The Rhodes Must Fall campaign follows the ideals of Nelson Mandela
sir – Our university’s vice-chancellor, Professor Louise Richardson, makes two unwarranted claims (“Nelson Mandela would have opposed Rhodes Must Fall campaign”, report, June 12).
First, she draws on Mandela’s words, seven years after his death, to defend colonial-era statues. This would be inappropriate ventriloquising in any context. It is especially so now, when universities need to listen to, not presume to speak for, black students and people of colour.
Secondly, she claims that the campaign amounts to “hiding our history”. The opposite is true. What is being demanded is a full and frank accounting for Britain’s history, in place of the selective commemoration of “great men” whose wealth was made through white supremacy.
Your report refers to a speech by President Mandela in 2003. Earlier that year, he spoke of Cecil Rhodes and others who “enriched themselves at the expense and exclusion of others”.
He also spoke of the South African constitution’s promise to “recognise the injustices of our past” and to build a country that “belongs to all who live in it”. Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter demand nothing else for Britain. We support those demands. James Mcdougall
Professor of Modern and Contemporary History
Elleke Boehmer
Professor of World Literature in English Robert Gilde
Professor of Modern History
Sandra Fredman
Professor of Law
Richard Reid
Professor of African History University of Oxford and nine others; see telegraph.co.uk
sir – Michael Hellier (Letters, June 15) writes that Guy’s and St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust bowed to “public pressure” in removing statues. There is, however, little evidence of widespread public support for this removal. Surely, the trust in fact gave in to a strident, highly vocal minority. Sue Pickard
Epsom Downs, Surrey
sir – I am surprised no one appears to have drawn attention to the fact that the only historical precedent for the wholesale removal of statues of different figures from public view was that carried out by the Nazis and the
Vichy government after the German occupation of France.
Statues of Jews, Masons, radicals, philosophers, democrats and past opponents of the Germans – any that were repugnant to them – all went. Those in metal were melted down, others were broken up.
For this see Pierre Jahan’s clandestine photos of the destruction of those made out of metal in Paris in La Mort et les Statues (1946). Alastair Laing
London N5