A century and a quarter ago, Cecil John Rhodes wreaked mayhem and misery in Southern Africa, violently conquering people – and running the territories – as commercial enterprises of his British South African Company. In what is now Zimbabwe, Zambia and South Africa, the asthmatic from Bishop’s Stortford in England looted the region’s wealth in his attempts to expand British colonialism and to spread the “superior” Anglo-Saxon culture. Today, his dream of imperial assimilation lives on in majestic properties and statues, as well as in initiatives such as the Mandela Rhodes Scholarship.
Over the past weeks, students at the universities of Cape Town and Rhodes have attacked the remnants of this racist imperialist’s repugnant history, and have expressed their discontent about the status quo and the way it still reflects colonial hierarchies. At the University of Cape Town, students have woken up to the fact that the centrally placed Rhodes statue has symbolised the university’s culture, history and values for 81 years. Their counterparts in Grahamstown have again raised the issue that the university’s name – Rhodes University College was founded in 1904 – is repulsive.
Here, then, is a microcosm of the appalling state of race relations and social cohesion in South Africa 21 years after the end of apartheid. It is a symptom of our failure to confront the outstanding historical issues of racism and inequality. For example, neither of the two campuses has fully transformed itself to reflect South Africa’s socioeconomic and racial diversity.
The statue has become a reminder of the need to highlight outstanding issues. Racism and inequality were highlighted by the racist “blackface” prank by two University of Pretoria students last year, and five years ago acts humiliating to black people drew attention at the University of the Free State. But we failed to take heed. Such incidents are still manifest in different forms around the country, sometimes propagated by our politicians, who pander to narrow populism in racially polarised constituencies.
We can bring down the statues. We can change the names of streets and squares. But such symbolic action only delays dealing with an explosive social problem. Our society is still untransformed, unequal and racially polarised. Our education and health systems, which should provide some recompense for apartheid’s neglect, still betray the majority of the poor and oppressed, as we have so often highlighted in this newspaper.
Politicians, including Nelson Mandela, tried superficially to repair what was clearly a broken society. Other pillars of that society – the media, civil and religious leadership and business – have misdiagnosed the problem as a political one requiring political intervention and leadership.
But the solution must go well beyond politics: it is about the economy, about who gets empowered and who doesn’t, about who owns the bulk of the wealth of the country. Unless deep shifts take place in that arena, the colonial past will continue to haunt us.