When students hurled a bucket of excrement over a statue of Cecil John Rhodes at South Africa’s highest ranked university, they could scarcely have guessed how their act would trigger national soul searching about heritage, identity and race.



Protesters at the University of Cape Town (UCT) are demanding the statue’s removal as a catalyst for becoming a less “eurocentric” and more African institution. In what one newspaper dubbed “Rhodes rage” and Twitter users embraced as #RhodesMustFall, they argue that the colonialist has no place on campus 21 years after the end of apartheid.

The brittle multiracial consensus subsequently built by Nelson Mandela and others is tested every so often by some event that comes seemingly out of the blue. In 2012, it was a satirical painting of president Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed, leading to a divisive debate about humiliating portrayals of black men versus the artist’s right to criticise. This time it is a statue that has brought frustration and resentment bubbling to the surface.

“There is underlying anger in the country,” said Xolela Mangcu, an academic at UCT and biographer of black consciousness founder Steve Biko. “There has been a failure to really engage truthfully with the raw emotions of people’s experience. A thing like the Rhodes statue triggers the raw feelings of alienation. The people know there’s been a general failure to deal with race and now it’s blown up in their faces.”

Born in 1853, the son of a Bishop’s Stortford clergyman, Rhodes went to South Africa because of adolescent ill-health, founded the De Beers diamond empire, became one of the world’s wealthiest men and rose to be premier of Cape Colony in 1890. He began the policy of enforced racial segregation in South Africa and allowed the newspapers he controlled to publish racist tracts. He died in 1902, aged 49, and was buried in the country that bore his name, Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

Rhodes donated the land on which the UCT campus is built. The statue, unveiled in 1934, depicts him in a seated position and has been a source of discontent for years. But the “poo protest” galvanised student activists who plan to march on Friday. In response UCT’s vice-chancellor, Max Price, has suggested the statue be moved to a less prominent location, though not destroyed.

Mangcu added: “It should have long been removed. Rhodes was probably one of the worst colonisers both in word and deed. His legacy speaks for itself. He laid the template through the native reserves, the pass laws and saying extremely racist things. For his statue to have pride of place is anachronistic.”

The demands point to a deeper problem at UCT, where only five out of more than 200 full professors are black and the number of black South African female full professors is zero. Mangcu, who is outspoken on the subject, said: “I’m happy the statue will open the conversation. It symbolises something gone wrong at the university. It didn’t have to come to this. I’m hoping there will be a different mode of engagement; there’s a lot of anger among black people at UCT.”

Student leaders say that, along with the teaching staff, the demographic of the student body and the content of the curriculum are also sorely in need of transformation. Ramabina Mahapa, president of the Student Representative Council, said: “It is eurocentric and needs to move to a more African outlook. African students are not able to identify with the institution and feel a sense of belonging, and that needs to change.”

On Thursday South Africa’s higher education minister, Blade Nzimande, backed this view. A statement from the ministry agreed that the statue should be moved, adding: “However, it is important for higher education institutions to note that transformation goes far beyond this. It should include changing the demographic composition of staff and student bodies as well as ensuring that curriculum reflects South Africa’s development and cultural needs. It should reflect the history of its people, including all their languages, art, philosophical and religious beliefs, and their material and scientific development.”

Rhodes’s legacy is a source of ambivalence for some. Rhodes University in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape province, was created with Rhodes’s wealth and named after him. His will also created the Rhodes scholarships to educate future leaders for the world at Oxford University. In 2003 the Rhodes Trust joined in the creation of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation which provides scholarships for students studying at African universities.

Trudi Makhaya, who studied as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, wrote in South Africa’s Business Day newspaper that his will was limited by the sexism and racism of his era but its scholarship endowments revealed a man who recognised some universal virtues. “These contradictions, Rhodes the pillager and Rhodes the benefactor, are a symbol of our country’s evolution towards a yet to be attained just and inclusive order,” she said.

Adekeye Adebajo, a Nigerian Rhodes scholar and executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town, said on Friday: “At the time I got the Rhodes scholarship, all I could think about was getting a good education and fighting for pan-Africanist issues. This wealth was stolen from Africa when Rhodes plundered the continent, so I felt absolutely no guilt about using the money to criticise what he stood for.”

Monuments to South Africa’s colonial and apartheid rule are scattered throughout the country. Debates over renaming streets or cities – including the capital, Pretoria – are ongoing. With English the language of politics and business, some commentators have complained that the black majority remain a cultural minority in their own country. Universities, as oases of opportunity to escape widespread poverty and joblessness, are often a focal point.

Writing in the Times newspaper, Jonathan Jansen, vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, commented: “University leaders make a strategic mistake to think these protests are simply about statues. They are about a deeper transformation of universities – including the complexion of the professoriate – that remains largely unchanged.”