Cricket provides united focus for students

gave the statue a second glance.

Why? Because most seemed to have other things on their minds – mainly the Cricket World Cup semi-final being played in Auckland between the Black Caps and the Proteas.

Scores of students of all races sat in the cafeterias off Cissy Gool Plaza focused on TV sets mounted on the walls, watching the cricket action, cheering and sighing as the moment demanded. Others were clustered around laptops in the Molly Blackburn Hall, watching the same action.

Others wandered quietly around a series of boards erected in the hall, covered in graffiti, which exhorted students to have their say on the Rhodes statue issue.

As the Man Booker International prize function got under way next door, the speeches were frequently interrupted by the sounds of cheers and sighs.

Rhodes’s statue was sculpted by Marion Walgate and erected in 1934. It has long been contentious, and was initially resented by young Afrikaans students at the university.

In the university’s leaflet which accompanies its Heritage Walk, it is stated that Rhodes’s “imperialist and racist attitude to Africa causes much controversy and resentment today, but without this section of the Groote Schuur estate which he donated for the founding of a university, UCT would probably not have come into existence in 1918”.

It goes on: “Rhodes envisioned Boer War enmity between English and Afrikaner being laid to rest by means of the interaction of promising young people from these backgrounds in an academic environment.

“Just as many young Afrikaners in the 1930s and 1940s were uncomfortable on a campus which provided daily reminders of Rhodes and Jameson, today many students question the ways in which these figures continue to be memorialised.”

Except yesterday, for a brief while, cricket provided a united focus.