Striking back at the Empire

An animated campaign to pull down imperialist Cecil Rhodes’s statue turns the gaze to wider issues of racial bias in British academia and society.

February 05, 2016 12:57 am | Updated 12:57 am IST

It would be fair to assume that within the cohort of Oxford Rhodes scholars alive today, there is unlikely to be anyone who would not feel a sense of repugnance for the world view that informed the outlook of Cecil Rhodes, the flag-bearer of imperialist expansion in South Africa in the 19th century. The profits made by Rhodes from the plunder of South Africa’s natural resources funded the Rhodes Scholarship, which was started in 1903 in accordance with the terms set out in his will.

Yet, so successfully have the keepers of his institutional legacy been able to foreground his educational endowments as philanthropy, while pushing into the soft haze of history his unapologetically racist and rapacious engagement with South Africa, that there has been surprisingly little debate till recently on the deeply problematic foundation upon which the Rhodes legacy stands.

Oxford gets the blues The ‘ > Rhodes Must Fall ’ (RMF) campaign is the first serious challenge and questioning of the Rhodes legacy and its import. The young activists driving the campaign want a debate on why and in what ways the representation of the morally dubious but carefully sanitised inheritance of Cecil Rhodes could be altered.

The average Rhodes scholar today is of course a vastly different entity from Rhodes’s own conception of the ideal scholar as young, male, a “colonist” attuned to “manly outdoor sports” and with “qualities of manhood, truth, courage, devotion to duty, etc.” Today, 89 young men and women from around the world — with China included last December — are chosen each year for the scholarship after a rigorous selection process. It is not surprising therefore that the RMF campaign in Oxford started from within this gifted and introspective student group.

The campaign has had its highs and lows. Rhodes’s alma mater Oriel College announced last week that it would not remove the statue of Rhodes and a plaque to him. It denied media reports that the decision was prompted by threats from unhappy donors to withdraw funding worth more than £100 million if the statue was removed. It also reneged on its promise made in December 2015 of holding a six-month “listening period” to hear student views on the matter, funding lectures on the history of colonialism, and fundraising for more scholarships for African students.

The RMF campaign called the decision “outrageous, dishonest, and cynical”. “We are very disappointed by Oriel’s decision although we always knew that the fight would be a long one,” said Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, a PhD student and activist with the RMF campaign. “We want to draw the link between Oxford’s imperial blind spot and racism.”

Nevertheless, the campaign has got the Oxford academic community debating the issues it has raised. One of the important endorsements won by RMF activists came from the Oxford Union that voted 245 to 212 for the removal of the statue. At a debate that preceded the vote, Rhodes scholar and RMF spokesperson Ntokozo Qwabe held his own against Nigel Biggar, a professor of moral and pastoral theology at Christ Church. Professor Biggar’s argument was that Cecil Rhodes was not the only racist. So too were Winston Churchill and many others whose statues can be found all over the country. “If we insist on our heroes being pure, then we aren’t going to have any,” he said. Mr. Qwabe argued that the issue was not just about the statue. It was “deplorable”, he said, that only 24 black British students were accepted last year into Oxford undergraduate courses. He dismissed criticisms made against him of hypocrisy and of using the platform Rhodes offers to criticise it. “I will not be told that I’m a hypocrite for taking money that was stolen from my people. This idea that money can buy our silence is exactly what the problem is,” he said.

Institutionalised racism? The campaign has received high-profile support — from Noam Chomsky among others — and high-profile criticism as well. Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a Rhodes scholar himself, said removing the statue would “substitute moral vanity for fair-minded enquiry”. “We can lament that he [Rhodes] failed to oppose unjust features of his society while still celebrating the genius that led to the creation of the Rhodes Scholarships,” he wrote.

Cecil Rhodes set a particularly brutish example of racism. “Rhodes’s fortune was made through the exploitation and death of black Southern African mine workers, his reputation and power secured through devastating imperialist wars,” says the RMF. “Rhodes also introduced racial policies in South Africa, which served as a precursor to apartheid and have led many to dub him the ‘father of apartheid’.”

The removal of Rhodes’s statue would have been the sort of dramatic and attention-drawing public event that could flag off a larger campaign against what the RMF claims — and Oxford institutions hotly deny — is the “institutional racism” present in Britain’s hallowed centre of higher education.

It is no coincidence that the RMF campaign comes at a time when higher education itself is in a crisis, weighted heavily against students from deprived regions and family backgrounds who are most often black or minority.

British universities recently found a new critic in no less than Prime Minister David Cameron, himself an Oxford graduate. “A young black man is more likely to be in prison than at a top university,” Mr. Cameron wrote in a stinging indictment in a piece for The Sunday Times . “Go the extra mile,” he urged. “It’s not enough to simply say you are open to all.”

He accused universities, the armed forces and big businesses of “ingrained, institutional and insidious” attitudes that exclude people. “There are no black generals in our armed forces and four per cent of chief executives in the FTSE [Financial Times Stock Exchange] 100 are from ethnic minorities,” he said, a situation that “should shame our nation and jolt us into action.” His allegation prompted an angry response from top British universities who denied tolerating racism, arguing that they had increased their intake of black and minority students.

A recent report by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission establishes the “geography of disadvantage” that is building in the U.K. The survey reveals that many better-off parts of England and centres of higher education such as Norwich, Worcester, Oxford, Cambridge and Northampton are worse at creating opportunities for their disadvantaged children than areas that are far more deprived.

The RMF campaign has now presented seven demands, worded in a somewhat rambling and unfocussed manifesto, on its website. “We will retain the demand on Rhodes, we might ask for Rhodes House to be renamed, and also ask for some form of reparation in the form of scholarships to black students from southern Africa,” a spokesperson said.

The campaign appears to have struck a chord within the Rhodes Trust, which responded to the RMF debate on its website. “The current vision and ethos of the Rhodes scholarship programme,” it acknowledges, “stands in absolute contrast to the values and world view propagated by Cecil Rhodes and much of his generation.” It draws an analogy to Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite who then created the Nobel Peace Prize, a proposition that will surely stir the debate up a little differently.

parvathi.menon@thehindu.co.in

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