A political science student felt so angry and so strongly about a statue that early one morning he woke and drove to one of the townships on the fringes of Cape Town. Here he picked up a bucket of faeces, heavy from the night before. He put the stinking bucket into his car and drove to the University of Cape Town (UCT).
For the last few hundred yards, Chumani Maxwele, put the bucket on his shoulder. He wore running tights and a pink construction hat and clearly had no respect. His destination was the green lawns and scented flowers of the entrance to the university. He took a deep breath and threw the manure into the face of one of the world’s most famous colonialists who had died more than a century before.
<div id="attachment_4680" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4680" class="size-medium wp-image-4680" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Chumane-Maxwele-047-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Chumane Maxwele</div>
Maxwele was an angry Africanist who didn’t feel this face fitted in his continent; the face belonged to the statue of arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, who died just down the road in his beach house at Muizenberg in 1902, and who donated the land to the university.
“The statue was a political symbol. Even when Rhodes was still alive and now dead, he represents a particular symbol of black people in pain, suffering and dispossession. If you look at the images of Rhodes, it’s all these African people lying with horses, his articulations and so on, you can tell there’s a direct relation between Rhodes and UCT, and UCT being controlled by white people. And there’s a direct relation with who controls the economy of the country and the state of black people. And yet the university takes so much pride in the man,” says Maxwele.
The bucket of faeces launched the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) campaign. After a month of unrest and consultations at the university, the statue was transferred to a museum in Cape Town.
The anger from UCT reverberated across the country, with dozens of colonial statues defaced or destroyed by angry youth. Louis Botha, the first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, survived two wars but couldn’t dodge the red paint of protesters outside Parliament in Cape Town.
Exactly two years after Maxwele started the campaign, FORBES AFRICA spoke to the man in Cape Town. He had just left the gym, dressed in blue and white shirt, tight blue jeans and black brogues. He kept his composure throughout but his emphasis to decolonize the university was as sharp as it was two years ago. He looked nothing like the rabble-rouser portrayed in the newspapers.
“The process of bringing the poo to the statue, it was within political education in this country. People talk about townships and health issues at the university level, and yet these things are really happening. Us black people, we are there, we know these things first hand. People keep the poo buckets in their rooms at night, and in the morning take them to the pavement. And kids play with them, no one cares. I thought I might as well bring one to the university, as a way of saying there’s a problem there but at the same time addressing the racial problems at UCT,” says Maxwele.
At face value, Maxwele’s campaign can be simplified as only against Rhodes’ statue but the man insists there’s more to it than meets the eye.
“There are a lot of complicated issues involved in Rhodes Must Fall. Coming to the university as a rural African student, you are sort of told to leave who you are at the university’s entrance. There’s so much institutional and personal racism going on. Part of my protest was to exhibit white arrogance and black assimilation into the university system,” says Maxwele.
“On the question of curriculum, what is being taught and who is teaching it, and how it is being taught. There’s no way you are going to talk about the brutal killing of black people with what it deserves as a white person. UCT doesn’t recognize apartheid.”
Maxwele says black students and academics have accepted they must assimilate to survive. They fear they’ll be excluded and persecuted like he was.
“It is not easy to be honest to your cause. I have been suspended by the university for two years in 2015 and 2016,” he says.
In September last year, the anti-statue feeling spread to the University of Ghana where students and academics petitioned for the removal of Mahatma Gandhi’s statue. The protesters claimed the proponent of non-violence was racist and the university must replace his statue with an African hero.
The President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, unveiled the statue in June last year at the University of Ghana campus as a symbol of close ties between the two countries.
Gandhi, a native of India, spent 21 years in South Africa as a lawyer and civil rights activist. More than half a century after his assassination in India, like Cecil John Rhodes, Gandhi’s legacy divides the world.
Ashwin Desai, a professor of sociology in South Africa and co-author of The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire, wrote that Gandhi was never a saint, not even close.
“Some youngsters recently defaced Gandhi’s statue in Johannesburg for his perceived racism, while others demanded the defaming of Nelson Mandela, seen as a figure of excessive compromise who heralded disastrous economic policies…” says Desai.
The fervour and anger around statues grows. Many philosophers give reasons for this. The only certainty is if you put up a statue in Africa, be assured someone will want to tear it down.

Chumane-Maxwele-047

The Fight Over  Statues  Never Stands Still

Any visitor to Palestine is guaranteed a few things. Delicious deep-fried balls of ground chickpeas inside pita bread, the call of the muezzin five times a day, a permeating strong smell of black coffee through a cacophony of hooting cars and shouting in Arabic. And getting lost.
Driving, especially through the bustling streets of the de facto capital Ramallah, is a nightmare. Not because the roads are particularly unsafe but because assistance comes in the form of no street names, no street signs and no house numbers. A colleague of mine spent the better part of a year paying the wrong electricity bill because, well, he couldn’t read Arabic and the bill kept arriving under his door. It turned out to be for another apartment in another street – neither his street nor apartment were named or numbered!
Only in the last seven years, following the Ramallah centenary celebrations, have street names caught on in the growing metropolis. Yasser Arafat, former chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, now has his square and dozens of Palestinian fighters have their streets. The criteria are simple – heroes, places and ideas supported by the Palestinian people.
So it’s no surprise that South African anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela has been given his spot – if anything, the  surprise is that it took so long. But residents say it was worth waiting for. The east of the city is now nestled in the shadow of Madiba’s towering figure – a six-meter, two-ton bronze statue with right fist raised.
The statue is the first of its kind outside South Africa and took artists Christina Salvodi, Lungisa Khala and Tanya Lee seven months to create – and another 30 days to get through Israeli customs. But that’s nothing, muses Ramallah’s Mayor Mussa Hadid, compared to the 27 years Mandela spent in prison.
“The erection of Mandela’s sculpture in Ramallah carries a symbolic significance,” he says. “Mandela was an international symbol of peace and a torch to people striving for freedom and liberty.”
A staunch supporter of the Palestinian struggle against Israel, Mandela once declared that, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” It’s a view he repeated after warmly embracing Arafat in their first meeting in Zambia after his release in 1990.
“Like us, he is fighting against a unique form of colonization,” Mandela said of the Palestinian leader at the time, “and we wish him success in his struggle.”
Mandela is revered across the Arab and Palestinian world. The square now boasting his name is in a quiet part of the city and traffic here slows down to circle around his statue so drivers can get a good glance – looking upwards – of their hero. If you stand on tiptoes it’s almost possible to reach up high enough to touch his left hand.
Mamoun, a 19-year-old engineering student who lives not far from the now aptly renamed Mandela Square, exclaims, “He is our hero and it’s only right that a man who stood for the fight against oppression, now stands tall and proud in our city!”
Amira is another Ramallah resident who believes the square bearing Mandela’s name will become a major tourist attraction in her city.
“I am so excited that we have our own Mandela in Ramallah now,” she smiles. “Our struggle is like the struggle of South Africa – and hopefully he can watch over us just like he watched over his own people.”
Mandela’s relationship with Israel was more complicated. He was a firm supporter of the right of Jews to a national homeland, but he never forgot Israel’s support for the apartheid regime during the 1970s and 80s.
“We insist on the right of the State of Israel to exist within secure borders,” he remarked in 1993, but “with equal vigor” stressed support of “the Palestinian right to national self-determination.”
Mandela didn’t visit Israel during his presidency but agreed to receive an honorary doctorate from one of the country’s universities shortly after leaving office. He used the opportunity to impress upon the then newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak his concern about the conflict with the Palestinians and the failure of the Oslo peace process.
Israelis, like most people in the world, hold Mandela in high esteem but unsurprisingly, whereas the ceremony to unveil his statue in Ramallah received much attention in the South African and Palestinian press, it was hardly mentioned in the Israeli media.
Speaking at the inauguration, Johannesburg’s Mayor Parks Tau, who presented the statue as a gift from his city said, “Nelson Mandela himself would have been extremely proud of what has been done here today.”

Mandela Stands Tall Over People Fighting For Liberation

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.

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