Chumani Maxwele

Chumani Maxwele (born 1985) is a South African political activist best known for his involvement in the Rhodes Must Fall and the #FeesMustFall movements. Maxwele first gained prominence in 2010 after his wrongful arrest and interrogation for allegedly giving an obscene hand gesture to President Jacob Zuma's presidential motorcade convoy in Cape Town city traffic.

In December 2022 it was reported that Maxwele physically assaulted a University of Cape Town academic at a university function. He had previously been expelled from the university, a decision upheld by court in 2019.

Early years Maxwele spent most of his early years in a village in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa. His mother was a domestic worker and his father was a miner. Two years after South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994 he moved to the Cape Town township of Delft where he spent time volunteering for an HIV awareness campaign in nearby Khayelitsha. He gained a scholarship to study Political Science at the University of Cape Town (UCT).

Rhodes Must Fall & #FeesMustFall In March 2015 Maxwele ignited a vigorous national debate about post-apartheid racial transformation by hurling human excrement at a prominent statue of Cecil John Rhodes on the University of Cape Town's Rondebosch campus, a result of which some media started referring to Maxwele as 'poo-flinger'. He was subsequently an active member of the Rhodes Must Fall protest movement,

In April 2016, Maxwele was again involved in violent protests during an illegal #FeesMustFall protest taking place at the University of the Witwatersrand. During the protest, a lecture hall at the university was set on fire.

On 7 May 2015, Chumani Maxwele was given a provisional suspension order because UCT authorities "considered his continued presence on the campus as being a threat to the maintenance of good order."

The suspension related to an incident which is alleged to have occurred on 1 May 2015. Upon appeal by Maxwele, UCT varied the suspension to allow him to attend classes and use the library. Maxwele successfully challenged his suspension in the Western Cape High Court on the grounds that the presence of the deputy registrar of academic administration, Karen van Heerden, at his suspension hearing tainted the hearing with bias.

The expulsion, imposed on September 5, 2018, ended his postgraduate studies at UCT. His appeal against the conviction and expulsion was dismissed by the UCT Student Discipline Tribunal of Appeal on October 9, 2019.