The complex history of a globetrotting statue

sir – You report (November 21) that a copy of George Frederic Watts’s statue, Physical Energy, has been erected at the Royal Academy – 113 years after the original was taken to Cape Town.

It is worth noting that the statue was originally constructed at the grave of the empire-builder Cecil Rhodes, in the Matobo Hills in Zimbabwe, before becoming a centrepiece of the Rhodes Memorial on Table Mountain in South Africa in 1911, where it remains.

A second large cast was made in 1905 and unveiled in London’s Kensington Gardens. A third was made in 1959 and erected at the behest of the British South Africa Company in front of the High Court building in Lusaka, Zambia, before being moved to the grounds of the National Archives in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Dr Derek Henderson, the late vice-chancellor of Rhodes University in South Africa, hoped (but failed) to acquire it for his institution, in whose heraldic crest it figures, little anticipating the controversy that now surrounds memorials associated with Cecil Rhodes.

Thus this empire-builder continues, to borrow from Kipling, to “quicken and control”, but in ways that he could scarcely have foreseen. Dr Donal Lowry

Regent’s Park College University of Oxford