The 2015 October student uprisings in South Africa, organised around the hashtag and demand that #FeesMustFall (also #EndOutsourcing and #NationalShutDown), have been compared to the student uprisings of June 1976 when thousands of youth took to the streets to protest against the apartheid government's insistence that Afrikaans be a compulsory medium of instruction in schools. While the June 1976 and the October 2015 student uprisings were organised around what can, on the surface, be understood as a single issue, these large-scale protests also wanted larger demands to be met. The students of 1976 were resisting the unequal and segregated school and societal system of apartheid and in 2015 students were resisting the commodification of education by calling for free, quality, decolonised education and expressing dissatisfaction with the rate and depth of change two decades after South Africa's democratisation. Youth were critiquing the institutional racism and the racialised oppression that have persisted across South Africa, making it arguably the most unequal country in the world currently.

Comparing the recent 2015 uprisings to the 1968–69 period seems appropriate as that was the year that Steve Biko and others formed the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO). Out of this radical black student organisation came the politics and philosophy of Black Consciousness (BC), which encouraged self-reflection and the centering of the black self, and insisted on a Pan-African outlook. In its early phases it critiqued the education system in South Africa and fought for the improvement of higher education for the black student. It also developed its own organisational practices and structures and a political education programme (known as Leadership Training programmes for university students and Formation Schools for high school students and community members) for its members. There was a significant change in thinking about education and society from 1969 onwards, when SASO stopped fighting for “equality” in education, or education equal to white education, and started criticising white, privileged education as a domesticating or dominating education.

The last few years have seen a re-emergence of BC and Pan-Africanism at universities through a range of student formations. The demographics of universities, particularly the historically-white institutions like the University of Cape Town (UCT), Rhodes University, University of Pretoria and University of Stellenbosch, have changed significantly since black students were allowed into all universities. At some universities this has meant that black students make up the majority of students on campus.