Andrew Kenny

Rhodes to nowhere

They complain that the university is too ‘Eurocentric’ – but they show no signs of wanting to make any actual changes

‘Rhodes must fall!’ shouted angry black students at the University of Cape Town. The problem is — and it is the profoundest problem of race relations — they were also demonstrating by their every action and desire that they want Rhodes to rise even higher.

Last month a black 30-year-old student, Chumani Maxwele, in a great blaze of publicity, threw ‘human excrement’ over the statue of Cecil John Rhodes on the steps to the university’s upper campus. It was followed by similar acts and protests across South Africa against symbols of white imperialism and colonialism. At UCT itself, black students stormed into a council meeting chanting, ‘One settler, one bullet!’ As would be expected, the authorities gave way, and on 9 April, after 81 years, the statue was removed before a cheering crowd of black students.

But what were they cheering for? There have been interminable speeches and articles from black students and academics telling of their pain and humiliation before white colonial outrages and insisting on ‘transformation’ of higher education to a more African way. What do they mean? They say their university is too ‘Eurocentric’. How do they want to make it more Afrocentric?

I heard a lot of anger but not one single proposal about ‘transforming’ UCT except to remove the Rhodes statue and employ more black academics. Nothing was suggested about a more African curriculum or more African modes of learning. Quite the opposite: there was an important silence about making any real changes at all.

Rhodes was a 19th-century European with similar views to those of Karl Marx (a German contemporary). Both believed that black Africans were primitives and that the British empire did a good job in raising ‘barbarian countries’ (to use Marx’s words in his Communist Manifesto) to a higher stage of history.

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