Protesters call for end to Rhodes’ influence
Nationwide movement grows to remove statues and other symbols of British colonial rule
I t began with a container of excrement.
On March 9, a South African student protester tossed feces on a statue of British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, igniting nationwide calls to remove other statues of former white leaders. A statue of Britain’s George V on a University of KwaZulu-Natal campus was splattered with white paint. Some activists want a statue of Paul Kruger, a white Boer leader in the late 19th century, to be shifted from a central square in Pretoria, the capital, to a museum.
The uproar is part of a larger discourse about change in South Africa, where the legacy of apartheid, the white minority rule that ended two decades ago, is often blamed for economic inequality, a struggling education system and other problems.
Mthunzi Mthimkhulu, a technology consultant and former student at the University of Cape Town, stood Saturday near the Rhodes statue, which had been wrapped in black garbage bags by protesters. Obscene graffiti covered the pedestal.
“We don’t need reminders of where we came from. We know our struggles,” he said. “What we need is things that will take us forward.”
By Sunday, the Rhodes statue was boarded up, its days apparently numbered. Max Price, the university’s vice-chancellor who is white, described Rhodes as a “villain” and said the statue should be moved.
Rhodes, who died in 1902, was “a kind of colonial warlord” and “ardent segregationist” who made a fortune in mining and grabbed land from locals, said Paul Maylam, a history professor at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. He was also associated with education and philanthropy, partly because of scholarships that carry his name.
There have been calls for Rhodes University’s name to be changed. University Vice-Chancellor Sizwe Mabizela said there should be a respectful debate.
Cape Town residents wonder about the fate of the temple-like Rhodes Memorial on the slopes of Devil’s Peak, overlooking the city. There is also a Rhodes statue in Company’s Garden, a central park. There is more to the furor. Some South Africans complain university faculties are mostly white and Western-based curricula ignore African culture. Some also assert Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader who was elected president in 1994, was too soft on a white minority that still commands enormous economic clout. This week, Ngoako Ramatlhodi, the mineral resources minister, said there is “still some way to go” before most South Africans, particularly blacks, benefit from a mining industry forged many decades ago to benefit a “select few.”
One caller to a radio show mockingly asked whether the Union Buildings in Pretoria, which were designed more than a century ago and today house government offices, should be levelled.
On Thursday, in the southern town of Uitenhage, members of a radical South African movement set fire to a monument to British soldiers who died in the Boer Wars, police said.