#RhodesMustFall, the University of Cape Town, and the Deep Inscription of Colonialism

A #Fallist moment

On March 9, 2015, in an event choreographed for the press, Chumani Maxwele, a student at the University of Cape Town, threw the contents of a port-a-potty at a statue of Cecil Rhodes strategically located at the main pedestrian entrance to the university’s upper campus. Photographs of the moment were widely circulated. Maxwele wears a pink construction helmet, possibly referencing the red helmets of the populist political party the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), and sandwich boards with the slogan “Exhibit: White Arrogance @ UCT.” The act of throwing human feces is an established mode of protest in the Western Cape. Anthropologist Steven Robins has written with insight and humor about the so-called “poo protests” deployed by the urban poor as a means of protesting the slow pace of service delivery under the presidency of Jacob Zuma. As political theatre, poo protests tap into multiple taboos, including Xhosa notions of hygiene, civility, and respect, and their opposite, gross disrespect and insult directed against another person.1→Steven Robins “How Poo Became a Political Issue,” IOL, July 3, 2013.
→Steven Robins, “Poo Wars as Matter Out of Place: ‘Toilets for Africa’ in Cape Town,” Anthropology Today 30, no. 1 (2014): 1–3.

Lingering with the moment, we can further annotate it in the following way. The statue of Rhodes was sculpted by the British medalist and figurative sculptor Marion Walgate, wife of architect Charles Walgate who played a role in the design of the upper campus of the University of Cape Town following the death by suicide of its principal architect, JM Solomon.2Howard Phillips, The University of Cape Town 1918–1948: The Formative Years (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1993). The statue was commissioned by the then governor general, the Earl of Clarendon, and paid for by the Rhodes National South African Memorial Committee. It was dedicated in 1934. It shows Rhodes seated in the pose of Rodin’s The Thinker (Le Penseur), although slightly more upright than the original. His right elbow rests on his thigh, and his head—which is slightly over-scale—rests on his right fist. His left-hand dangles over the edge of the chair or throne and is loosely clasped around a roll of papers. His gaze and the full force of his attention are directed forwards, toward the distant mountains of the Hottentots Holland. Walgate’s statue stood on a substantial plinth of granite blocks (it was the plinth rather than the statue itself that was splashed with feces). Inscribed on the plinth are some lines from Rudyard Kipling’s imperial hymn “A Song of the Cities” (1893): “I dream my dream by rock and heath and pine/ Of Empire to the northward. Ay, one land/ From Lion’s Head to Line.”3Hedley Twidle, “‘All Like and Yet Unlike the Old Country’: Kipling in Cape Town, 1891–1908,” English in Africa 39, no. 2 (2012): 85–109. In the figurative staging of the scene, Rhodes is understood to be gazing north toward Africa (in fact, he gazes a few points south of due east). The statue was originally located approximately 100 meters further down the slope at the entrance of the upper campus proper. With the construction of the motorway bisecting the university’s upper and middle campuses in 1962 (Rhodes Drive, which leads to Settlers Way), it was relocated to the position where Maxwele encountered it, at the intersection of the lower ring road and the university’s Jameson Steps.4→Nick Shepherd, “After the #Fall: The Shadow of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town,” City 24, no. 3–4 (2020): 565–579.
→Nick Shepherd, “Specters of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town,” in Decolonizing Colonial Heritage: New Agendas, Actors and Practices in and beyond Europe, eds. Britta Timm Knudsen et al. (Oxford: Routledge, 2022).

Maxwele’s action led to a month-long protest and the formation of the student-led social movement #RhodesMustFall (#RMF). Initially calling for the removal of the Rhodes statue, the protest broadened to encompass the legacies of colonialism and institutional racism at the University of Cape Town, and the call to decolonize higher education.5→Britta Timm Knudsen and Casper Andersen, “Affective Politics and Colonial Heritage: #RhodesMustFall at UCT and Oxford,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 24, no. (2018): 256–278.
→Francis B. Nyamnjoh, #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa (Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa Research and Publishing, 2013). In the weeks that followed, #RMF protesters marched, picketed, and held mass meetings. Numerous protest actions focused on the statue itself, which was graffitied, covered over with black plastic bags, and became the site of spontaneous acts of defiance. On March 20, #RMF activists occupied the main administrative building of the university—Bremner Building—the site of the vice chancellor’s office, which they renamed Azania House.6“Azania” from the Ancient Greek is a name that has been applied to various parts of southeastern Africa. It is current among African nationalists as an alternative name for South Africa. On March 27, the university’s Senate voted in favor of removing the Rhodes statue. A few days later, the Council of the University of Cape Town, the university’s highest decision-making body, confirmed this decision. Finally, on April 9, 2015, exactly one month after Maxwele’s poo protest, the statue was removed from the university campus.7→Shepherd, “After the #Fall” (2020).
→Shepherd, “Specters of Cecil Rhodes” (2022).

Coloniality as deep inscription

There is something deeply satisfying about the fall or removal of statues when those statues are of unpopular or tyrannical figures. Such moments become allegorical in a larger sense. They speak of the hubris of power, but also of its fragility, and the unexpected fall from grace. Paul Maylam, Rhodes’s most important recent biographer, recounts an anecdote in which Rhodes tells his friend Leander Jameson that he expects to be remembered for millennia: “I give myself four thousand years.”8Paul Maylam, The Cult of Rhodes: Remembering an Imperialist in Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 2005), 12. As a concept, history feels abstract and ungraspable. We understand that we are caught up in it, but at the same time, its connection to the particularity and detail of our own lives can be difficult to fathom. When we are present at the dramatic fall or removal of a statue, as the student activists of #RMF were on April 9, 2015, we understand that we are part of history in the making. At the same time, some important questions are left unanswered by these events. We understand that an act like the removal of the Rhodes statue is a largely symbolic act, but how does it relate to, as it were, actually existing power in the world? What is the link between the symbolic act and the materiality of power? What about the other, less obvious, legacies of Rhodes at the University of Cape Town? Heritage practices of symbolic restitution often target the obvious vestiges of colonialism and racism, like statues and street names, but how do we begin to conceptualize their less obvious vestiges?9→Shepherd, “After the #Fall” (2020).
→Shepherd, “Specters of Cecil Rhodes” (2022).

Here I set out to contextualize the Rhodes statue in the broader symbolic and memorial landscape of the University of Cape Town and argue that it is one instance of a more deeply inscribed set of ideas and relations. A conceptual starting point is the notion that coloniality exists as a form of deep inscription, in landscapes, in lives, and in the bodies of colonial and former colonial subjects.10→Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007).
→Walter D. Mignolo, “Coloniality: The darker side of Modernity,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, eds. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 39–49.
→Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
→Walter D. Mignolo, “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: On (De)coloniality, Border Thinking, and Epistemic Disobedience,” Confero: Essays on Education, Philosophy and Politics 1, no. 1 (2013): 129–150. Often, as in the case of the University of Cape Town, the forms taken by this deeply inscribed coloniality are not immediately obvious to us and instead are part of an ambiguous and only partly understood inheritance. It feels important to establish my own position in relation to the events and contexts described here. Beginning in the mid-1980s, I was a student at the University of Cape Town. From 2000 to 2017, I was a member of the academic staff of the university, based in the Centre for African Studies where I established and taught a graduate program in Public Culture and Heritage in Africa. Many of the students from the Centre for African Studies were active in #RMF.

The temple on the hill

The South African College, later the University of Cape Town, was founded in 1829 on a site in the center of the city. It moved to its current location on the Groote Schuur estate in the 1920s. Two things enabled this move. The first was the terms of Rhodes’s will, which deeded the land for the establishment of the university. The second was a bequest of money made by Messrs. Werner and Beit, mining magnates, the so-called Werner-Beit Bequest.11Phillips, The University of Cape Town. From the beginning, the intention was that the University of Cape Town on its new site should embody the ideals of an Oxbridge institution, a kind of “Oxbridge in Africa.” In the final design of the university, this intention was manifested in details both great and small: the quadrangular colleges of the original men’s and women’s residential buildings, and the stucco-ed exteriors of the university buildings that encourage a luxuriant growth of ivy. Herbert Baker was at that date the pre-eminent South African architect, largely through his association with Rhodes and the many public buildings that he had designed. Baker being unavailable, a younger architect from his studio, Joseph Michael Solomon, was commissioned to produce a design for the University of Cape Town. Solomon was dispatched on a study tour of “great universities of the world,” which took him to the United States and Europe.12Phillips, The University of Cape Town. His itinerary included the University of Virginia, whose library (The Rotunda) formed the basis for the design of the University of Cape Town’s great hall (Jameson Hall, named after Rhodes’s confederate, recently renamed Sara Baartman Hall), an imposing structure in the neoclassical style.13→Shepherd, “After the #Fall” (2020).
→Shepherd, “Specters of Cecil Rhodes” (2022).

On his return, Solomon drew a plan for the University of Cape Town, which, with slight modifications, was the plan that was eventually realized. Solomon’s design works off a strong vertical axis and a series of cross-axes that follow the contours of the lower slopes of Devil’s Peak. The vertical axis runs from the top of Devil’s Peak through a small pavilion or Summer House constructed in the late-eighteenth century, the only structure on the site predating the current campus. Arrayed along the vertical axis are the central pediment of the neoclassical façade of Sara Baartman Hall, a series of dramatic flights of stairs that lead from level to level of the university (Jameson Steps), and the central plaza. The cross-axes take the form of a series of sweeping avenues, originally imagined as straight lines, but later curved to allow for the natural contours of the site.14Phillips, The University of Cape Town.

In design terms, Solomon’s plan makes use of two architectural tropes, both common in university designs, but seldom as completely realized as in the case of the University of Cape Town.15In 2012, the British publication the Daily Telegraph named the University of Cape Town’s upper campus as third in a list of the ten “most beautiful university campuses in the world” (the top two were Oxford and Harvard). The first is the idea of the temple-on-the-hill. The idea is that one approaches the university from the base of the mountain—Rondebosch, in this case—sweating and toiling up the lower slopes, via a pathway along the central axis (the Japonica Walk), a lonely pilgrim or seeker after knowledge. After several steep climbs (the Jameson Steps), one finally encounters the temple (Sara Baartman Hall) where, figuratively, one stands with the gods and, as it were, breathes the rarified air and thinks deep thoughts. Along the route of this pilgrimage, one encounters the statue of Rhodes, himself brooding, pensive, deep in thought. The second idea manifested in Solomon’s design is that of the site of prospect. Standing in front of Jameson Hall on the central plaza of the university, one turns one’s back to the mountain and looks out at the city, arrayed below in distant prospects: Rondebosch, Rosebank, Newlands, and further off, Athlone and the Cape Flats. This is a kind of looking—literally an “overlooking”—which is filled with power and intention. Standing figuratively with the gods, one looks out over the busy minutiae of daily life, literally and metaphorically “above it all.” I would argue that it is possible to understand this form of the gaze as a kind of imperial gaze, and I would further argue that the Rhodes statue itself instructed us in this form of gazing. The pensive figure of Rhodes in his chair gazed out and over. What he gazed at is Africa, “one land to the northward” in the words of Kipling’s poem, figured by the distant peaks of the Hottentots Holland or the more proximate Cape Flats.16→Shepherd, “After the #Fall” (2020).
→Shepherd, “Specters of Cecil Rhodes” (2022).

Rhodes’s statue, strategically located at the symbolic entranceway to the University of Cape Town, formed a potent statement encapsulating the metaphorical thrust of the architectural design of the university, and its dramatic staging on the slopes of Devil’s Peak. Conversely—but importantly—what might be called the imperial designs of the University of Cape Town extend well beyond the statue of Rhodes and are deeply inscribed into the architectural fabric of the university and the organization of space. The “temple-on-the-hill” and the act of imperial gazing carry on, even after the removal of the statue of Rhodes. Indeed, they are part of the habitus of the University of Cape Town, something that we absorb through our bodies as we inhabit and are inhabited by the space, and which we are only partially able to name. As thoughtful and inquiring people—scholars and students—it’s important that we do try to name what it is that the dramatic staging of the University of Cape Town encourages us to think and feel “as we inhabit and are inhabited by the space.”17Shepherd, “Specters of Cecil Rhodes,” 70 (2022). As a first pass, I would suggest that it takes the form of a certain kind of entitlement, a version of the relationship between knowledge and power based on an inbuilt coloniality, with all that this implies: white privilege, a sense of destiny, an aura of superiority. This sense of destiny and entitlement has changed over the decades with the changing face of South Africa’s race/class politics, but I would argue that it still forms part of the core legacy of the University of Cape Town—as it does of many other universities globally, though seldom as completely encapsulated in the architecture and design of the institution.

For decades I either walked or drove to the University of Cape Town campus, so I feel that I too have been imprinted by this habitus and that I carry its marks as an unwilling legacy. It is certainly worth mentioning that mainly poorer staff and students, many of them Black, approach the university on foot—and would have encountered the Rhodes statue—while wealthier staff and students drive in via one of the other entrances.

The shadow of Rhodes

Following the removal of the Rhodes statue, university managers had the plinth, which remains on the site, covered in a plain wooden box. This was painted grey but was soon graffitied. As I write, the boxed plinth remains on the UCT campus. Over the years, it has become a site for impromptu demonstrations and performances, like the small installations that are made on the plinth each year on the anniversary of the massacre of mineworkers at Marikana. It also enjoys a certain notoriety. I often see visitors and students posing for selfies in front of the plinth. One of the most eloquent reminders of the Rhodes statue was made shortly before its removal. In late summer, the afternoon sun shines from the northwest, behind and to the side of Devil’s Peak. Someone carefully traced the outline of the shadow of the Rhodes statue as it was cast on Jameson Steps, and then filled this in with black paint. Now the statue is gone but the shadow remains. For those who wish, the boxed plinth and painted shadow offer a different kind of encouragement to the dominant text of coloniality and entitlement. That is, an encouragement to dwell on the meaning of this troubled legacy and to consider the different forms that knowledge and the university might take in a decolonial future.

This piece is an adapted version of a chapter by the author published in Britta Timm Knudsen et al., Decolonizing Colonial Heritage: New Agendas, Actors and Practices in and beyond Europe (Routledge, 2022).

Banner photo credit: Desmond Bowles/Flickr