All of this shouting for the removal of the statue and bones of Cecil John Rhodes – the arch African colonist from England who thought, seriously, that America was a colony that should be returned to the empire – has been done before.
More than 16 years ago, I stood spellbound at Malindidzimu, the windswept outcrop of rock a short drive from Bulawayo in Zimbabwe where chiefs of the Mandebele have been laid to rest for centuries. It was a tranquil place that Rhodes used to go to stand and stare at the breathtaking view of the sweeping land of hills and valleys that disappear over the horizon. Rhodes used to call it the world’s end and chose to be buried there.
I was there, as a television journalist, to get the other side of the story that had been raging among the young radicals in Harare for weeks. A bunch of young Turks wanted to exhume and expel the remains of Rhodes to wipe the stain of colonialism from Zimbabwe forever.
I had interviewed their leader, the late Warlord Chakaredza, a polite man in his mid-twenties, in Harare a few days before. He was quite clear the bones of Rhodes needed to be exhumed and thrown into the sea.
“Why the sea?” I asked incredulously.
Chakaredza looked at me as if I was mad.
“That is the way he came to Africa and that is the way he will float back to England where he came from,” he replied.
As crude as it sounds, maybe there was a brutal and sublime logic.
I countered to Chakaredza about the beliefs in Africa about the sanctity of graves and the dead. He didn’t want to hear it. The bones of Rhodes must go and they were prepared to use their bare hands to get him out, if need be.
A story to be taken seriously, I thought. Maybe it was a way of pushing forward the debate over colonialism? Maybe Poland wouldn’t have been too keen to look after any graves, or statues, of German generals in Warsaw after World War Two?
We spoke to a historian who told us that the Mandebele loved Rhodes and lined up to salute him at his funeral by shouting: “Bayete!” – the salute reserved for chiefs. What the historian didn’t tell me, that I read only later, was that the black mourners were kept far from the graveside in a segregated funeral.
I also noticed that the Zimbabwe government, which wasn’t exactly head-over-heels when it came to colonialism, didn’t give much of a damn. They saw it as part of Zimbabwe’s heritage and a tourist attraction that brought in money. We also found out, when the statues of the past were ripped down in Harare, after independence in 1980, they weren’t crushed into rubble, they were put into an odd looking group, behind a fence, at the back of the National Museum in Harare.
Another discovery on the rock outside Bulawayo was that Rhodes was buried about 40 feet down in a shaft carved out of sheer rock. Furthermore, the coffin was encased in lead; it would take dynamite, rather than bare hands, to get the remains of the old man out. Maybe he feared someone may try to exhume him.
Nothing happened. The story faded into the ether – Rhodes slept on. No one gained anything from the story, except the newspapers and TV bulletins who garnered a few catchy headlines. I wondered at the time what the point was.
So it was with a roll of the eyes that I heard that students wanted to remove the Rhodes statue in Cape Town. You can call it a metaphor in righting the wrongs of a colonial past; you can call it tantamount to removing a statue of a German general from Poland.
For the second time in 20 years I wonder whether Rhodes and his statues and bones are worth the time and effort.
If I thought for one minute removing the statue of Rhodes would provide books, bursaries and accommodation for young people who wanted to learn, I would take a sledgehammer and knock the statue down myself and then throw it into the sea.

#RhodesMustFloat

Who was Cecil John Rhodes, the man at the center of the mayhem around South African statues? Rhodes is different things to different people; some call him evil, others say he was a hero. Whatever he was, he has caused a storm 114 years after his death.
Rhodes was a British expatriate who amassed a fortune in Africa from diamond and gold mining – the Aliko Dangote of his day. He died in Muizenberg near Cape Town, South Africa, in 1902. His corpse was transported by train to be buried in Malindidzimu in the Matopos Hills near Bulawayo, in Zimbabwe, as he wished.
More than a century later, his body and his imposing statue at the University of Cape Town (UCT) lay undisturbed.
<div id="attachment_3607" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3607" class="size-medium wp-image-3607" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/469050928-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA &#8211; APRIL 09: Students cheer as the Cecil Rhodes statue is being removed from the University of Cape Town on April 9, 2015 in Cape Town, South Africa. The statue of British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes was removed from the University of Cape Town as a result of a month long protest by students citing the statue &#8220;great symbolic power&#8221; which glorified someone &#8220;who exploited black labour and stole land from indigenous people&#8221;. (Photo by Charlie Shoemaker/Getty Images)</div>
On March 10, it all changed when Chumani Maxwele, a fourth year political science student at the university, dressed in black tights, running shoes and a pink construction helmet, for a solitary protest. Maxwele poured excrement on the statue and placed a placard: “Exhibit White Arrogance @ UCT”. That was the birth of the great statue protest of 2015 that spread across the country.
Xolela Mangcu, a professor at UCT, supported the students’ movement that became known as Rhodes Must Fall.
“When I first arrived here three years ago, I was struck how white and European the university identity was, not just in terms of number of students but the content that is being taught. Nothing in the curriculum says you are in a South African university. The whole question whether UCT can imagine itself as an African university is what I have been raising in my intervention in both my columns and the university itself. The fact is that there are five black full professors out of 200. And there’s not a single South African black woman professor. That’s how I got into this debate. But I was ignored,” says Mangcu.
The debate had legs. Around 872 kilometers from Cape Town, in the heart of the Eastern Cape province, in the city of Grahamstown, lies Rhodes University, named after the British mining magnate in 1904. Grahamstown was named after Lieutenant-Colonel John Graham who drove the Xhosa tribe off their land. There have been calls to change the names of the city and the university.
Nomalanga Mkhize, a history lecturer at Rhodes University and a newspaper columnist, says the anger over Rhodes vindicates Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan scholar. As head of the Centre for African Studies at UCT in 1998, he developed a new curriculum elevating African scholarship, but the university waved it away.
“No doubt, the ‘Mamdani Affair’ is now embarrassing for UCT. It has become clear that he was right and his detractors were wrong,” says Mkhize.
Not every academic agrees. Shadrack Gutto, a professor from the University of South Africa and a constitutional rights expert, says preservation of the past is critical to progress and those who want to wipe the history because it is hurting are wasting their time and are ill-informed.
“History is never made on a clean slate. If you are talking about proper history, you are talking about history of tragedies, grief, happiness, periods of prosperity and periods of decline. From that point of view, you need to preserve all of it, in order to know where you are coming from, where you want to go. I don’t agree with the destruction of symbols of the past, they need to be there, the question is how are they explained and placed. We may disagree on where you place them. But to try to wipe them out, I think it is foolish and something that defies the understanding of people,” says Gutto.
“I support the spirit of 1976 students in the current UCT students. Whether they change their names or not or they have a black vice chancellor, the fact remains, universities have not been transformed.”
Gerhard Papenfus, Chief Executive of the National Employers’ Association of South Africa, says Cecil John Rhodes the person. He says Rhodes oversaw the death of his Afrikaaner ancestors 114 years ago, in the Anglo-Boer War, but he disagrees with the statue removal.
“So, after Cecil John Rhodes’ statue has been removed, followed by the statues of perhaps King George V at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Queen Victoria in Parliament, and then Paul Kruger in Church Square in Pretoria; and perhaps after convincing Robert Mugabe to remove David Livingstones’ statue from Victoria Falls and to exhume Rhodes bones from his grave on Malindidzimu, and after every street and school has been renamed and the history have been rewritten – then what?” asks Papenfus.
A month after Maxwele’s lone protest, statues of Mahatma Ghandi; an Indian human rights champion and Paul Kruger; the Afrikaaner leader and nemesis of Rhodes, along with others were smeared with paint and broken down.
The students at UCT got their wish. At 5:37AM on April 9, management removed the Rhodes statue to the cheers of students in an atmosphere thick with revolutionary slogans.
One would have thought that the removal would settle the dust. But members of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign continued occupying Bremner Building, a main administration block, which students renamed Azania Building – the Pan-Africanist name for South Africa.
University officials served Maxwele and other students with an eviction letter and threatened to go to court. Three days later, the students left.
UCT council chairperson, Njongonkulu Ndungane, says the university will take up the transformation debate.
Zimbabwe president, Robert Mugabe, was coincidentally in a two-day state visit to South Africa during the Rhodes debate. In a press conference in Pretoria there was laughter as he quipped about the debate over statues in South Africa and a grave in Zimbabwe.
“We have his corpse and you have his statue. What do you want us to do with him? Dig him up? We cannot tell you what to do with the statue but we and my people feel we need to leave him down there.”
One can argue that the noise Rhodes made in his life hasn’t stopped.

The Statue  That Moved

For 127 years, the Rand Club, in the heart of downtown Johannesburg, has been home to the rich, ambitious and gentlemanly. It was born in 1886 when Cecil John Rhodes, the colonialist extraordinaire, walked from the mine diggings, marked a small dusty spot and said ‘This corner will do for the club’.
In those days, £10 bought you membership and in flocked the Randlords, the millionaires who mined Johannesburg’s gold and turned it from bush to the biggest city in Africa. On raucous nights, behind its oak doors, Rhodes would walk in and roll handfuls of rough diamonds like dice on the green baize of the billiard table to show everyone the fruit of his mines.
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There could be few clubs who can claim to have accomodated Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill, when he was a young journalist.
Conspirators met in the Rand Club to hatch the Jameson Raid in 1895. They plotted for a bunch of armed horsemen, lead by Leander Starr Jameson from Pitsani, in Botswana, to stage a coup against Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal Republic, who controlled the gold mines. The Afrikaaner rulers raised taxes and controlled the treasury but refused foreigners, who worked the mines, the vote. Jameson hoped to ride in and foment an uprising in Johannesburg among disgruntled mine workers but only got as far as Krugersdorp where marksmen captured them.
These days, the membership is $1,200 a year. But down the years fewer have taken it. With an aging membership, the welcome is getting warmer. The club is changing to attract a new generation to liven it up.
“In 125 years, much has changed in the business center. Most of our core members have moved out of the city center of Johannesburg going to Sandton or closer to their mining operations. As a result, there are not enough people using the club anymore. In 10 years, the club has not made an operating profit. We want people to use the club, especially with the inner city revival, but we haven’t had the outsource capacity to do that,” says David Williams, Rand Club deputy chairman.
Williams announced in August that it would sell the catering business for $0.01. A new private banqueting company will operate from within the club. It will try to rejuvenate a tired marketing strategy for a building, as much a museum as a club, with Africa’s longest bar.
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Every second Thursday evening, you’ll find David Lobban taking new members around the club to learn its history. But, unlike a lot of museums, the building has changed little since 1904. Not even a fire in 2005 changed it, says Lobban.
“I remember that day so well. As the building was burning, we had two of our oldest members at the bar. I remember them saying ‘we’re going down with the ship’, they refused to leave ‘their spots’ at the bar. In the end we convinced them to finish their drinks on the balcony, whilst the smoke was coming out the windows,” he says.
It was a sign of meaner times when the club was forced to increase its security after a $205,000 book was stolen from its library.
Lobban has worked for the club for 15 years, after he left his old job as a bodyguard for the most famous Rand Club member, Nelson Mandela.
“He was one of the hardest people to look after. I used to hate it. The man had no sense of security. Often he would stop in the middle of a street to get out and talk to people,” says Lobban.
A painting, donated by the great man, hangs above the stairwell, to commemorate his membership.
As the club struggles to survive, surely Rhodes would approve of the one last roll of the diamonds.

Tag: Cecil John Rhodes

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#RhodesMustFloat

The Statue That Moved

The Last Roll Of The Diamonds