Cecil Rhodes | Oxford | UK
Rhodes was an imperialist,
businessman and politician who played a dominant role the
colonization of southern Africa in the late 19th Century. Both
Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia)
were named after him. Rhodes colonial project in Africa was one of
slavery, economic exploitation, expansionism and white supremacy.
According to BBC he believed that "White people are the
first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit
the better it is for the human race". The protest movement
Rhodes Must Fall was born on 9 March 2015, originally directed
against a statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town
(UCT). The protest was a call for the transformation of the
university's curriculum, culture and faculty, which many blacks felt
being alienating and reflecting a Eurocentric heritage. The campaign
for the statue's removal received global attention and led to a wider
movement to "decolonize" education across South Africa. In
2015, students at Cape Town university took down the statue. Five
years later Rhodes Must Fall arrives in Oxford University where more
than a thousand demonstrators gathered outside the university to call
for the removal of Cecil Rhodes statue in the campus has it is
considered an imposition to the commemoration of Rhodes colonial
legacy rather than a critical engagement with it.
Will the removal of
Oxford's Cecil Rhodes statue bring out into the open the university's
institutional racism and have direct impact on Oxford's
decolonization of education?
