USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: CEcil Rhodes

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From: "Dr. Adekeye Adebajo" <adebajo@ccr.org.za>

Subject: CEcil Rhodes

Dear all: congrats seemingly to Nigerians for its historic "regime change"! for those of you interested in lively debates on the imperialist Cecil Rhodes, pls. see below. Best, Adekeye

 

Debating Max Price on Cecil Rhodes

Adekeye Adebajo

 

Being myself a former Rhodes scholar at Oxford University and given the furore by students calling for the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from the front of the University of Cape Town (UCT), I was rather startled to read the views of Max Price, UCT's Vice-Chancellor, on the arch-imperialist in last week's Sunday Independent ("The Student Statue Protest Is Significant, But the Greater Debate Around this is What Really Matters", Max Price Tells Michael Morris, 22 March 2015). Price seemed to be unwittingly acting like a pyromaniac fireman.

 

Although he conceded that Rhodes's "values and his ruthlessness, and his willingness to take the view that imperial ends were justified by any means, were appalling", Price made the extraordinary statement: "I do believe there's a risk of simplifying Rhodes....it's important to examine why he came to be viewed as a great man. He achieved an enormous amount by the time he died....a businessman, diplomat and Prime Minister of the Cape, a military strategist, and a philanthropist very committed to education and in all these things he was successful."

 

Let us examine each of Price's claims in turn. First, the idea of Rhodes as a diplomat is patently absurd, unless one views "diplomacy" as flowing out of the barrel of a maxim gun. Rhodes seized, administered, and populated African land with white settlers. His genocidal "scorched earth" campaigns killed tens of thousands of people.  He dispossessed black people of their ancestral lands in modern-day Zimbabwe and Zambia through armed conquest, stealing 3.5 million square miles of black real estate in one of the most ignominious "land-grabs" in modern history. By 1890, Mashonaland had been seized, while farming claims had been staked out in Matabeleland by 1896. Rhodes's British South Africa Company gave itself the right to half of the loot, with the rest being shared out among the assorted motley crew of his settlers, freebooters, mercenaries, and adventurers. The huge herds of Ndebele cattle were divided between these armed thugs and the British South Africa Company. Rhodes's band of mercenaries raped, enslaved, and stole the land of the Shona in greedy pursuit of mineral wealth.

 

Perhaps the diplomacy which Price is referring to is Rhodes's use of agents to negotiate a concession with Matabele King, Lobengula, who believed that he was only ceding limited mining rights, but ended up losing his entire country. Or perhaps he is referring to Rhodes's "negotiation" of a treacherous and dishonest accord in which the Ndebele and Shona were allowed to return to their land over which all rights had been revoked? This is, surely, duplicity rather than diplomacy. Killing thousands of people with superior technology was not – in contradiction of Price's second claim - the actions of a great military strategist, but those of a pillaging plunderer. 

 

Price's third claim was that Rhodes was a great businessman. The imperialist, however, used his economic wealth (he controlled 90 percent of the world's diamonds) to buy political power, and used political power to protect and extend his wealth. He used shares and land to buy off politicians in Britain and South Africa, including members of the Afrikaner Bond. In cornering the diamond industry in Kimberley, he ruthlessly crushed many of the smaller businesses, and tricked many of his opponents. He manipulated the stock exchange and bought off people with company shares, outright bribes, and job offers. He had speculative shares in a shell diamond company in the early 1880s. He bought off rival entrepreneurs, politicians, and journalists to further his expansionist aims. He misled investors and the British government into believing that his British South Africa Company owned the 1888 Ruud Concession in order to secure a royal charter.

 

Price's fourth claim was to praise Rhodes as prime minister of the Cape colony. However, the imperialist used his rule between 1890 and 1895 to lay the foundations for apartheid, and his premiership ended in disgrace when Leander Jameson's ill-conceived raid of gold-rich Transvaal failed in 1895, helping to trigger the Anglo-Boer war four years later. Even before apartheid was passed into law in 1948, Rhodes was its forerunner, helping to disenfranchise black people through introducing new property and educational criteria in the Cape colony. He forcibly removed blacks to native reserves through the 1894 Glen Grey Act, which presaged apartheid's notorious Bantustan policies by half a century. Rhodes further pushed the Cape parliament to introduce hut and labour taxes on blacks to force them into the cash economy; packed over 11,000 black miners into inhumane, dog-patrolled, wire-protected barracks; and supported draconian labour laws (including the legal flogging of "disobedient" black labourers through the notorious "strop bill") that facilitated the continued supply of human fodder to his mines, and impoverished the black population. As premier of Cape colony, Rhodes also introduced social segregation for non-whites in schools, hospitals, theatres, prisons, sports, and public transport; forced blacks to carry passes (a precursor of apartheid's "dumb pass"); and removed thousands of members of these groups from the colony's electoral rolls. As he infamously put it: "I prefer land to niggers . . . the natives are like children. They are just emerging from barbarism [and] one should kill as many niggers as possible."

 

Price's fifth claim was that Rhodes was a great philanthropist. Aside from the difficulty of being generous with stolen booty, it is important to note that, though 7,688 Rhodes scholars have studied at Oxford University since 1903, the scholarship scheme excluded women until 1976 and had clearly been designed for a "heaven's breed" of largely Anglo-Saxon white males. The Rhodes trustees themselves today remain mainly white men, while most of the scholarships still go disproportionately to white Americans, Canadians, Australians, and South Africans. Contrary to Price's statement that Rhodes did not graduate from Oxford, the imperialist - not reputed to have been a particularly good student or a potential Rhodes scholar! – took eight years to achieve a "gentleman's pass" in law from Oxford. The South African scholarships – from which Price himself benefitted - have been particularly controversial, since they have effectively served as a form of white "affirmative action" for over a century, disproportionately going to schools that did not admit blacks or girls until the 1980s. Only four of the first 80 scholars were black.

 

One must also unequivocally reject Price's argument that "We are all, really, products of our time." Many of Rhodes's contemporaries criticised him, including writer Olive Schreiner, a friend who later wrote a devastating critique of his ruthless imperial methods in her 1897 novella, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland. There were, after all, abolitionists who condemned slavery even when its practice was widely accepted. Finally, Price makes the astonishing claim that Rhodes was "in many respects…self-made, though he had the empire behind him." This is surely a contradictory and confused statement. The British government, in fact, granted Rhodes a royal charter to annex territory in Southern Africa. Rhodes was allowed by "Her Majesty's government" to dispossess the indigenous inhabitants, and offer British soldiers land-ownership in return for their military conquest. This is surely not the sort of record that the Vice-Chancellor of UCT should be defending.

 

 

 

Dr. Adekeye Adebajo is Executive Director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution, Cape Town.

 

Sunday Independent South Africa , 29 March 2015.

 

The Fall of Cecil Rhodes?

Adekeye Adebajo

 

As a former Rhodes scholar who studied at Oxford University, I have been particularly intrigued by the current student agitation at the University of Cape Town (UCT) to remove the statue of the greatest imperialist of the nineteenth century: Cecil Rhodes.  I have always justified my acceptance of the scholarship as a pragmatic decision to take a slice of the wealth plundered from Africa to pursue anti-colonial causes in order to bite the hand that fed me.

 

The spark that lit the fuse of protest at UCT was provided by a student, Chumani Maxwele, who threw human excrement on Rhodes's statue. Other students followed by throwing urine and pig manure at the monument. Yet more students covered the statue with a white cloth as if to hide the imperial stain. A photographer was assaulted by campus security.

 

Rhodes University – also named after the colonial plunderer – removed a statue of Rhodes from its main entrance two decades ago as South Africa entered a democratic era. Why has it taken so long for a debate to emerge at UCT on Rhodes's legacy?

 

Listening to the students, the removal of the statue appeared to be a metaphorical call for the transformation of the university's curriculum, culture, and faculty which many blacks feel are alienating and still reflect a Eurocentric heritage. Maxwele noted that he had acted on behalf of the collective pain and suffering of all black people against what he described as the "colonial dominance" still evident at UCT. He argued that black students would not want to graduate in a hall named after the imperialist Leander Jameson, wondering "where are our heroes and ancestors?"  The university's Students' Representative Council (SRC) supported calls for the removal of the statue, describing the events as a "consequence of an institutional culture that is largely exclusionary". It noted that "for too long the narrative at the university has silenced the voices of black students and black history," and asked "how can a colonizer donate land that was never his land in the first place?"

 

Another student, Rekgotsofetse Chikane, wrote an open letter to the chair of the university council, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, noting that he found his "silence on matters of transformation at UCT..disconcerting", and observing that UCT students often played a game of asking whether they had ever been lectured by a black academic, and citing a common saying among students that the university was "a European university stuck at the bottom of Africa." Mahmood Mamdani, the Ugandan scholar who left UCT in 1996 over a dispute about transforming the curriculum, similarly noted in this regard: "South Africa lacks an Africa-focused intelligentsia in critical numbers...the institutional apparatus of learning..continues to be hostile to Africa-focused thought." 

 

It was interesting to watch 500 black and white UCT students protesting together on Youtube, with most making eloquent speeches calling for the removal of Rhodes's statue. They argued "We are not black people fighting white people. We are fighting the system as youth"; chanted "Down with Rhodes, down!"; while a member of the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League, Khaled Sayed, exhorted: "Make the removal of the statue the removal of liberals at UCT." Some students made the sensible call for placing the statue in a colonial museum in which a historical context can be provided. There are no statues of Hitler to be found in Germany, or Mussolini in Italy, so why has a statue of a figure of black dispossession and oppression in Southern Africa survived for eight decades?

 

The university's response to the protests have been rather officious, with a questioning of the methods of some of the students; an insistence on the need to follow "procedures" for "peaceful and safe" protests; encouraging "open debate and responsible action"; and threatening to take legal steps against any "unlawful behaviour."

 

But even if the students are victorious in toppling the statue of Rhodes at UCT, will they go further to target other symbols of oppression on their campus? The Jameson hall is named after Rhodes's psychopathic lieutenant whose "scorched earth" policies marked the genocidal conquest of modern-day Zimbabwe in the 1890s. The grandiose Rhodes memorial can hardly be moved into a museum, but could be provided with more historical context than the brooding imperialist staring down from his Olympian heights.

 

Doubtless, the council of Rhodes University and the trustees of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation are watching the outcome of this fiery debate closely.

 

 

Dr. Adekeye Adebajo is Executive Director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution, Cape Town.

 

Businessday (South Africa), March 2015.

 

 

 

 

 

	Dr Adekeye Adebajo CCR Executive Director Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) 2 Dixton Road, Observatory 7925 Cape Town, South Africa Tel: +27 (0)21 689 1005 Fax: +27 (0)21 689 1003 Email: adebajo@ccr.org.za  Website: http://www.ccr.org.za

 

 

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