Toppling statues won’t change students’ future

AFAVOURITE latenight bar game I play with nerdy business reporters is to test their powers of observation.

Which is the most prominent artist featured on the Standard Bank executive floor? I suspect it’s Irma Stern. The bank has a lot of her paintings. What is the extent of the Bidvest art collection? One. At least it’s a joke Brian Joffe tells visitors to the group’s small head office in Melrose Arch.

My favourite: What sculpture occupied the centre of outgoing Nedbank chairman Reuel Khoza’s coffee table at the Rivonia Road head office? Most people inevitably would answer Mandela. Some would suggest Jan Smuts. Not one ever suggested Paul Kruger.

I once interviewed Khoza in his office. On the table was a small Anton van Wouw sculpture of a forlorn Kruger slumped in a chair reading the Bible. The piece, Kruger in Exile, seemed oddly out of place.

Khoza explained that, like him, Kruger was an African. He cared deeply about his people and struggled against colonialism and died in exile.

Khoza was adamant that we all had plenty to learn from Kruger and just because we might not like his politics, it didn’t mean we couldn’t learn from his extraordinary life. The sculpture gave him a daily reminder of that fact.

The problem with statues in South Africa is that they laud a political past and are by their nature divisive.

The Dutch-born Van Wouw was one of the Nats’ favourite sculptors.

He created, among others, the statue of Kruger that was splattered with paint in the aftermath of the #RhodesMustFall campaign. It’s worthwhile noting that the very placement of Kruger in Pretoria’s Church Square was in itself contentious. Van Wouw was commissioned by industrialist Sammy Marks in 1895 to produce the Kruger likeness. He completed it in the year the Anglo-Boer War broke out. It was finally erected in Princess Park in 1913, despite its plinth in Church Square being ready for it for 15 years. It was finally moved to its current spot by DF Malan in 1954 — itself a political act.

As the University of Cape Town this week removed the statue of Cecil John Rhodes from its prominent position on that campus, it’s worth stopping off in Adderley Street to see who funded the statues of Jan and Maria van Riebeeck at the lower end of that road. Yes, it was Rhodes who saw fit some 250 years after the establishment of a Dutch refreshment station to commemorate that early act of colonialism.

Removing his statue — or any SOMEWHAT BEARISH: A sculpture of the popular author Michael Bond with his creation, Paddington Bear other, for that matter — does nothing to change history. It does nothing to address systemic corruption that threatens to undermine the students’ collective future. It does nothing to improve their job prospects. The rage exhibited at inanimate objects is symptomatic of something far more serious — a desperate battle for an equitable stake in the country’s economic future. Bringing down statues does nothing to advance that cause, either.

Everything I know about Rhodes suggests he was a detestable character. If anything, memorials to him and his ilk serve to remind us of where we come from. Rhodes was instrumental in the early consolidation of De Beers, which laid the groundwork for a booming resource economy, but he was also a rabid colonialist who in- stigated the Anglo-Boer War and whose ambition to have the Union Jack fly from the Cape to Cairo was thwarted only by illhealth and his death at 49.

London probably has more statues and sculptures than any other city. They unashamedly celebrate Britain’s colonial past and serve as a reminder of how Britain was once a dominant global power. They are also a chilling reminder of a history steeped in blood.

From Boudica, the Icenian queen who, with her daughters, died in the revolt against the Roman invasion; to Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo; to Horatio Nelson, who died fighting the Spanish at Trafalgar; and Winston Churchill, whose fortitude captivated Smuts, who, along with Nelson Mandela, today share pride of place in Parliament Square outside the Palace of Westminster. Elsewhere, amyriad of long-forgotten monarchs and generals are dotted around the city.

London, however, also glorifies its engineers, artists, scientists and literary greats.

You will find a small memorial to Joseph Bazalgette, the Victorian engineer whose development of the sewerage system took the city from a cesspit to a modern metropolis, near Cleopatra’s Needle, the obelisk on the banks of the Thames. Hyde Park has a statue of JM Barrie’s fictional character Peter Pan, and not far from Paddington Station is a recent sculpture of author Michael Bond and the Peruvian bear named after the station.

Back home, Beaufort West has a modest memorial to heart transplant pioneer Chris Barnard. Saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi is remembered outside the Newtown venue that bears his name. But there are too few memorials to those who have made life better than those who sought some kind of immortality through the exercise of political or military power.

Business leaders leave monuments of a different kind. Donald Gordon has a hospital and business school named after him, Raymond Ackerman a respected entrepreneur training academy. Others have plaques showing they opened massive head offices, often shortly before being fired. When Michael Jordaan stepped down as CEO of FNB, he declined the honour afforded his predecessors. Traditionally, CEOs of FNB had portraits painted and hung in the hallowed halls of its downtown Johannesburg HQ. Some were downright rogues. He probably didn’t want his legacy to be tarnished through association.

Modern-day iconoclasts, beware what you wish for.

Whitfield is a financial writer and broadcaster

London’s statues also glorify its engineers, artists and literary greats