Twenty years after apartheid ended, it seems like historical amnesia has come to an end in South Africa. Or at least on college campuses. Students at the University of Cape Town are demanding the destruction or removal of a huge statue of Cecil Rhodes, British imperialist who worked hard to disenfranchise black people. More on the click.
Interesting opinion piece by Eusebius McKaiser via The New York Times:
For two decades, many South Africans assumed that our university campuses had become politically apathetic. But this may be the year that South Africa’s students wake up from a deep sleep, refreshed and determined to demand transformation of their educational institutions.
Their activism has been stirred, unexpectedly, by a controversy over 19th-century history. Though the British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes came to Africa to pillage, he has been immortalized in countless statues, highways, buildings and, for a time, even a posh Cape Town nightclub.
Rhodes’s staying power in post-apartheid South Africa was impressive for a man who plundered much of the region while amassing his fortune, worked tenaciously as a politician to disenfranchise black people, and dreamed of conquering Africa from the Cape to Cairo. Now, it seems, the historical amnesia has come to an end.
Students at the University of Cape Town are demanding the destruction or removal of a huge statue of Rhodes that stares down on the city from the mountainside campus, eulogizing the arch-imperialist with the words of another great admirer of empire, Rudyard Kipling: “Living he was the land, and dead, His soul shall be her soul!”
Twenty years after apartheid ended, 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. In recent weeks, there have also been demands to change the name of Rhodes University, my own alma mater.
Both of these universities have hastily built up reputations as exemplars of diversity and inclusiveness. They are not.
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. By 2013, only three percent of academic staff at U.C.T. were black, and there are only two full professors who are black in the faculty of Humanities.
It is little wonder many U.C.T. students are demanding the destruction or removal of a prominent statue of colonialism’s great exemplar, Cecil John Rhodes. And in my hometown of Grahamstown, a city born of colonial misadventure, we shouldn’t be surprised that many students are demanding the name of Rhodes University be changed.
Critics may ask of what use it is to dismantle symbols of colonialism on campuses if removing them won’t usher in transformed and more inclusive educational spaces?
But they miss the point. The core issue is a prevalent feeling, and experience, of exclusion among many black students in universities across the country, even where they are a numerical majority.
Read the entire piece, here.
Your thoughts?
