Struggle songs and collective identity.

Abstract

This qualitative study aimed to explore the role of struggle songs in constructing a collective identity for students who sing struggle songs during student protests. This study was guided by the objective to explore how the discourse strategies employed in struggle songs currently sung by student activists in South Africa are used to construct their collective identities. The theoretical foundations of this study were based on the Afrocentric paradigm, specifically the Afrocentric framework of personhood. A social constructivist research paradigm was adopted in this study. The data in this study was collected through a purposive sampling of N=21 videos of struggle songs available on the YouTube platform from 2015 to 2022. A political discourse analysis (van Dijk, 1997) was used to analyse the data in this research. The research findings indicated that struggle songs are a form of political discourse with discursive strategies that construct the collective identities of the students who sing them. The study found that these discursive strategies included topics, textual schemata, local semantics, lexicon, syntax, rhetoric, expression structures and speech acts. The study found that the struggle songs discursively construct the students' collective identities based on their sense of community belonging, unity, and connection with apartheid activists. This research found that today, discursive strategies are used in struggle songs to construct the student's social, political, communal, racial and socioeconomic collective identities. The findings of this study collaborated with the Afrocentric framework of personhood through the notion that the conceptualisation of a person, their behaviour, and motivations are based on their community existence, unity of being and relation to others. The study's conclusions will be helpful to the government, institutions of higher learning, university management, and, more importantly, the student activists who sing the struggle songs and future students and student activists who will be singing the struggle songs in the near future.