BLACK FEMINIST REVOLT and digital activism working to end rape culture in South Africa Simamkele Dlakavu Simamkele Dlakavu is a Fallist and a Masters student in African Literature at Wits. She has been an active participant in student movements, calling for an intersectional decolonial reality in South Africa. Simamkele is a former Media and Communications Manager for Oxfam South Africa. She has also worked as a human rights television producer on one of South Africa ’s most popular current affairs show: The Big Debate. In 2013, she was one of the producers for BBC’s Question Time for a special episode on Nelson Mandela. Simamkele has co-created and participated in organisations that work with black rural and township youth like Sakha Ulutsha Lwethu. She shares her views on current affairs and politics through platforms such as City Press, The Daily Maverick and independent newspapers. The Mail & Guardian recognised Simamkele as one of South Africa’s Top 200 Young South Africans in 2014. In 2015, she was a part of 22 young women selected to attend the “Writing for Social Change Workshop” held by the African Women’s Development Fund in Uganda. We need to rethink how we move away from the current situation in which there is too little [action] on holding [rape] perpetrators accountable – Prof. Pumla Dineo Gqola (2015, p. 178). Introduction During the establishment of the “Fallist” movements in early 2015, when black women and queer and gender non-conformists held plac-ards stating that “This revolution would be intersectional or it will be bullshit”, they meant it. In 2015 and 2016, South Africa and the world witnessed the commitment of these movements to a decolonial pro-ject where all forms of oppression matter. I am interested in analysing their moments of defiance, revolt, love and solidarity in which social media was a tool to spread awareness, organise and build solidarity in response to rape at university campuses. I engage in this discussion without alienating myself from the community of black feminist stu-dent activists who are the focus of the paper. I will follow the traditions of black feminist scholars like Pumla Gqola, Patricia Hill Collins and others, who have demonstrated the value and courage of not alienat-ing the self from our politics, positionalities, family, communities and our experiences “in order to produce credible intellectual work” (Hill Collins, 2000, p. viii). I choose to do so because I share the hurt and ex-periences of many young women in South Africa and across the world: my lived experience of being a rape survivor. In addition, I was part of the group of black feminists at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) who engaged in solidarity protests entitled #IAmOneInThree in support of the #RUReferenceList, also prevalent on social media. The #IAmOneInThree protest was also a space for us to share our own experiences of patriarchal violence, in the form of rape, and how the system has failed us. Furthermore, I choose to utilise black feminist theory because it allows us to display “the dialogical and dialectical re-lationship between experience, practice and scholarship ” (Hill Collins, 2000, p. 30). I argue that the activism of black feminists in universities in South Africa was able to display: the intersection of ‘activism’ with ‘Black feminist theory’: that is, ‘activism’ or ‘action’ that translates into concrete, tangible out-puts that produce outcomes that make a measurable difference to Black women ’s lives. Thus, ‘Black feminist theory’ is brought to life and articulated as the thinking upon which the action is con-tingent (Nayak, 2013, p. iv-v). I will begin this process of articulation by looking at the black femi-nists ’ acts of mobilisation in three different universities, namely, the University of Cape Town (UCT), the university currently known as Rho-des University (RU) and Wits. I will look at how they engaged with one another through social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, and how their ideas, acts of mobilisation and rebellion allowed for the re-energisation of debates and struggles fought by black feminists in South Africa for decades which are targeted at ending rape. I will fo-cus on how their use of social media to communicate their message, through text, images and videos, drove the issue of rape on university campuses into national political discourse, attracting the attention of mainstream media (local and international), politicians and political organisations, the government, civil society and the wider public. I will begin by outlining the context of #RapeAtAzania and #RU- ReferenceList. I will then look at how black feminists are organising and advocating for gender justice through the digital sphere. I will also share the importance of black feminist agency and revolt. Finally, how black feminists build solidarity and engage the personal, political and public using social media is outlined. #RapeAtAzania and #RUReferenceList: A brief context During the #FeesMustFall protests in universities across South Africa in 2015, a young black woman was raped by a person she regarded as her comrade. Her rape happened at Azania House, an administrative build-ing that activists from the #RhodesMustFall movement had occupied BUWA! ISSUE 7 | DECEMBER 2016 : A Journal on African Women ’s Experiences 101