On Erasing Racists Like Rhodes From Africa’s Colonial Past

Rhodes, 1853-1902, was a British colonialist, businessman, mining magnate, and racist politician in South Africa.

Europeans like to say he founded Rhodesia – a colonial state in Africa. Of course he did, the same way Christopher Columbus founded America!

What was the territory that the British and Rhodes named after themselves was historically the site of many prominent kingdoms and empires, as well as a major route for migration and trade across the South African expanse.

But on the arrival of certain Europeans, that course of thousands of years of history, culture and trade was decimated.

Cecil Rhodes and his mafia British South Africa Mining Company during the 1890s demarcated the lands, with Rhodes becoming the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1923.

In 1965, after South Africans had been forced through the barrel of the gun to give up significant parts of their ancestral lands, the conservative white minority government unilaterally declared independence as Rhodesia.

The unrecognized state endured African and international isolation and a 15-year guerrilla war with African liberation movements; this culminated in a peace agreement that established universal enfranchisement and de jure sovereignty in April 1980.

Luckily, the Shona and Ndebele ethnic groups whose livelihoods had been distorted by racist from Europe, from 1888 to 1965, morally reconstituted the territory into Zimbabwe after the fall of the British Empire.

The name “Zimbabwe” is based on a Shona term for Great Zimbabwe, the ancient African city in the country’s south-east whose remains are now a protected site. Many sources hold that the name Zimbabwe is derived from dzimba-dza-mabwe, translated from the Karanga dialect of Shona as “large houses of stone”.

An ethnically diverse country of roughly 13 million people, Zimbabwe has 16 official languages, with Shona and Ndebele being most common. President Robert Mugabe is head of state and government, and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He is renowned as a champion for democracy and anti-colonial imperialism.

However, the Rhodes University in South Africa, named after Cecil Rhodes has not changed. Neither has provisions of the infamous Rhodes Scholarship, also funded by his loot from Africa, recognized the terrible neanderthalic inhumanity of the likes of Rhodes in South African colonial history.

In Johannesburg, the Cecil John Rhodes statue on the University of Cape Town’s campus stands nauseatingly tall until now.

Should it be destroyed?

The institution’s Vice Chancellor Max Price said not.

“I do not think the statue should be destroyed or hidden away. I just think it should not be there – it should be moved,” Price said in a statement.

“This will not compromise our ability to record and debate the role Rhodes played in the city’s and continent’s history.”

He said moving it would not change the institution’s acknowledgement that it acquired its site from the Rhodes estate.

But many in South Africa and beyond disagree.

“There is no such thing as a Rhodes estate. It is loot. Loot that must be re-confiscated back to Zimbabwean and South African national funds,” said historian Amadu Imbala from Cameroon.

During a seminar on transformation at the university, the president of the students’ representative council, senior staff and more than half the audience walked out.

The seminar was held following protests that began when a student emptied toilet on the Rhodes statue.

On Sunday, the statue was covered with black rubbish bags.

A “UCT: Rhodes Must Fall” Facebook group was created.

It had 3698 likes by 6.30pm on Thursday. The group described itself as “a collective student, staff and worker movement mobilizing for direct action against the institutional racism of UCT”.

Price said the university council was the only body that could make a decision on whether to move the statue.

Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande welcomed the calls for the removal of the statue.

“I welcome the struggles initiated by the progressive forces at UCT and Rhodes to drive transformation in our institutions, but also appeal them to ensure that their actions always remain disciplined and peaceful,” he said in a statement.

He said the only place suitable for such a statue is “indoors, possibly in a museum,” to remind our children of the havoc of a brutal European colonial past.

“History cannot be swept under the carpet… Rhodes accumulated a large fortune by exploiting South Africa’s natural resources and its people,” and he wants his children and all South Africans to remember that abominable history so it never happens again.

He said the issue of transformation went beyond the statue’s removal and on erasing racists like Rhodes from Africa’s colonial past.

“It should include changing the demographic composition of staff and student bodies as well as ensuring that curriculum reflects South Africa’s development and cultural needs.”

He said the notion that expanding the proportion of black students and staff at the best institutions would lead to a drop in quality, should always be seen as first racist, second neanderthalic and lastly, should never be accepted.

“Such arguments only serve to defend privilege. In SA today, the job of good university leaders is to ensure that transformation and quality improvement go hand in hand.”

The Economic Freedom Fighters on Wednesday also threw its support behind the students.

“Rhodes can never be a symbol worth celebrating in a post-1994 South Africa,” national spokesman Mbuyiseni Ndlozi said in a statement.

“The EFF is not opportunistically raising the issue of Rhodes due to the momentum of students’ and academics’ demand.”

Ndlozi said the EFF had consistently called for the removal of symbols of colonialism and white supremacy from South Africa’s symbolic expressions everywhere in the country.

“On various occasions, the EFF has demanded the complete removal and demolition of apartheid symbols, including the ones next to the Parliament of South Africa.”