‘Retain and Explain’ won’t end the culture wars

I’m sympathetic to Oliver Dowden’s formula for defusing culture-war disputes about statues of controversial historic figures: ‘retain and explain’. That is, don’t pull statues down, but make it clear that their remaining in place doesn’t signify approval of everything the people they represent did. Provide the public with a helpful summary of their lives and works, the good as well as the bad, so we can make a rounded assessment and, hopefully, judge them by the standards of their times as well as of our own.

Unfortunately, the ‘explanatory panel’ that has just appeared beneath the statue of Cecil Rhodes on the facade of Oriel college falls somewhat short of this ideal. It describes him as a ‘committed British colonialist’ who ‘obtained his fortune through exploitation of minerals, land, and peoples of southern Africa’. In case you’re in any doubt about how terrible he was, it adds: ‘Some of his activities led to great loss of life and attracted criticism in his day and ever since.’

The problem with this summary isn’t that it’s historically inaccurate, but that it’s too one-sided. Yes, Rhodes was a committed colonialist, but he also campaigned against withholding voting rights from the indigenous peoples of the Cape Colony provided they met the same eligibility criteria as whites. He funded a newspaper, Izwi labantu, aimed at an African readership and which, after his death, played a pivotal role in the formation of the African National Congress. Most significantly, he inserted a clause in his will making it clear that the scholarships bearing his name should be awarded without regard to race. For staunch defenders of imperialism, that was tantamount to heresy.

No doubt there wasn’t room on the panel to include the case for the defence as well as the prosecution and, to be fair, it includes a QR code directing you to a page on Oriel’s website that offers a slightly more nuanced discussion of Rhodes’s shortcomings and includes a dissenting opinion by Professor Nigel Biggar.