Campaigners say removing statue of British colonialist is small part of tackling racism at Oxford and would help address UK’s ‘imperial blind spot’

Oxford students fighting to have a statue of Cecil Rhodes removed from Oriel College have said the row over his legacy demonstrates Britain’s “imperial blind spot” and criticised the university’s record on black and ethnic minorities.

The Rhodes Must Fall group last week succeeded in persuading the college to move a plaque dedicated to him and consult on whether to take down his statue from the Grade II-listed building but the students behind it have said they hope to widen their campaign.

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Brian Kwoba, a 33-year-old doctoratal student at Oxford and one of the campaign’s organisers, said he and fellow students were inspired by recent events in South Africa, when students at the University of Cape Town hurled buckets of excrement and paint over a statue of Rhodes that was eventually removed.

“Cecil Rhodes is responsible for all manner of stealing land, massacring tens of thousands of Black Africans, imposing a regime of unspeakable labour exploitation in the diamond mines and devising proto-apartheid policies,” Kwoba said.

“The significance of taking down the statue is simple: Cecil Rhodes is the Hitler of southern Africa. Would anyone countenance a statue of Hitler? The fact that Rhodes is still memorialised with statues, plaques and buildings demonstrates the size and strength of Britain’s imperial blind spot.”

Born in 1853, Rhodes attended Oriel College, Oxford in the 1870s before returning to South Africa. It was there that he founded the De Beers diamond empire, became one of the world’s wealthiest men and rose to be premier of the then Cape Colony in 1890. He died in 1902, aged 48.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Classicist Mary Beard believes the statue should stay, and students must be empowered ‘to look up at Rhodes and friends with a cheery and self confident sense of unbatterability’. Photograph: Geoffrey Swaine/Rex Shutterstock

The British imperialist is now chiefly remembered for beginning the policy of enforced racial segregation in South Africa and for his belief in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. His reputation causes particular problems for Oxford, where the statue sands on campus and his name is still present on the Rhodes Scholarships for international students.

Some academics responded to the campaign by arguing that fighting over the statue is irrelevant. Mary Beard, the classicist, said in a piece for the Times Literary Supplement: “The battle isn’t won by taking the statue away and pretending those people didn’t exist. It’s won by empowering those students to look up at Rhodes and friends with a cheery and self confident sense of unbatterability.”

Conservative MPs have sought to defend the existence of the statue. Jacob Rees-Mogg, MP for North East Somerset, said it was impossible to single out Rhodes given how other celebrated historical figures, such as Winston Churchill and Elizabeth I, also fall short of today’s moral standards. Sir Alan Haselhurst, MP for Saffron Waldon and who read law at Oriel, told the Daily Mail that “apologising for the past is one thing, but destroying symbols of the past is quite another.”

But students involved in the campaign say the battle is far wider than a debate about history. Daisy Chandley, an 18-year-old PPE student at Oxford, said the subject was also about the future. “I joined the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in my second week at Oxford after attending a meeting held by the group,” she said. “This isn’t just a campaign against Cecil Rhodes – it’s a campaign against racism at Oxford, of which the Rhodes statue is a small but symbolic part.”



Of Oxford’s undergraduate students, 13% are black and minority ethnic (BME), a proportion in line with the UK population overall. In 2014, Cherwell, the university’s student newspaper, conducted a study which found that the success rate for BME applicants was 17.1%, significantly lower than the 25.4% success rate for white applicants.

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The study also found that 59.3% of BME students have felt uncomfortable or unwelcome at Oxford because of their race or ethnicity, compared to 5.4% of white students.

Another recent article in the paper also cites a 2011 University and College Union survey which revealed that Oxford has one of the UK’s lowest proportions of professors of BME backgrounds. Only 3.9% of Oxford’s professors are from a BME background, compared with 6.4% at Cambridge, 9.1% at Kings College London and 8.1% at Oxford Brookes.

“Taking down the Rhodes statue would not immediately fix or reverse all of this but it would signify a real commitment from Oriel and the university to seriously engage with this problem,” said Dalia Gebrial, a 22-year-old master’s student. “It would signify an acknowledgment that brown and black lives matter – and that they matter to the extent that we are willing to take honest, genuine steps to address historical violence against them.”

Oriel College, whose provost is the former civil servant Moira Wallace, has also indicated that the issue goes far beyond a debate about public art. Its statement, release last week, acknowledged that “Rhodes was also a 19th-century colonialist whose values and world view stand in absolute contrast to the ethos of the scholarship programme today, and to the values of a modern university.” The college promised “further outreach initiatives focused on potential BME applicants, more support and training on equality and diversity issues affecting students and staff within the College”.

The consultation on the future of the Rhodes statue is due to begin in February 2016, with the campaigners looking forward to a continued debate. “Every movement looking to better the lives of minorities has faced a backlash,” Gebrial said. “Indeed, the birthing pains of progression can be hard to bear, but in the end it is all worth it for the creation of a more empathetic and historically informed society.”

The University of Oxford declined to comment.