HOW I SEE IT
They thronged Oxford (with no pretence of social distancing) to witness the ultimate Empire villain take a tumble. But he’s still clinging to his 50ft-high perch – for now
HavIng toppled Bristol slaver Edward Colston into the River avon at the weekend, the monument police moved on to Oxford last night with an even juicier target in their sights: arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes.
The statue of the victorian mining mega-magnate has stood above the High Street entrance to his old college, Oriel, for more than a century.
a vocal but unsuccessful five-year movement for his removal – calling itself ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ – has now found itself reborn and firing on rocket fuel after the death of george Floyd at the hands (and knee) of a Minneapolis police officer.
Last night more than 1,000 protesters gathered in Oxford’s High Street – without any pretence at social distancing – in the hope of seeing the ultimate Empire villain take a tumble. Colston might have lent his name to various Bristol landmarks. Rhodes gave his to two entire countries, northern and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe).
However, a combination of wire mesh, a posse of rooftop police and an insurmountable 50ft gap between the plinth and the street below ensured that the Croesus-rich clergyman’s son from Bishop’s Stortford would cling to his perch – for now. It will need a fireman’s ladder or a cherry-picker to give Rhodes the Colston treatment. That was not going to happen last night.
This was a passionate but assiduously peaceful protest with plenty of high-brow moments; it’s not often that you hear a public gathering quoting – and booing – former Regius Professor of Modern History Hugh Trevor-Roper.
The Black Lives Matter movement was well-represented but there were more placards and banners on the theme of ‘Decolonise Oxford’.
‘De- De- De- Decolonise!’ they chanted as speakers skirted round the obvious paradox. How does a university disassociate itself from one of the most generous yet unloved benefactors in its history while still enjoying his munificence? Rhodes scholar
ships have given and continue to give umpteen poor students – Bill Clinton and three Australian PMs among them – a head-start in life. The boss of the university’s African Studies Centre is the ‘Rhodes Professor of Race Relations’.
Oxford will have an easier time finding that coronavirus vaccine than solving this conundrum. So much easier, of course, to fixate on a statue. Cecil Rhodes never saw this stone effigy of himself. It was put up several years after his death by a college thrilled to receive £100,000 of his fortune upon his death in 1902. It’s not a terribly good statue. Rhodes looks like a bank manager on his second-storey alcove, lording it over the two mere King-Emperors standing below – Edward VII and George V.
They all stand on the North Wall of the Rhodes Building, a mock-Jacobean complex built between 1909 and 1911. The ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ lot were by no means the first to seek the dismantling of this unashamedly imperialist façade. Back in 1930, one of Oxford’s most famous literary sons, Evelyn Waugh, wrote: ‘A very small amount of dynamite should be enough to rid us forever of the High Street front of Oriel.’
Ninety years on, it looks as permanent as ever. Speaker after speaker bemoaned the injustice of it all through a tinny sound system which, at times, was drowned out by the news helicopter overhead. ‘We demand an admission of the colonial violence on which Oriel was built,’ yelled one young activist, unaware that Oriel was founded by a medieval rector several centuries before anyone had heard of the British Empire.
A Labour city councillor, Hosnieh Djafari-Marbini, urged the college to apply for planning permission to remove the statue (this is a listed building, after all), before adding that Winston Churchill was a brutal colonial racist, too. Simukai Chigudu, an associate professor from the Centre for African Studies, complained that he was one of a handful of black academics at a university steeped in racism, singling out Prof Trevor-Roper for saying that ‘there is no history in Africa’.
PROF
Chigudu went on to accuse Oxford’s Chancellor, Lord Patten, grand vizier of the liberal establishment, of ‘naked racism’ for his past criticisms of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign.
Oriel College’s flabby earlier statement that it will ‘continue to debate the issues’ was roundly mocked. The speeches gradually drifted off course into rants about Boris Johnson, Palestine and covert Israeli support for the American police before a parting chorus: ‘What goes up must come down.’
For now, in the case of Cecil Rhodes, it does not.