A bucketload of human excrement flung at a statue has toppled a symbol of British imperialism in South Africa, marking the emergence of a new generation of black protest against white oppression. The senate of the University of Cape Town (UCT) on Friday bowed to student demands that a brooding bronze statue of colonialist Cecil John Rhodes should be removed from the campus.
UCT, the oldest university in South Africa and regularly ranked as the best on the continent, was built on land donated by Rhodes, a mining magnate who died in 1902. Many of the students involved in the protests never lived under the injustices of white minority rule, but said they still experience racial discrimination 21 years after the end of apartheid.
The large statue of a notoriously racist Rhodes gazing across an Africa that he coveted for the British Empire made them feel alienated on a campus still dominated by white staff, they said.
Photo: Reuters
The “poo protest” was launched by a small group of students earlier this month, sparking a series of demonstrations demanding that the statue be torn down.
On Friday, the university senate voted 181-to-1 to remove the statue permanently from the campus, after UCT vice chancellor Max Price acknowledged “the many injustices of colonial conquest enacted under Rhodes’ watch.”
While the university council still has to endorse the move at a special meeting on Wednesday next week, the statue was to be boarded up until it is handed over to government heritage authorities, university spokeswoman Pat Lucas said.
“It is certainly a victory for us,” student representative council president Ramabina Mahapa said. “It means we are being heard by the larger community.”
A DIVISIVE HISTORY
However, the disappearance of Rhodes is unlikely to end the debate on racial transformation launched by the protest, which gave rise to similar demands for change at two other universities.
In the east coast city of Durban, students at the University of KwaZulu Natal splattered white paint and antiracism slogans on a statue of British King George V.
And at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape, activists want the institution to be renamed.
The protests have also sparked lively debate among academics, historians, politicians and writers of letters to newspapers.
Much of the debate has been calm and thoughtful in a nation with such a divisive history, but a bitter edge of racism lurks beneath the surface in what former South African president Nelson Mandela dubbed a “Rainbow Nation.”
One white letter writer suggested in the Cape Times that the student who threw the excrement at Rhodes should leave UCT and attend a university established by “his own ancestors.”
However, students have dismissed the argument that Rhodes should be honored for donating land for the campus, saying that he stole it from black Africans in the first place.
The discontent goes beyond symbols to cover admission policies and the racial makeup of the teaching staff.
Eusebius McKaiser, an author and commentator who attended Rhodes University and won a prestigious international Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, summed it up in an opinion piece in the New York Times.
“South African universities remain a testament to the country’s colonial heritage in terms of what they teach, who does the teaching, and the morally odious symbols that haunt our campuses or lurk in their very names... At Rhodes, 83 percent of senior management staff remain white and 77 percent of ‘professionally qualified staff,’ a category that includes academic teaching staff, are white,” he wrote.
MANDELA LEGACY
White people make up about 8 percent of South Africa’s population of about 54 million.
McKaiser, who is of mixed race, defended his acceptance of a Rhodes scholarship, telling a radio interviewer that in moral terms, the colonialist’s money belonged to “the millions of black South Africans whose rights were trampled on.”
He took the scholarship to Oxford “so that I could come back and show the middle finger to his legacy,” McKaiser said.
Since the end of apartheid the names of some cities and streets deemed offensive have been changed, but monuments to South Africa’s period of racist white minority rule remain scattered throughout the nation.
Much of that can be attributed to Mandela’s racial reconciliation policies.
Another former Rhodes scholar, Shaun Johnson, wrote in South Africa’s Times newspaper of his surprise when Mandela agreed in 2002 to have his name coupled with that of Rhodes in a new charitable organization.
The Mandela Rhodes Foundation, of which Johnson is now executive director, provides post-graduate scholarships to young Africans.
“Mandela told us to expect controversy and embrace it, while remaining certain in the knowledge that what we were actually doing was what mattered,” Johnson wrote. “He said... whenever possible, we had to put history to work for a better future.”
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was