A Most Unsavoury Rehabilitation
by Adekeye Adebajo
On winning the single Rhodes Scholarship from Nigeria to study at Oxford University in 1990, an alarmed uncle exclaimed: “That thing is dripping with blood. Cecil Rhodes was a bloody imperialist!”
My thoughts at the time were more practical: to get a good education at a world-class institution, and if the money of a robber-baron who had plundered Africa's wealth was paying for it, then at least a slice of the treasure was returning to the continent. I remember my stomach churning at dinners at Rhodes House in Oxford when the assembled dignitaries would turn to a large portrait of the colonialist and raise their glasses to “The Founder”. My own silent protest involved refusing to partake in this strange ritual of the most secret of societies. Still struggling to come to terms with my own personal discomfort with this association a decade later, I was shocked to discover the creation of the Mandela/Rhodes Foundation in South Africa in 2002. The Rhodes Trust in Oxford contributed 10 million pounds over a decade to scholarships, child healthcare and sporting facilities to disadvantaged communities. I wondered, however, whether this was not a tragic perversion of a genuine African hero. As Paul Maylam, the author of a recent excellent book, “The Cult of Rhodes”, noted: “The arch-imperialist colonizer of the nineteenth century was being conjoined with the great anti-imperialist freedom fighter of the twentieth century.”
Mandela - one of the greatest moral figures in the 20th century - was effectively rehabilitating a grotesque and cruel imperialist of the Victorian age. In launching the new foundation, Mandela noted: “Combining our name with that of Cecil John Rhodes in this initiative is to signal the closing of the circle and the bringing together of two strands in our history.” It is shocking to visit Rhodes House in Oxford today, and to see Mandela's picture with a white bust of Cecil Rhodes lurking behind him, as well as a painting of both of them hanging side by side. Surely, Jews would not create a Herzog (founder of the Zionist movement)/Hitler Foundation - so why have Africans accepted this monstrosity? Has Mandela perhaps not taken reconciliation too far in rehabilitating an evil figure that Africans should really have condemned to the pit-latrine of history?
Rhodes, who died in 1902, undoubtedly remains the greatest individual historical symbol of imperialism. Independent Zimbabwe tore down his statues after independence in 1980. Zambia toppled a statue of Rhodes on achieving independence in 1964, and both countries – formerly named Southern and Northern Rhodesia – sought to remove the imperial stain by re-baptising themselves. South Africa has not yet started a proper debate on the numerous Rhodes memorials that litter its post-apartheid landscape. Today, Rhodes' obsessive quest to achieve immortality can be seen in Cape Town (statues, street names and a grandiloquent memorial at the University of Cape Town ); Kimberley (a statue on horseback); and Grahamstown ( Rhodes University ). An effort by the academic, Roger Southall, to change the name of Rhodes University in 1994 was soundly defeated in the university senate.
Rhodes harnessed both political power – as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony – and economic power, as a diamond and gold magnate. He used his economic wealth to buy political power; and used political power to protect and extend his wealth. He headed the De Beers mining firm and dispossessed black people of their ancestral lands in modern-day Zimbabwe and Zambia through brutal and often treacherous means, stealing three-and-a-half million square miles of black real estate in one of the most ignominious “land-grabs” in modern history. Rhodes was an often unscrupulous businessman as well as a crude racist. He infamously said: “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.” Even before apartheid was passed into law in 1948, Rhodes was its forerunner, taking away the vote from black people in what had hitherto been considered the relatively “liberal” Cape Colony; forcibly removing blacks to native reserves (through the Glen Grey Act of 1894); and passing draconian labour laws (including the legal flogging of “disobedient” black labourers) that facilitated the continued supply of human fodder to his mines.
The Rhodes Scholarship is the most enduring legacy of this arch-imperialist. The South African scholarships have been particularly controversial since they have effectively served as a form of white “affirmative action” for a century. Students from schools listed in Rhodes' will – Diocesan College (“Bishops”); St. Andre w's College; the South African College Schools (SACS); and Stellenbosch boys' high school (Paul Roos Gymnasium) – that neither admitted blacks nor girls until the 1980s continued to obtain four of the nine scholarships. The first Afrikaner scholar declined the scholarship in 1903, as the scheme was seen as privileging “Anglo-liberal whites”. As apartheid South Africa became increasingly isolated, American Rhodes scholars led petitions and protests to increase black representation on the scheme and even to cut off scholarships to the country altogether. The pressure eventually led the Rhodes trustees to take the four “whites only” boys' schools to court in 1985 to force them to admit blacks and girls. Only in 1976 were the first black Rhodes scholar (Ramuchandran Govender) and the first woman Rhodes scholar (Sheila Niven) chosen - 72 years after the first South African scholars went up to Oxford. Four black scholars were elected in the first 80 years of a scheme that still appears to be more albinocratic than meritocratic. Even today, there is no systematic plan in place to attract the “best and brightest” black talent to the scholarships.
Based on Rhodes ' sordid historical legacy, a debate on the wisdom of yoking the saintly Mandela to a colossal imperialist seems to be long overdue.
Dr. Adekeye Adebajo is Executive Director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
This piece first appeared in the Mail and Guardian on Friday 21 July 2006 . www.mg.co.za