whatever happened to Cecil Rhodes?

December 5, 2015 10:05 AM

Why South African students have turned on their parents’ generation
posted by the man of twists and turns (10 comments total)

South Africa is having its 1968 moment then?
posted by acb at 10:36 AM on December 5, 2015

I knew almost nothing about any of this; thanks very much for the post.

When I spoke to Malaika wa Afrika, a 22-year-old writer and student active in the year’s protest, she remarked to me that she felt the protests had tapped into an “incredible amount of nostalgia” for a particular kind of black dignity and resilience, forged under oppression. For centuries, as in many other parts of the world, whites in South Africa denied blacks a positive history. They were accorded no cultural achievements remotely commensurate with those of the west; they were considered primitive beings in need of tutelage. It took enormous courage to remain human against that attempt at erasure, and that courage – the courage of resistance – became a foundation of the black South African character. The struggle songs that the students now sing did not merely capture the longings of a particular moment in time. They formed the basis for a culture. Like the spirituals sung by black slaves in the southern states of America, many of these songs pair tormented lyrics with a mysterious harmonic serenity, capturing the capacity of black South Africans to retain some normality and honour in the face of brutality. This itself was a massive achievement, perhaps even as great as liberation. And it established a powerful identity that cannot, it turns out, so happily be abandoned for a tabula rasa. [...]

Human beings have a basic need to integrate their presents with their pasts.

Trying to sweep the past under the rug never works.
posted by languagehat at 11:16 AM on December 5, 2015 [5 favorites]

There's a lot of people who think the "solution" to racism is to just move forward and pretend that everybody is equal and the past doesn't matter, and South Africa is showing us an example of how and why that doesn't work.
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:42 AM on December 5, 2015 [7 favorites]

This is a really incredible article, applicable to entire human experience. Thanks for posting.
posted by special agent conrad uno at 12:13 PM on December 5, 2015

There really is a statue of a benevolent looking, saint-like portrayal of Cecil Rhodes at Cape Town U? That's what I find really shocking.
posted by telstar at 6:49 PM on December 6, 2015

Well he did donate the land on which it was built.
posted by PenDevil at 11:23 PM on December 6, 2015

I'm not sure that donating colonized land presumably bought through wealth amassed by colonisation and outright imperialist nastiness is the kind of selfless generosity that should get a statue.

A statue of Rhodes blinded by his wealth and being devoured by eldritch monsters of the deep as murdered children walk away from him, I could live with. But I get increasingly vexed by people who gasp in amazement at the idea that in generational wealth and privilege are somehow immune from reparations. Removing that is a mild thing.

There was something else the article brought up - the songs being lost, and the culture born of resistance being deliberately forgotten as a sort of mass-forgetting. I wonder what the local anthropologists and sociologists are recording now and what will be - could be - purposefully rediscovered by grandchildren digging into their parents' pasts.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 11:43 PM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure that donating colonized land presumably bought through wealth amassed by colonisation and outright imperialist nastiness is the kind of selfless generosity that should get a statue.

Just to be clear the statue wasn't built recently. It's been there since 1934 (predating SA independence in 1948 and our republicanisation and kick off of Apartheid into high gear in 1961). UCT itself is over 140 years old.
posted by PenDevil at 11:59 PM on December 6, 2015

Cecil Rhodes was a racist, but you can’t readily expunge him from history via A Don's Life
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:36 AM on December 21, 2015

What on earth is with the people trying to conflate refusing to continue celebrating a person with expunging them from history? I wonder what the agenda could possibly be.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:34 PM on December 21, 2015 [1 favorite]