The Past Haunts Oxford Debate Over Rhodes Statue

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/world/europe/the-past-haunts-oxford-debate-over-rhodes-statue.html

Version 0 of 1.

LONDON — High above a main thoroughfare in the city of Oxford, in an alcove framed by twirly columns, a statue of Cecil John Rhodes, the archimperialist who shaped Britain’s empire and the destiny of its far-flung subjects in Africa, peers down inscrutably on the people below. If you weren’t looking for it, you might miss it.

In recent weeks, though, the statue has provoked an acrimonious debate about whether it should be removed, as was another monument to him last year, in South Africa, where he built his fortune and power before his death in 1902.

But, as the debate has unfolded, it has sometimes been tempting to ask what it is all about — the unhealed wounds of Africa’s colonial heritage; or fears among Westerners that their version of history may be sacrificed on an altar of racially tinged revisionism, an echo of an equally fiery debate on some American campuses.

Certainly, it seems beyond dispute that colonialism, along with the slave trade and the encroachment of foreign faiths in lands that had not requested them, burned an enduring scar on Africa’s self-regard and self-esteem.

But, said Christopher Patten, the chancellor of Oxford University, who does not want the statue pulled down, “our history is not a blank page on which we can write our own version of what it should have been according to our contemporary views and prejudices.”

As Africa peers into the uncertainties of 2016, there seems to be a disconnect between the preoccupation with the past at Oxford, where Rhodes studied intermittently between 1873 and 1881, and the continent’s broader concerns in the present.

Consider, for instance, the terrorist attack in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, last week that killed at least 30 people, which underscored two of the continent’s most pressing challenges: the spread of jihadism and recurrent threats to its democratic renewal.

In light of such onslaughts, said Farai Sevenzo, a Zimbabwean filmmaker, the months to come may be “a nervous year in which the African Union must harness what collective power it has to protect its citizens from the biggest madness of the millennium.”

The attack came just days after the inauguration of President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, who won Burkina Faso’s first free and competitive elections in decades — a marked contrast to contests in Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe, where incumbents have shown little interest in relinquishing power.

Elsewhere, many African countries may well be concluding that their continent is as much a hostage to the economic and political maneuvers of outsiders as it was in Rhodes’s day.

This time, though, it is China’s economic retreat that has sent shock waves through Africa, shaking the markets on which mineral-producing nations depend for export earnings, weakening their currencies and threatening jobs, living standards and political stability.

None of that, of course, diminishes the passions of the campaign to consign the contentious statue of Rhodes in Oxford to the same fate as, say, monuments honoring Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Some activists argue that its removal would be a form of spiritual decolonization, a notion that has also provoked debate.

“Whereas the real decolonizers sought to throw off the yoke of history,” said Kenan Malik, a writer and broadcaster, “ ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaigners appear to have let the past recolonize them.”

In his will, Rhodes created a trust that has allowed nearly 8,000 Rhodes scholars to study at Oxford for over a century. In 2003, Nelson Mandela himself endorsed a body called the Mandela Rhodes Foundation in conjunction with the original trust to benefit poorer South Africans. Some questioned the twinning of the names, but Mr. Mandela demurred.

“We shall once more take hands across historical divides that others may deem unbridgeable,” he said.

For a newer generation, it seems, the statue of Rhodes on its plinth above Oxford’s High Street is simply a bridge too far.