The Black Lives Matter movement that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s killing last year energized similar campaigns around the world. In Britain, this reignited protests demanding the toppling of Cecil Rhodes’ statue at Oxford University’s Oriel College. The Rhodes Must Fall campaign, first conceived in March 2015, was originally directed against the bronze statue of Rhodes at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. The protests called into question the legacy of Cecil Rhodes –– an avowed white supremacist and staunch imperialist –– and sought to fight institutional racism in the university. The statue at UCT was taken down within a month, but the movement continued to live on in other parts of the world, including Oxford.
On June 17, bowing to protests, the governing body at Oriel College expressed its desire to remove the Rhodes statue and launched an independent inquiry into the matter. The commission tasked with the inquiry is set to announce its decision this spring. Still, there remains strong opposition to removing the statue: some academics want to lobby the government to prevent the statue’s relocation to a museum, and a recent petition opposing the statue’s removal has gained thousands of signatures. Against this backdrop, a critical examination of Rhodes’ imperial legacy reveals a strong moral imperative to remove the statue at Oxford and, more broadly, decolonize our public symbols.
Cecil Rhodes was a towering figure of British imperialism during the nineteenth century, epitomized by the fact that the colonies of Northern and Southern Rhodesia –– which encompass modern-day Zimbabwe and Zambia –– were named in acknowledgement of his role in their colonization. Rhodes’ political involvement in Africa began in 1881 when he was elected to the Cape Colony parliament, and within a decade, he would become the prime minister. His political career was defined by ruthless imperialism and blatant racism against the native population –– in an 1887 speech, referring to the Black Africans of the Cape Colony, he said that the native population “is to be treated as a child and denied franchise.”
A white supremacist through and through, Rhodes variously referred to the native population as “lazy,” “children,” and “barbaric,” and viewed them solely as “an engine of labour.” A staunch believer in an Anglo-Saxon master race, Rhodes leveraged his vast wealth –– derived from his founding of the De Beers diamond mining company –– to extend the British empire in Africa. His imperial ethos is captured well in a letter in which he had expressed his belief in the British being the “first race” in the world and that “the more of the world [the British] inhabit, the better it is for the human race.”
As prime minister, Rhodes pushed for the Franchise and Ballot Act of 1892 that raised the bar for voting in the Cape Colony, resulting in disproportionate disenfranchisement of the native population –– the total number of eligible Black voters halved due to the new law. He also introduced the Glen Grey Act of 1894, which further disenfranchised the native population and limited their economic options. Rhodes’ rule in the Cape Colony served as a precursor to the heinous apartheid regime of South Africa that would follow a few decades later. Weighed down by its past, South Africa remains, to this day, the most unequal and racially divided country in the world.
Rhodes launched campaigns and facilitated policies that led to the subjugation and death of thousands of Black Africans. His legacy is defined by racism, British supremacy, and ruthless imperialism, so why is there a statue of him standing at Oxford? To be sure, he generously left a big sum of money to Oxford upon his death which funded the Rhodes Scholarship, a scholarship that to this day remains very prestigious and brings people to Oxford from all over the world. While some like to defend Rhodes by pointing to this, it is by no means sufficient to expunge him of his inexcusable sins.
Statues are important cultural and historical monuments that embody the values upheld by society. We make statues of people we venerate as a society to look up to them and feel inspired. Who a nation considers as its heroes says a lot about the spirit and ethos it embodies. To then dedicate statues to people like Cecil Rhodes would be equivalent to celebrating a person and a history defined by inhuman racism and imperialism. Today’s world, including Britain, has come a long way from the imperialism that defined the previous two centuries. Given its horrors and failings, there is a moral imperative for Britain to detach itself from that reprehensible past. In modern multicultural Britain, there should be no adulation of figures like Rhodes, who orchestrated and oversaw the rise of an empire defined by genocide, racism and suppression.
Apologists tend to argue that calls for removing Rhodes’ statue are tantamount to erasing history. However, the Rhodes Must Fall Movement does not demand an erasure of history –– relocating the statue to a museum will serve to provide an additional historical context to Rhodes’ legacy. If anything, the growing protests have highlighted the horrors of Rhodes’ colonial legacy and the often overlooked moral failings of British imperialism. Removing statues of imperialists like Rhodes is about condemning the glorification of individuals who achieved prominence through exploitation, subjugation and extermination of people and whose legacy continues to hurt various groups today.
In Georgia, a statue of Joseph Stalin was removed as recently as 2010, but surely that does not mean they successfully erased the history of a man who caused the world so much suffering. Very few would contest taking down statues of figures like Stalin or Hitler on account of preserving history –– given their horrific legacy, removing their statues is a no-brainer. Then why should we be in two minds about taking down Rhodes’ statue?
Advocates of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign are often accused of presentism –– that they are unfairly imposing their modern moral values on a figure of the distant past. Even if one were to take this kind of argument seriously, we find that it does not stand up to scrutiny. There is ample evidence to suggest that there were many contemporaries of Rhodes who critiqued his work during his lifetime.
When Rhodes was awarded an honorary doctorate of civil law in 1899, the decision was met with opposition from members of the academic community who expressed their anger at the injustice of elevating a morally unscrupulous man to the honor of a legal doctorate. When Rhodes died in 1902, The Guardian’s editorial offered a dim view of his legacy. History, the editorial spelled, will judge that Rhodes “did more than any Englishman of his time to lower the reputation . . . and compromise the future of the empire.” Rhodes evidently faced strong moral rebuke for his colonial exploits during his time, suggesting that we cannot exonerate his legacy even if viewed from the lens of British morality of that time.
The British Empire was marked by violence, racism, subjugation, and extermination of native populations, and to venerate figures like Rhodes is to ignore the moral failings of British imperialism. Public symbols like statues reveal a lot about a society’s values. As such, the resistance to the Rhodes Must Fall movement reflects the failure on the part of many in Britain to acknowledge and take moral responsibility for Britain’s imperial past.
Oxford University is amongst the foremost institutions of higher learning in Britain. Unless The Rhodes Must Fall campaign achieves success there, it is unlikely that Britain will be inclined to reckon with its imperial past. Rhodes must fall, and Britain must stop valorizing imperialists through public symbols — it is long overdue.
Image Credit: “Cecil Rhodes” by Howard Stanbury is licensed for use by CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
