INDEPENDENT MEDIA The protesters have directly linked the call for the removal of the Rhodes statue with an ongoing campaign for transformation and equity at UCT, says the writer. File photo: David RitchieTear down one memorial to Cecil John Rhodes and we might then have to raze numerous statues, says Zenzile Khoisan.
IT is the incomparable Donato Mattera who gave South Africa the words: “Memory is a weapon.” For Mattera, and many others who have reflected on the past as a way to make meaning of the present, memory holds the keys between authoring hope for the future, or succumbing to the abyss of forgetfulness.
Even as we mark 20 years since the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there are very many characters from our past who stir intense emotions in South Africans.
Some inspired us to rise above repression, while others represent the oppression and dispossession that millions had to endure, while others reaped the benefits.
One such character is Cecil John Rhodes, industrialist, robber baron, philanthropist, scholar, politician, imperialist and rogue.
Rhodes died in Muizenberg on March 26, 1902, but his legacy and the contestation around who or what he really was, continues to touch a raw nerve 113 years later.
And the storm that has erupted over whether it would be necessary or prudent to tear down the statue of Rhodes at UCT has touched exactly that raw nerve.
To some, he is the benevolent, affable colonial gentleman, the successful industrialist who created order and development in his wake. Conversely, for the vast majority, Rhodes is colonialism and imperialism personified.
For them he is a thief of land and resources who imposed his will and twisted way of life on the indigenous people, for whom he had scant regard.
This contested narrative over Rhodes and his legacy broke into the open on March 9, when Chumani Maxwele and a dozen of his fellow students took the step of tossing untreated faecal matter at his statue, rested imposingly adjacent to Jameson Hall on UCT’s upper campus.
Maxwele said he did this because “as black students we are disgusted by the fact that this statue still stands here today as a symbol of white supremacy”.
That almost unseemly act has unleashed a fierce debate on campus and in society at large, soliciting both support and revulsion, with a rising tide of voices clamouring emotionally for this colonial-era symbol to be torn down.
They have also directly linked the call for the removal of the Rhodes statue with an ongoing campaign for transformation and equity at the institution.
By linking the removal of the statue to transformation, the student activists have presented UCT, and South Africa, with a more profound question which, in the words of Langston Hughes is: “What happens to a dream deferred... does it simply explode?”
This week the leadership of UCT acquiesced to the call for the statue’s removal. Vice- Chancellor Dr Max Price addressed the matter directly in a media statement.
“Last week’s student protests have resulted in a massive outpouring of anger and frustration – much about the issue of the statue, much more about experiences of institutional racism, aggravated by students’ perceptions that they are not being heard, or that their demands are not achieving the response they seek.
“There are also similar frustrations experienced by a number of our members of staff. There have also been many voices critical of both the mode of the student protest, and the view that the statue should be removed.”
However, if this simply involved the tearing down of a piece of sculpture, it could possibly be accomplished within the space of a few hours.
And all that would remain is an empty space that once hailed the manifest destiny of a colonial icon.
That is easier said than done, however, for then we’d have to tear down all the memorials erected in honour of Rhodes, including numerous statues from Cape Town to his grave in Zimbabwe, several cottages and buildings bearing his name, an entire university (Rhodes), and also a prestigious scholarship that many anti-colonial fighters are proud to attach to their CVs.
In that same vein, we may actually have to go back further, to the dawn of the colony, and later, to all the symbols that are sentinel signposts to injustice.
Here we shall have to deal with the statues reaching from Jan van Riebeeck to Hendrik Verwoerd, the Manor House at Boschendal, the Slave Lodge, the colonial prisons, the Castle of Good Hope, the Cape of Good Hope Bank, the Cape Chamber of Commerce, and the many churches where apartheid and colonialism were venerated.
All of these symbols, in one way or another, represent the strip-mining of the Africans and the plunder of their land, resources and cultural belongings.
It is also notable that the student leaders have failed to mention that the university is built on a Khoi burial ground.
This was part of the first parcels of land forcefully taken from the Gorinhaiqua and Gorachoqua Khoi by Van Riebeeck.
This act gave rise to the first Khoi-Dutch war, after which a bitter almond hedge, reaching all the way through UCT to Kirstenbosch, was planted, to keep out the Khoi.
So, in seeking a way through the cauldron stoked by the big debate about Rhodes, we may have to look at what the searing narrative that is our collective history has been about, and then engage on how we reflect it, not only for today when the pain is raw, but for posterity.
That requires the meeting of minds, and a wholesome and sustainable project of remembrance, lest the weapon of memory, wielded wildly, opens a Pandora’s box.
This must therefore become an urgent national project embraced by all, or we collectively will reap the whirlwind that will follow.
* Zenzile Khoisan is a senior writer for the Weekend Argus senior writer and a former TRC investigator.
Weekend Argus
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