Student-led protest movements swept South Africa in the mid-2010s. Nevertheless, echoes of these demands can still be heard today. The issue of transformation and “decolonization” of higher education is one of the most pressing issues for the young “born free” generation. It touched on the deep-seated problems of post-apartheid South Africa, such as racism, economic inequality, high unemployment, crime. Moreover, the youth argued that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party had failed to deal with the past as promised in 1994. The author reflects on why and how the “born free” give meaning to their country’s past, drawing on Twitter and South African media accounts of the #FeesMustFall protest. In particular, more than 200,000 tweets with the hashtag #FeesMustFall (#FMF) were uploaded using web scraping between 15 and 29 October in March 2023. The relevance of this study lies in the increasing role of South African youth in addressing critical issues in the political and civic life of their country. The scholarly novelty lies in the analyzing the tweets as sources to study the perception of apartheid’s past and its legacy. The main objectives of research are to discover the ways to study #FMF and to determine the strategies for actualizing the past in the student protests. In conclusion it can be argued, that through social media the young generation appealed to the historical events of their country that allowed to demonstrate a willingness of “born free” to become the agents of political transformations. Furthermore, the memory of the colonial era and the apartheid period is the cornerstone of a new South African identity after 1994.