Akin Jimoh hears how the 2015 toppling of the Cecil Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town was both an anti-climax and a catalyst for change.Paballo Chauke and Shannon Morreira examine a drive by the University of Cape Town to cultivate a more inclusive academic environment after a campus statue of nineteenth-century imperialist Cecil Rhodes was toppled in April 2015.
In this series we explore the practice of science in this wonderful continent, the progress, the issues, the needs, and in the words of the African scientists who are based here. But I was in a campus where I wasn't seeing myself, either In my class . The people that were teaching me were not Black people. The only Black people were cleaners and, and, like, sort of supporting staff. But academics were mainly white. Mainly white men, even. Not just white but white straight men.
But also people were saying, “What's the point of trying to erase history?” And that was not what we were trying to do. The protesters were not trying to sort of erase history, actually, they were trying to underline it, and sort of highlight the pain and the suffering that history has caused in the present as well.So when it was taken down, you were there? Can you go back and, you know…What were the things that happened, you know, while watching, you know.
There was theory and practice behind why the statue must fall. The students were informed about why this must happen. There isn't just an emotional, “Oh my God“, the statue must go. We read books. I Write what I Like by Steve Biko. Books by Toni Morrison, and Malcolm X, and Audre Lorde. We were philosophical, sociological, we were thinkers. People must know that “Rhodes must fall” was a thinking movement. So we’re thinking, we’re moving, we’re speaking, and we prayed.
We're saying, we are fighting back, that this is obviously a small win, but it's something, and it's showing that unity, you can actually sort of address the issues that killed us. The issues that keep us suppressed and buried without anyone knowing. But what Rhodes did that's had such a lasting impact on Southern Africa, was that he combined his economic interests in the colony with political interests. So he was a very strong imperialist. He had a huge strong belief in expanding and consolidating the British Empire.
So as long ago as the 1950s, there were Afrkaans nationalists who protested against the statue, because it was a statue of a British imperialist, through into the present into the postcolonial moment where for a number of years, prior to 2015, there had been sort of recurrent moments of student protest against the presence of the statue on the campus.
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