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Illustration: Ella Baron
Living and working in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital city, in a job my Oxford master’s helped me to land, I am surrounded by statues of Genghis Khan, founder of the largest contiguous empire ever seen. Under his leadership, the Mongol Empire spread through wholesale slaughter from the Pacific Ocean to the Caspian Sea. For the Khan and his armies, rape and pillage were the spoils of war.
Given he might well have been the world’s most prolific rapist – it is believed that a significant proportion of people alive today are his descendants – should those statues be removed? That some people and institutions achieved greatness through terrible means is a matter of which we should be frequently reminded, not something to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Earlier this year, a statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town was covered in human excrement by students. Having successfully demanded its removal, the protest movement known as Rhodes Must Fall has made its way to Oxford, where students gathered last Friday outside Oriel College, the statue’s home. Presenting a petition to the Vice-Provost and Senior Dean of Oriel College, to which the Grade II* listed building belongs, they declared that Rhodes must fall in Oxford. Despite their good intentions, I believe that, although Rhodes’ legacy should be challenged and its shameful history exposed, his statue in Oxford must stand.
Cecil John Rhodes was an influential British imperialist, phenomenally rich businessman and politician in South Africa. He founded the state of Rhodesia in the late nineteenth century and South Africa’s Rhodes University through the Rhodes Trust, an educational charity set up on his instructions in his last will and testament. He was a major benefactor of the University of Cape Town, which sits on land bequeathed by Rhodes, and Oriel College, Oxford, his alma mater, to which he donated two per cent of his considerable fortune. In Oxford, he lends his name to the Rhodes Building, Rhodes House and the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, which enables students from around the world to study at Oxford and is funded by his estate. Its 7,000 beneficiaries have included former heads of government or heads of state of the United States, Canada, Australia, Pakistan, Jamaica and Malta.
He was also an unfathomable racist. Rhodes believed in the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race, encouraging the expansion of the British Empire by profound violence and subjugation of other races to cover the entirety of the “uncivilised world”, which he supposed was “inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings”. He sought to assert the dominance of Anglo-Saxons under one empire, including bringing the United States back under British rule, and to “crush all disloyalty and every movement for [its] severance”. His legacy is overwhelmingly one of death and human misery. Perhaps of greatest import, whilst serving as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896, he oversaw the introduction of the Glen Grey Act, a piece of legislation that laid the foundations for apartheid South Africa.
Rhodes is clearly someone to be reviled by both today’s standards and those of his day. But tearing down his statue outside Oriel College, which many students argue glorifies British colonialism, would be missing the point – setting a dangerous example of historical revisionism and denying future generations the debates we are having now. Rhodes Must Fall is not just about statues. Its supporters call for the ‘decolonisation’ of education, whereby reading lists populated singularly by the voices of privileged, white men should be overhauled, Oxford’s tiny proportion of BME professors redressed, and non-Western perspectives introduced into academic discussion. So, too, do they lament the ignorance of many British students about the realities of their country’s colonial history. Meritorious as these goals are, if they are to achieve them, it will be by educating and challenging the ill-informed – not tearing down a statue.
Oxford should face up to its colonial past, but not distort the historical record. That a murderous, imperialist brute is so closely aligned to that past that a statue was erected in his honour and Rhodes House was built in his memory is part of that history, and part of the reason many people are aware of it and feel so passionately about it in the first place. To remove the statue would be to erase this visible reminder that the abhorrent Rhodes occupied such a significant place in the fabric and finances of Oriel College and the University as a whole. Indeed, one of the reasons for the listed status of the Rhodes Building and the statue itself is their great historical value, the listing text acknowledging that Rhodes was “a controversial figure, but of immense historical importance and whose legacies had a major impact on the University.”
Had his statue not stood on the High Street today, this level of debate and awareness of the true nature of his legacy would simply not exist, and the student body would be more ignorant of it – an outcome that goes against one of the fundamental goals of Rhodes Must Fall. Come most revolutions, the statues of the previous regime are the first things to fall, followed in due course by the collective memory of it.
Rhodes Must Fall should be praised for stimulating a debate we should have had long ago. But the statue can stand without glorifying the man whose memory it preserves if its viewers are properly informed – the responsibility of which must fall on both the College and the University. A museum on the many horrors of colonialism, commemorating its many victims, and a plaque near the statue would be a good place to start.
