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Speaking of removing statues of racist imperialists, the name Cecil Rhodes came up:
June 9, 2020, “Rhodes Must Fall – Oxford protesters target statue of colonialist,“ Reuters, Ben Makori, Hannah McKay, Oxford, England
“A wave of anti-racism protests sweeping across the United States and Europe has reignited a debate about monuments glorifying Britain’s imperialist past, which many people see as offensive in today’s multi-ethnic society. Dramatic images on Sunday [June 7th] of protesters in the port city of Bristol tearing down a statue of 17th century slave trader Edward Colston and throwing it into the harbour inspired campaigners in Oxford to seize the moment.
“Rhodes represents such a violent legacy of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, particularly in southern Africa,” said protester Morategi Kale, a South African graduate student at Oxford. “The beginning is to take down a statue that celebrates that.”
Many academics and public figures oppose the removal of such monuments, arguing they merely reflect history and should be used as points of discussion.
But demonstrators said the statue of Rhodes should no longer have pride of place on the facade of Oriel College, which overlooks Oxford’s High Street.
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“I think what he did should be in the museum, but not on an institution of higher education. It’s just the wrong place,”said Butch Smith, a chef, who had brought his young daughter to the protest. Jeevan Ravindran, a student, said the statue showed the university was failing to engage with issues faced by students from ethnic minority backgrounds.
“For black and brown students to have to walk around this university and see these symbols of slavery and colonisation is frankly quite abhorrent,” she said.
CONTESTED HERITAGE
A previous student campaign in 2015, modelled on the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement in South Africa that led Cape Town University to remove its statue of Rhodes that year, failed to convince Oriel to follow suit.
In a statement ahead of Tuesday’s demonstration, the college said it abhorred racism.
“We understand that we are, and we want to be, a part of the public conversation about the relationship between the study of history, public commemoration, social justice and educational equality,” it said.
“As a college, we continue to debate and discuss the issues raised by the presence on our site of examples of contested heritage relating to Cecil Rhodes.”
A mining magnate, Rhodes was a central figure in Britain’s colonial project in southern Africa, giving his name to Rhodesia, present-day Zimbabwe, and founding the De Beers diamond empire.
He made his fortune from the exploitation of African miners, secured power through bloody imperial wars and paved the way to apartheid with his beliefs and measures on racial segregation.
A student at Oriel in his youth, Rhodes left the college money when he died and also endowed the Rhodes Scholarships, which have allowed more than 8,000 students from countries around the world to study at Oxford over the past century.
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The demonstration was peaceful, and there was no attempt to remove the statue, which stands in a niche high up on a building whose construction was partly funded by Rhodes.” (Images above by Reuters, June 9, 2020, in Oxford, England)
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“(This story corrects name spelling in paragraph 8, changes “he” to “she” in paragraph 9)”
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Added: “Not simply its colonial history, its uncritical veneration and idealisation of that history:”
June 11, 2020, ““It was intensely painful”: The Story of Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford,“ New Statesman (UK), Ailbhe Rea
“Organisers of the original 2015 movement to challenge institutional racism at Oxford University speak to the New Statesman about that experience, and their hopes for the current resurgence.”
“Explaining the origins and aims of the movement, Mpofu-Walsh “would ask people to put themselves in the shoes of various black students at Oxford,” he says. These students “have achieved a great deal to get to Oxford, because there are so few black students there. And then it slowly dawns on one that there is something wrong. The feeling of some kind of hostility and alienation becomes very palpable, very quickly.”
A report in 2014 uncovered a high level of social isolation among BAME students at Oxford, and found that 59.3 per cent of BAME respondents have felt uncomfortable or unwelcome at Oxford due to their race.
“Part of that is linked to Oxford’s colonial history, but not simply its colonial history, its uncritical veneration and idealisation of that history. What Rhodes Must Fall has simply asked for is greater critical engagement with the way public space is negotiated at Oxford, and the way that links to the very material problems of systemic racism that undergird it.”
Some critics of the campaign, both now and in 2015, have suggested that it focuses too narrowly on the fate of the statue, and not enough on wider issues of curriculum and representation at Oxford. (In the year Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford was founded, for example, the university admitted only 24 black British undergraduates. The most recent admissions figures for the university show that only one UK black student was admitted for geography, two for physics, and none at all for biological sciences over a three-year period.)
But Mpofu-Walsh argues that the focus on the statue was a strategic move to amplify multiple concerns about systemic racism at the university.
“The key was how to leverage a wide range of conversations and centre them around one icon. Centering the debate around the statue made a whole set of questions that were not as prominent as they should have been more prominent, even as the statue became the most prominent question….
“People would say, ‘You’re shutting down debate’, and we would say, ‘No, actually, we’re opening up debate. We’re the ones who are saying that we need to debate Rhodes’ legacy.’“…
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