Looking Globally at Monuments, Violence, and Colonial Legacies

Abstract

On 9 March 2015, the University of Cape Town campus was abuzz with unexpected excitement. One of the black African students of this formerly white-only university had just hurled a bucket of excrement on the statue of Cecil Rhodes. The statue of this famous colonizer, once revered for his boundless ambition and energetic expansion of the British realm, had figured prominently on campus since the statue’s inauguration in 1934, located just downhill from the convocation hall. Calls for its removal dated back at least to the 1950s, when Afrikaner students objected to Rhodes as an advocate of British supremacy. In the post-apartheid years, economic and social inequality has continued to mar South Africa. In 2015, growing anger at the silence over historical injustices and a refusal to rectify years of systematic racism, violence against black Africans, and land theft boiled over into protests. It sparked a wildfire, a global Rhodes Must Fall movement. A few days after being tarnished by feces, more than 1,000 people gathered for a rally at the monument, demanding the university to remove the statue (which it did a month later). Meanwhile the protests spread to other campuses in South Africa, and then to Oxford University in Great Britain. What sparked the protests, according to decolonization scholar Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, was “the continued existence of Rhodes’ memorials and statues in South Africa as a sign of colonial/apartheid arrogance and refusal by those who benefitted from his colonial plunder to express repentance and tolerance of the feelings of those who Rhodes abused.” In post-apartheid society Rhodes has become perhaps the most potent symbol of the inequalities stemming from past colonial violence that resonate in modern South Africa and across the world. In short, Rhodes stands for all the greedy, violent colonizers who took away the natives’ lands, killing, enslaving, and exploiting them. The Rhodes Must Fall movement is a pertinent example of how in recent years questions and debates surrounding colonial durabilities and legacies have become both increasingly visible and increasingly global. Gaining new steam in the summer of 2020 with the Black Lives Matter protests, there now exists widespread and multilayered