, class and moral discourse in South Africa, SADC students often underlined their outside-ness. They implied that identity politics is something only happening among South African students and something that theyas outsiderscondemn. By attacking South African students' perceived overreaction and lack of manners, SADC students themselves were thus also contributing to an antagonistic identity politics at Rhodes.
Essentialising identity politics is not just a South African problem but a global phenomenon that feeds on the sense of marginalisation and resentment of many groups around the world that have not benefited from the post-Cold War world order. 121 Throughout post-colonial Africa, the move to liberal democratic models has also aided the rise of identity-based politics. 122 Many increasingly experience formal political channels as ineffective, which has diminished conventional forms of participation and given rise to 'contentious politics', 123 especially among younger generations. 124 The aggressive identity politics at Rhodes University reflects this contemporary political environment, which therefore cannot be assumed to pertain only to South African students.
The struggles for equality and affordability in South African higher education relate to the historical marginalisation of black South Africans. The ascent of divisive identity politics during the campus protests was thus connected to the moral discourse of enduring social injustice. Despite largely agreeing with the goals of the fallist movements, SADC students disapproved of the protest tactics because they did not fit their ideas of mannerliness. Their response was therefore characterised by moral grandstanding. The notion of respectability is a key aspect of performing middle-class distinction in Southern Africa, 125 which SADC students reiterated when they claimed that 'South Africans are entitled' and 'South Africans need anger management'. This paradox of criticising others' moral discourse through one's own was possible because SADC students saw themselves as outsiders and this enabled them to deflect the heated question of potential class advantage.
SADC students' claims of their outside-ness contradicts the southern African region's distinctive dependency on South Africa going back at least two centuries. 126 The expansion of South Africa's economic influence over its neighbours has been seen as political soft power 127 and even 'regional imperialism'. 128 These unequal regional relations are also manifested in the form of regional migration to South Africa, which remains prevalent despite the shift from systematic labour migration to more casual movements. 129 It was not uncommon for SADC students to have relatives living in South Africa. Some had even done their schooling in South Africa or followed the South African curriculum in their home countries. At home, they had watched South African TV and listened to South African music, testifying to South Africa's cultural influence in the region.
Considering the close economic and cultural ties between South Africa and the students' home countries, SADC students' assertions of their outside-ness indicate a degree of conscious boundary-making. SADC students' lives in South Africa are located in a context of encounters with unfamiliar practices, especially in terms of morally imbued expressions of race and class. When identifications based on race and class became highly contested during the fallist protests, SADC students seemed to rely on the one distinction that the protesters could not deny: the fact that they were not South African.
Indeed, SADC students consciously built their identities in contrast to rather than within a South African framework. This strategy must be understood in conjunction with their positionality with respect to race, class and transnational frameworks. However, it is important to ask whether SADC students have in fact accepted the fallist challenge of recognising their own privileges or used the assertion of outside-ness to evade the issue altogether.

Conclusions
The way in which the fallist protests employed the ideas of black pain and poor black identity illustrates how intersectionality between race and class has become a central device of distinction in South African higher education. Students identifying as poor black take ownership of the struggle, which often denies those students who position themselves as middle class the chance to have an input into the transformation discourse if they lack the ability to tap into the shared moral discourse of the prominent majority. As fittingly expressed by a Zimbabwean student: Acknowledging these feelings of SADC students, this article has pointed out the oftenneglected experiential aspect of international student life at South African universities. Taking into account their specific challenges as immigrants and their different moral understandings of race and class, it is clear that SADC students had their reasons not to participate in the fallist protests. Considering the mismatch between their self-understanding and the class identities ascribed by others, it is reasonable that SADC students felt marginalised by the protest movements. I do not aim to undervalue that experience. Nevertheless, antagonistic identity politics during the protests implicated even those SADC students who made conscious efforts to avoid any involvement. Identity politics has been a recognisable force in the fight for social justice within the South African higher education system, but the narratives of SADC students have illustrated that it has also led to further othering and animosity within the student community.
Identity is, as Vincent points out, 'not only something we construct ourselves but is also constructed in the eyes of others'. 131 When confronted with these external perceptions and expectations, our response can be either to reject them or remould ourselves accordingly. 132 This article has explained why these options have been restricted for many students in South African higher education. Many disadvantaged students in South Africa are seeking a sense of belonging within the 'foreign' institutional culture of formerly white universities. This environment narrows down their identity options, often making the perceived authenticity of poor black identification the only positive option available. Using authenticity as the essence of their identity, disadvantaged students can take ownership of their identity definition. However, through this logic, they may also narrow the identity options available to others, as happened to SADC students during the fallist protests at Rhodes University.
In 2002, Chipkin argued that the notion of blackness in post-apartheid South Africa had been radically remodelled or 'displaced', as it turned from representing the liberation struggle to becoming a symbol of patriotism and national sovereignty. 133 Since then, it has likely been reconstructed once again as the country has faced serious challenges, from the Marikana massacre to the spectre of state capture. 134 In this context, it is important to ask how changing ideas of blackness were reflected in the fallist protests, and how they affect the ways in which immigrants in the country are recognised. South African universities are one of the sites in which new ideas of blacknessand other identitiesare emerging. SADC students are a minority that may not have a huge influence on the mainstream narrative regarding university transformation, but their role as 'inbetweeners' certainly highlights the importance of linking debates on post-apartheid social justice to questions of xenophobia and belonging. 135 The fallist protests at South African universities indicate that the transformation of higher education discourse is centred on national issues, notably poverty and inequality. South African students live in a reality of 'fragile nationhood filled with contradictions. [They are] integrated, yet separated … united, yet unreconciled … free, yet oppressed … equal, yet unequal … non-racial, yet live in a racist political reality'. 136 When universities settle for Africanisation rather than striving for genuine transformation, unfair advantages are merely transferred from one group to another rather than being fundamentally rejected or reconfigured. 137 At Rhodes University, this has led to the racial, classist and xenophobic antagonism described by SADC students in this article. Local students may have benefited to some extent from a more Africanised curriculum, but the institutional culture remains predominantly white and, ultimately, foreign. Furthermore, some SADC students complain that their South African lecturers and peers have little awareness of what is happening in the wider continent. For them, Africanisation has mainly implied South Africanisation.
One's existence at home can never be fully replicated in a foreign country. Having migrated to South Africa with a different set of cultural and moral codes, SADC students have displaced their familiar class positions. SADC students' frustration with identity politics on South African campuses can therefore be understood as an appeal for recognition of their particular position within an environment that does not easily accept one's right not to have an identity. 138 However, the realisation of this recognition will likely depend on how South African higher education can first recognise the demands of local students and accordingly deal with the urgent need for transformation at the national level. This article suggests that more research on the lived experience of international students is required to better understand the challenges and consequences arising from transformation pursuits, especially regarding the complex reality of intersections between transnationalism, race and class.