Tear It Down
Colonial Aphasia and Racism Perpetuated in
Monumental Material Memorality
Photo made by author, Amsterdam April 2018.
Kat Rogers 11259841
Master Thesis: European Studies (Identity and Integration) First Reader: Dr. Chiara de Cesari
Second Reader: Dr. P.W. Zuidhof Date of Completion: 28 June 2018
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction………..……4
Theoretical Framework 1.1 Articulating Race and Racism………8
1.2 Statues as Contested Sites of Material Memory………...12
1.3 Colonial Aphasia and Memory……….15
Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford UK 2.1 Rhodes and Colonial History………19
2.2 Rhodes Must Fall………22
2.3 Critiques of the Movement………25
2.4 Movement Responses………...………30
2.5 Outcome………...…33
Confederate Monuments in New Orleans, USA 3.1 The Confederacy Memorialized in New Orleans………..…36
3.2 Take ‘Em Down NOLA and the Call for Removal……….…39
3.3 Pro-Statue Support………45
3.4 Removal of Statues and Ongoing Debate……….…………49
A Trans-Atlantic Relational Analysis of Racial Discourse 4.1 Revealing Racism in Debate Discourse……….………52
4.2 Language and Aphasia as Suppression of History………...………56
4.3 Colonial Reckoning – US and European Racism……….………59
Conclusion……….………64
“Society must accept some things as real; but he must always know that visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and achievement rest on things unseen…We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations.”
-James Baldwin “The Creative Process”
It was Franz Fanon who stated that the colonial world is “a world compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified, a world of statues…a world cocksure of itself, crushing with its stoniness the backbones of those scarred by the whip.”1 The continued presence of statues that commemorate, glorify and romanticize the colonial past do not merely herald a benign history. As colonialized Others, students of colonialism, anti-racist thinkers and activists seek to dismantle the enduring relics of these histories, it is not with the intent purpose of re-writing history, negating or obscuring the atrocities of the past. Rather, it is to address the trauma inflicted on colonized bodies today by the unceasing and unreconciled nature of imperial pasts and the very real implications the veneration of such histories has on those racialized in these spheres. While memorials and their meanings may ultimately be transient, susceptible to changing perceptions, they reinforce mythologies of emerging power structures, support claims of legitimacy and power, and can act as “scaffolding for…an attempt at control.”2
It is in the presence of these statues that narratives of imperial nostalgia persist, and where the subtleties of racism find their foothold. As such, this thesis is written with the intent purpose of looking at two specific instances of contested statues and their role in the perpetuation of the aphasiac nature of colonial and racist histories in Europe and the United States. This case study will analyze the debates surrounding the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue at Oriel College Oxford, as well as the removal of Confederate statues in New Orleans, Louisiana. While some emphasis will be placed on the historical importance of these statues, the reasons behind their erection, and their physical presence in their respective home countries, the primary focus of this thesis is to look at the debates taking place around their removal. These case studies are conducted via desk research. Numerous opinion editorials, articles, and blog posts have been examined to produce an understanding of the opinions both for and against the removal of the contested statues. These primary sources will be analyzed with use of discourse analysis to reveal the ways in which recurring rhetorical devices connect to the theoretical insights of Stoler’s colonial aphasia3 and, in turn, perpetuate the continuity of racism. Background literature on the historical context of the statues has been referenced. The insistence that these statues must be removed, or must remain, reveals much about the 1 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963): 15.
2 Dacia Viejo-Rose, “Memorial functions: Intent, impact and the right to remember,” Memory Studies 4, no. 4 (2011), 469.
3 Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Times (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016).
difficulty of extrapolating and understanding colonial histories and the apparent perpetuity of racism in Western societies. By utilizing theories that articulate racism, colonial aphasia, and statues as sites of material memory, this thesis will synthesize the recurring themes of the debates around these statues to reveal the venomous effect of the failure to acknowledge and rectify colonial pasts on the racialized present. There are some methodological challenges in this approach. The United States and Britain have very different colonial histories. Where Britain oversaw a global empire, the United States was initially a colony and, after achieving independence on colonized stolen land, developed into a global imperial superpower in its own right. The groups that take issue with the presence of the statues of each case study do not represent the entirety of racialized others within each respective nation. Though the grievances that recur are important and insightful, what they articulate is the impact the presence of statues that glorify colonial and white supremacist histories have on the lived experience of those relegated to Otherness within these communities. While the enslaved and racialized Others have been present in the United States more or less from its genesis, the subjects of Britain’s imperial project are a much newer fixture within the nation. It is a common opinion, particularly among Europeans, that racism in America is unlike racism anywhere else. While the overt and violent nature of racism in the United States is certainly shocking, this thesis seeks to use a relational analysis of these two case studies to reveal the ways in which this argument not only implies that Europe has no racism to contend with, but that if racism does exist in Europe then it is of a less harmful or detrimental quality. Additionally, the comparative component of this thesis will address not only the continuities that exist in both the debates around contested statues and the public responses across the Atlantic, but will see these continuities as emblematic of the racism and colonial nostalgia that has permeated our current political climates and normative discourse.
As part and parcel of this methodology it is important to denote the limitations of my own perspective as a researcher on this topic. As a student of academia, but also as a white American that has never been on the receiving end of racialized oppression, of a lineage of colonial subjugation, my analysis of these primary sources and the larger conclusions I draw are very much done so from the perspective of an outsider. If anything, I am a beneficiary of systematic white privilege. Though I acknowledge this fully, it does not escape me that this poses limitations to my ability to fully comprehend the complaints of those who would seek to tear down the statues that reinforce mythologies of white supremacism and imperialism. In line with the concept of ‘engaged anthropology’ posited by Michael Herzfeld, which “allows
involvement to emerge from the academic pursuits that both led the scholar to that particular site or group and offer illumining insights into the dilemmas faced by informants,”4 I wish to perform a sort of engaged academia in which the critical objective of dismantling the superstructures of white supremacism and Western imperialism are at the heart of my research and analysis. What is especially missing from this thesis is contact with the movements themselves. Ideally, this engaged academia would have involved actual interaction with the movements of the case studies so as to provide them greater agency throughout my assessment. As much of this has been done via desk research, I have put together a narrative of the movements that was available to me from afar. This is important to note, as the genesis of these movements, the way they progress, organize, and work, is not exhaustively accounted for in this thesis. With more time and field research, I would have ideally pursued a more anthropological interactive form of research wherein I could come to know directly who has been behind these debates. As such, this academic work is talking around, rather than for or directly to, the people of the movements of these case studies. Though still able to provide an interesting analysis, it is important to acknowledge the limitations of this work.
Sometimes we fail to understand the dynamics of privilege, or to see clearly how deeply racialized Western societies have been constructed to be. We have to understand the systems that we seek to dismantle. This is tireless and tedious work, as the traces of power structures can permeate literally every sphere; our language, our cities, our stories, our art, our memories. There is no shortage of examples of the manifestations of how deeply entrenched racial discrimination is in Western societies. The discourse that centers on the removal of statues that emblemize figures of a colonial and racist past are certainly not the most explosive examples, but they are indeed reflective of larger structures and entrenched racialized thinking. Racism and white supremacy persist in the subtleties, the insidious representations the decidedly non-racist among us decide become benign with time while shushing the voices that repeatedly insist otherwise. It is this egregious internalized aphasia5 that keeps the lifeblood of oppressive ideologies oxygenated enough to surface unashamedly after a period that many referred to as “post-racial”. In fact, thinkers like Alana Lentin see post-racialism as being firmly set within the history of modern racism as a sort of discursive 4 Michael Herzfeld, “Engagement, Gentrification, and the Neoliberal Hijacking of History,” Current
Anthropology 51, no. S2 (October 2010), 265.
political loophole by which “the notion that we are post-racial is in fact the dominant mode in which racism finds discursive expression today across a variety of contexts.”6 The desire for multiculturalism to succeed, for tolerant (a problematic word in and of itself) liberalism to pacify the racial upset of earlier decades, has led many to be surprised by the sweeping populist rhetoric of the current political climates in the US, the UK, and Europe. It does not likely come as a surprise to those who found themselves still under the thumb of systemic racialized oppression in the UK and the US. It is the very fact that some of us are so surprised when others are not that stirs in me a curiosity to understand the ways in which racial inequality is reinforced in our societies, perhaps most interestingly in the often ignored banal examples of things like street signs, weathered monuments, and oft overlooked names on buildings.
White supremacy reveals itself in the discourses that take place around these subjects. Passions are stirred, without question, in the debate about what aspects of history ought to be judged by contemporary standards, about heroic accomplishments transcending historical transgressions. The very aphasiac mechanisms that permit the presence of these statues in the first place reveal themselves in this discourse. It is in these nooks and crannies that the racism and white supremacism that ever-changing political and social imaginings of how best to integrate the continually Othered into a racialized society struggle to touch. This is where it lives and persists, polyvalent in nature and easily exploited, inflamed to its full and undisguised expression with the coaxing of entertaining leaders and convenient lies. The horrors of history cannot be entirely relegated to the past. Our understandings of these histories inform our understandings, or misunderstandings, of the present. I see this as one of the critical hindrances to addressing racial inequalities in society at large. It is with this intention, to both come to understand a dynamic that reveals itself in particular case studies, and to tie this into more theoretical understandings of the dynamics of racial inequality in each respective country, that I set about writing this thesis.
6 Alana Lentin, “Post-race, post politics: the paradoxical rise of culture after multiculturalism,” Ethnic and
1.Theoretical Framework
1.1 Articulating Race and Racism
Racism is, without question, a word that most of us are familiar with. Perhaps we all even have a very particular idea about what it means to be racist, or can conceptualize what a racist individual might behave like in a particular context. We might even think we have a well-rounded idea of what “race” is, and how it has been used to institutionally and systemically foster division in global and local communities alike. Despite the prevalence of this word, it seems to be the case that there is not a concrete understanding of what it is to be racist, how racism manifests, and the pernicious nature of racialized thinking. As such, I will first provide an overview of what is meant by systemic racism, and the conceptual importance of understanding the polyvalent nature race and racisms have developed in both their discursive, material, and corporeal forms.
Race has, for the most part, been articulated as a tool of hierarchical classification that delineates biologically based differences between human beings. This form of classification not only produced racially inferior categories, but reinforced white supremacism as “inextricably interwoven with the global cultural expansion of Europe from the 15th century to the present.”7 This is to say that racial categorization was never intended merely to classify solely phenotypical differences, but rather to enforce notions of superiority and inferiority and promote the specific political project of colonialism. We can understand race as a concept that is “constantly adapting and readapting itself, chameleon-like to the changing political and social landscape.”8 Equally important is to see race as “central to political culture in a constitutive sense” in so far as it “plays a formative role in constructing images of societies that are easily transmittable…ordering and making sense of the problem caused by the observation of difference that has not diminished despite official denunciation.”9 Today, “race” is widely accepted to be a fallacy, a mere colonial construct that is not scientifically meaningful, but that continues to be a central ordering principle for modern western societies.10 This is because, even with the scientific invalidation of “race” as concept, it is 7 Mark Christian, “An African-Centered Perspective on White Supremacy,” Journal of Black Studies 33, no. 2 (November 2002): 181.
8 Alana Lentin, “Europe and the Silence about Race”, European Journal of Social Theory 11, no. 4 (2008): 491. 9 Ibid., 491.
tethered to the far more polyvalent and persistent concept of racism. Despite the unsubstantiated nature of “race” and its biological categorizations, racialized thinking and the hierarchical supremacism it fosters continues to leave its mark, and dangerously so. Racism manifests in myriad forms, including the institutional and societal discriminations, stereotypings, and injustices that are often seen as conceptually disassociated from their origins in the race projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries including, but not limited to, slavery, colonialism, eugenics, and genocide.11 Contrary to this understanding of racism as a product of ‘race’ as concept, Paul Gilroy understands ‘race’ as referring primarily to an “impersonal, discursive arrangement, the brutal result of the raciological ordering of the world, not its cause” and sees the term as directing attention “toward the manifold structures of a racial nomos –a legal, governmental and spatial order” that is distinctly “reviving the geopolitical habits of the old imperial system in discomforting ways.”12 He makes this particular distinction in order to deviate from the reading of ‘race’ as a “fatal, unchanging principle of political cultures that stretches unbroken and infinite into a future that is defined, just as the past was, precisely by the violent force of racial divisions.”13 This is to say that Gilroy does not want to see “race” as a fixed concept employed to understand divisions of the world, but rather understands it as a discursive tool that must be used referentially in order to discuss the racialized hierarchical thinking that has permitted the conceptual articulation of racisms through the construct of “race”. Regardless of whether we want to understand “race” as the product of or producer of racisms, what is absolutely essential is to understand the inextricable linking of these two concepts in order to nullify any inclinations we may have to consider “race” as a dead phrase, a historical relic or thinking that it no longer shapes our societies. It most certainly does.
Relegating racism to more historical naturalizing notions of the “fixity of racial difference has led to racist injustice, particularly in post-immigration societies, being overshadowed by the ‘new racism’: a culturally based discrimination often seen as less threatening than that based on biology.”14 This is to say that those of us who may still harbor the notion that racial thinking and racism are distinct to historical thinking of natural, biological arguments, are susceptible to failing to see the ways in which racism has developed, transformed, and 11 Ibid., 492.
12 Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 39. 13 Ibid., 38.
persisted in our modernist and “post-racial” societies. It becomes essential to understand racism in both its “frozen” and “motile” forms, as articulated by Alana Lentin. She sees this differentiation as important given the “dual move in which racism is both increasingly solidified – frozen, if you will, by reference to past events perceived as isolated – and, at the same time, more and more motile and, as a consequence, generalized to apply in a range of highly differentiated circumstances: polyvalent.”15 Frozen and motile conceptions of racism serve one another and fuel our inability to see and understand racisms “apparently continual drive” in so far as “freezing so called ‘real racism’ in historical time” permits “discrimination and abuse to continue polyvalently under the guise of purportedly post-racial arguments about cultural incompatibility, secularism versus religion, or sovereignty and security”, making racism debatable “not because the racisms of the past are called into question, but precisely because fixing the ‘real’ racism solely in historical events” makes the “continuities between racisms past and present” distinctly undecideable.16 It is not difficult to understand why there is so often debate about what can be considered racist. On the one hand, the polyvalent nature of motile racism creates a conceptual opening for white individuals to make claims of “reverse racism”, as if attempts to rectify institutional inequality is in some way equatable with the well established inequalities called into question. Furthermore, it creates the potential for demanding that claims of racism by racialized Others meet some set of ever changing, indistinct qualifiers; that you must have experienced x,y,z in order to be considered a legitimate victim of racism. Naturally, these qualifiers always seem to be articulated at the discretion of the distinctly non-racialized in society. Perhaps not dissimilarly, the cultural component to racism manifests differently from racism as a way as to delineate categorical “claims of national superiority or sociopolitical disqualification” amongst groups of individuals within a polity, where the attribution of certain “moral, intellectual, or social defects supposedly grounded in their ‘racial’ endowment…are inevitable.”17 Stolcke articulates ‘cultural fundamentalism’ as assuming a “set of symmetric counterconcepts, that of the foreigner, the stranger, the alien as opposed to the national, the citizen.”18 Important to this distinction is the way in which, via arguments of cultural incompatibility, systemic exclusion is enforced upon the racially Othered both outside of a set community (which 15 Alana Lentin, “Racism in public or public racism: doing anti-racism in ‘post-racial’ times,” Ethnic and
Racial Studies 39, no. 1 (2016): 35.
16 Ibid., 35.
17 Verena Stolcke, “Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe,” Current
Anthropology 36, no. 1 (February 1995), 7.
typically manifests in xenophobia and fear or demonization of the immigrant), and the racialized Others that are tasked with assimilating to and accepting the predominant cultures of the societies in which they find themselves. It is often with this notion of cultural incompatibility that the grievances of the racialized are dismissed or considered illegitimate, as the Other is seen as a relegated outsider to the culture they are critiquing.
While we do not want to conceptualize racism as distinct to a historical past, it is equally important to understand racial conception and racist expression as constitutively linked to the colonial condition19. As David Theo Goldberg articulates, “it is not that racism is reducible only to some narrow connection to colonial subjection and repression, ordering and governmentality”, but that it is indeed the case that “colonial outlooks, interests, dispositions and arrangements set the tone and terms, its frameworks for conceiving and thinking about, the horizons of possibility for engaging and distancing, exploiting and governing, admitting and administering those conceived as racially distinct and different – and relatedly for elevating and privileging those deemed racially to belong to the dominant”.20 In this way, “race” and racism are to be seen as indivisible from colonial paradigms. As such, racialized thinking and its colonial origins make it such that the persistence of racial thinking and the consequent manifestations of racism today are not to be conceptually disassociated from their historical origins. At the same time, it would be equally irresponsible to relegate racism entirely to a historic past. It is central to this thesis to understand racism and the racial as “predicated on the understanding that racial thinking and its resonances circulated by boat in the European voyages of discovery, imported into the impact zones of colonization and imperial expansion” in so far as “racial ordering, racist institutional arrangement and racial control were key instruments of colonial governmentality and control”.21 Racism and racialized thinking, in all its myriad forms and global expressions, can be seen as products of colonial exploits. The racism of the United States and the United Kingdom alike, though originating from very different histories, can be seen as part and parcel of an expansive ideology.
But let’s bring this down to earth a little bit. The ways in which racism manifests in our societies, while not always apparently to do with a colonial past, is to be understood as so 19 David Theo Goldberg, “Racial comparisons, relational racisms: some thoughts on method,” Ethnic and
Racial Studies 32, no. 7 (2009): 1273.
20 Ibid., 1273. 21 Ibid., 1275.
deeply engrained and systemic that it’s polyvalence renders recognition of structural racism difficult for many to grasp. Reni Eddo-Lodge expounds on structural racism as the “impenetrably white workplace culture…where anyone who falls outside of the culture must conform or face failure”, as the “silently raised eyebrows, the implicit biases, snap judgments made on perceptions of competency”, the sort of racism that has the “power to drastically impact people’s life chances” due not just to “personal prejudice, but the collective effects of bias.”22 We ought not interact with the discursive and political weight of these concepts without touching on the impact they have on the lived experienced of those Othered in racialized societies. First and foremost, this requires a willingness to make room for marginalized voices and to not merely hear, but to listen to their lived experiences in order to glean a greater understanding of the ways in which imperialism and racism continue to poison the well-spring, so to speak. In a desire to look at the structural racism of today, which can be understood as motile and difficult to grasp in its myriad manifestations and apparent indefinability, the reference to ‘race’, ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ throughout this text is to be understood as conceptually merging the polyvalent nature of racism as it exists in both covert and overt forms as indubitably linked to its colonial origins. As this is the case, the relevance of colonial memory and its contribution to racial oppression in contemporary times becomes apparent.
1.2 Statues as Contested Sites of Material Memory
In their literal form, statues stand to preserve aspects of glorified national narratives and frame, in their materiality, what is deserving of remembrance and commemoration. Statues and monuments can be seen as “sites of memory,” or “places where memory crystallizes and secretes itself” so as to affect “the way the past is selectively remembered from one generation to another.”23 Providing memories with a spatial dimension, statues and monuments are the way in which memories are literally built, preserved, and displayed.24 The production of collective memories renders a mythic national narrative that becomes “bounded by, and bonded with, particular places.”25 More than merely preserving an “objective record” 22 Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (London: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2018): 64-65.
23 Robyn Kimberley Autry, “The Monumental Reconstruction of Memory in South Africa: The Voortrekker Monument,” Theory, Culture & Society 29, no. 6 (2012): 147.
24 Robert Aldrich, Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005): 6. 25 Brian S. Osborne, “Constructing landscapes of power: the George Etienne Cartier monument, Montreal,”
of historical events and figures, these sites are and ought to be continually “reconstructed in the context of the present, and never disassociated from considerations of power.”26 We can take this to mean that the presence of particular statues reifies particular instances of national histories and narratives that align with endorsed and integral ideologies of the nation state. What is important in a nation’s memory is, somewhat obviously, reflective of what the nation takes pride in, what it considers to be reflective of an image of the nation as it seeks to see itself. In understanding monuments as focusing attention on specific places, figures, and events, we can understand them as vessels of nurtured and reinforced identifications of national-states in material and psychic terrains.27 Statues are then put in place to secure memories that serve the interests of particular groups and ideologies, and are emblematic of stories those particular groups and ideologies celebrate.28 They can be seen as “powerful narrative devices that create and transmit archetypal stories” that speak to “ritual remembrance in order to promote shared ways of thinking and feeling.”29 It was James E. Young who posited that time and memory “operate to irreconcilably disparate ends”, where memory is considered “recollective in its work, an operation that concentrates the past in the figurative space of the present moment.”30 In this way monuments and statues can be seen as erected with the intent of not only physically withstanding the ravages of time, but securing a memory in an everlasting, intemporal form.31 However, he notes that “in it’s linear progression, time drags old meaning into new contexts, estranging a monument’s memory from both past and present, holding past truths up to ridicule in the present moments.”32 Time “mocks the rigidity of monuments” and the presumption that their materiality will make a statue a “fixed star in the constellation of collective memory.”33 The histories, ideas, mythologies that monuments intend to reify are subject to changing times. As such, the purported truth of a historical moment they embody will always be subject to changing temporalities and the apparent permanence of such statues is, as Dacia Viejo-Rose notes, “a delusion.”34 While such sites of memory absolutely reinforce decided upon narratives, this 26 Ibid., 432.
27 Ibid., 433.
28 David Morgan, “Soldier Statues and Empty Pedestals: Public Memory in the Wake of the Confederacy,”
Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 14, no. 1 (2018): 154.
29 Ibid., 155.
30 James E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (Winter 1992), 294.
31 Ibid., 294. 32 Ibid., 294. 33 Ibid., 294.
obviously does not preclude the possibility for contestation of the legitimacy and appropriateness of the narratives such sites fortify.
Freud remarked upon the mnemic symbolic nature of monuments in so far as they “provoke the subject to pause in the real and immediate to contemplate the past and its consequences,” making monuments “inseparable from the spaces in which they are situated.”35 Furthermore, “personal reminiscence and public histories are intertwined with the subject’s meeting with mnemic symbols.”36 This is to say that the significance of statues and monuments do not lie solely with the histories they stand to emblemize, but with the dynamics of subjective interpretation, or the impact they have on those who are made to look upon them as fixed representations of a chosen histories. These sites are not just about the “subject of their representation, the figure depicted, but also about the subjects who encounter them in the everyday life of the city.”37 The meaningfulness of such sites is very much dependent upon the subjective interpretation and understanding of these sites as codifying particular narratives. When subjects take issue with the narrative put forth, or the glorification of particular representations of memorialized pasts, we can see statues as transcending representations of history as History. Rather, we can come to understand them as susceptible to public interpretation and rearticulation. We can take them to be material manifestations of histories that ought not to be considered as fixed, relegated distinctly to the past. Therefore, their significance and the narrative that they espouse and reinforce is also subject to contestation. More simply put, if the historical events and figures are up for reimagining and rearticulation, so too are the physical relics that emblemize those problematic historical narratives. As such, the contestation of the presentation of colonial histories makes very sensible the contestation of sites that contribute to this understanding of history. The “materiality of these public objects…consists largely of the way they secure a contested past or, for others, offer a way to reprove and emend that past by destroying or removing the statue.”38 When subjects, especially those who have been systematically silenced in the societies they find themselves in, voice issue with the representation of particular figures and histories, we ought to pay attention. It is not surprising that as racialized Others continue to press forward with efforts for actualized equality, glorified histories of oppression will come 35 Deborah Cherry, “Statues in the Square: Hauntings at the Heart of Empire”, Art History 29, no. 4
(September 2006): 684. 36 Ibid., 684.
37 Ibid., 684.
into question. The call to remove, or refigure, these sites, in themselves, speaks to the importance of material memory and the ways in which it codifies problematic and aphasiac narratives of colonial past.
1.3 Colonial Aphasia and Memory
Michael Rothberg notes that, in considering memory as multidirectional – as “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” – we are encouraged to see our relationship to the past as partially determining “who we are in the present, but never straightforwardly and directly, and never without unexpected or even unwanted consequences that bind us to those whom we consider other”.39 Approaching memory as a “malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions” permits for memory to “come into being through dialogical interactions with others; both the subjects and spaces of the public are open to continual reconstruction”.40 However, he also notes that “all articulations of memory are not equal; powerful social, political, and psychic forces articulate themselves in every act of remembrance”.41 This is to say that memory itself operates under power structures. While it may be the case that colonial memory has, historically and institutionally, been presented in sugarcoated narratives of glory, necessity, and benign historicism, it is not the case that it must remain as such. It is with this dynamic and multidirectional understanding of memory that we can call into question and engage with memories of colonial pasts, or rather, how we fail to engage with these memories.
Ann Stoler calls it colonial aphasia. David Andress calls it cultural dementia. Terminology aside, the struggle to reconcile and directly acknowledge the West’s history of colonialism and imperial domination as integral not just to the social structures of the West today, but as a contributing factor to our inability to address contemporary racism as a product of this past is critical. In seeing colonial aphasia as a “political disorder and a troubled psychic space,”42 a phrase that “emphasizes both the loss of access and active dissociation,” an “occlusion of 39 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2009): 12-13.
40 Ibid., 13. 41 Ibid., 18.
knowledge,”43 Stoler argues that contemporary injustice cannot merely be “folded into an originary colonial tale,” but rather that “specific and located histories of the present that retain the complexities and ambiguities of colonial entanglements” reveal that “history as an active voice is only partly about the past” - it is also about “how differential futures are distributed.”44 In seeing the articulation of colonial histories as aphasiac, she argues that “little of these histories has been or is actually forgotten: it may be displaced, occluded from view, or rendered inappropriate to pursue.”45 Furthermore, it denotes the difficulty to retrieve a “language that speaks to the disparate violence that [colonial histories] engendered” in so far as this permits us to understand these histories as neither forgotten nor absent from contemporary life.”46 David Andress articulates cultural dementia as taking the form of “forgetting, misremembering and mistaking the past.”47 While his simplistic definition does not articulate the active quality and nuanced development of Stoler’s aphasia, Andress primarily uses this rhetoric to denote the dissociation of our current political climate with a historical past as indicative of the “present confusion” and calls for a reconnection “with historical reality” so as to find “a new global role as cultures that embrace the realities of their long and complex pasts” to “refashion their heritage for the common good.”48 One can take this to mean that it is, not dissimilarly from Stoler’s arguments, a failure to extrapolate the significance of pasts as present as very much relevant to the political and social disruption of the West.
As such, we must assess the “resilient forms in which the material and psychic structures of colonial relations remain both vividly tactile to some in the present and, to others, events too easily relegated to the definitive past.”49 In plainer terms, we can understand this to mean that while some insist upon the presence of colonial past in the present, others insist that these histories do not persist. It is Stoler’s argument, and mine as well, that the colonial past and material glorifications of colonial memory cannot be “rendered mere vestiges” that “benignly remain,” and that we must see them as “part of the liveliness of racialized ascriptions and the
43 Ibid., 128. 44 Ibid., 128. 45 Ibid., 128. 46 Ibid., 128.
47 David Andress, Cultural Dementia: How the West has Lost its History, and Risks Losing Everything Else (Great Britain: CPI Group, Ltd., 2018): 1.
48 Ibid., 6.
often livid affective states tied to them.”50 As will be expounded upon in following chapters, the most obvious signifier of the persistence of colonial presence is the insistence that this is the case by racialized Others in Western spaces. In acknowledging these histories, they must become integral to our memory of colonial pasts, and understandings of colonial presence. In her assessment she calls upon Foucault to articulate how, in this state of aphasia, a “political (unreason) that splits and disperses colonial from contemporary categories and disassembles the features that make them part of similar governing logics” can help us to make sense of Fernando Coronil’s understanding of colonial projects as “predicated on dissociations that separate relational histories,” making “histories appear as History.”51 As such, there is structural violence in aphasia; the “forgetting” that is systemic in articulations of colonial history. Stoler sees forgetting as not a passive condition, but an active and achieved state, in which people “know and do not know not sequentially but at the very same time.”52 Perhaps it is this conceptual maneuvering that aids in the dismissal of racialized contestations of the presentation and memorializing of colonial pasts.53 The insidious nature of this aphasia has dangerous consequences in so far as it permits a recognition of a colonial, imperial past, whilst stripping it of its pernicious darkness and the continuity of its effect on colonized bodies and their ancestors.
As Paul Gilroy posits, understanding colonial histories as integral to the development of European nations is essential, in particular in regards to the ways in which “imperial mentalities were brought back home” and not distinctly relegated to the “distant terminal points for trading activity where race consciousness could grow – in the torrid zones of the world at the other end of the colonial chain.”54 As such, a “compensatory acknowledgement of Europe’s imperial crimes and the significance of its colonies as places of governmental innovation and experience”55 is necessary, though perhaps not sufficient, in effectively dealing with the West’s current racial injustices as perpetuated by colonial mismemory. It is this very difficulty to confront these histories that he sees as behind what he calls 50 Ibid., 170.
51 Ibid.,168. 52 Ibid., 150.
53 Recognition of colonial histories can, perhaps, be seen as the absolute bare minimum. With calls for reparations to former colonies and the ancestors of the slave trade, one could argue that a reticence to
acknowledge colonial atrocities is also very much tied to an unwillingness to redistribute the wealth acquired by empires during these periods. See Mark Christian, “An African-Centered Perspective on White Supremacy”,
Journal of Black Studies 33, no. 2 (November 2002): 193-195.
54 Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, 148. 55 Ibid., 148.
“postcolonial melancholia.” In turn, both evading the appropriate shame and acknowledgement of these histories and continuing to obscure colonial realities allows for the sort of nostalgia for imperial pasts and periods of rampant white domination that can be seen in politics as of late. Contestations of the normative presentation of colonial histories as distinctly of the past will hopefully help us to develop multidirectional memories that more aptly accommodate the marginalized recollections of colonial past and its present effects to fundamentally recalibrate the normative understandings of the West’s imperial pursuits and its ramifications through time. The material manifestations of imperial past not only reflect the importance of colonial memory in the contemporary structuring of society, but also perpetuate imperial mentality and the subjugation of colonized, racialized Others in the Western public sphere.
While this text will be focusing specifically on contested sites of memory in the United Kingdom and United States, statues that commemorate a colonial past are at the epicenter of debates about reconciling colonial histories across the globe. In South Africa, Australia, Canada and the Netherlands, statues are called into question for the memories and power structures they reinforce. Nowadays, the subjects who take issue with the presence of such depictions of the past still struggle to be seen as legitimate. But it is no mistake that sites of memory are being brought into ongoing conversations of persistent and systemic racism and its conceptual ties to colonial histories. The statues themselves provide a physical manifestation of colonial aphasia, by calling into the recollection of those subjects who look upon the statues a colonial history that produced very different lived experiences for the colonizers and the colonized, without permitting nuanced rearticulations of the impacts of those histories on contemporary lives and the ways in which these reinforced histories perpetuate the racialized thinking born of such colonial pasts. They represent a remembering and a forgetting, simultaneously. Less abstractly, some look upon statues and see genocidal and tyrannical oppressors remembered, and in their remembrance, revered, as serving an ideological narrative of the nation. In order to call into question these ideological narratives, which this thesis sees as essential, then it follows that we would also call into question the presence of commemorative depictions of the actors of those ideologies. In piggybacking off the debates that follow the contestation of the presence of such sites of material memory, much is revealed about the discursive recapitulations of occluded histories in the rhetorical devices employed by politicians and political bodies at present. This is to say that, much of
the thinking that contributes to the disagreement around the presence of these statues can be seen as indicative of larger ideological trends that are present in the racialized, white supremacist, aphasiac nature of political discourse in the UK and US, making the debates around statues a microcosm for the disagreements and misunderstandings that underpin larger societal ills that must be reconciled.
2. Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford UK
2.1 Rhodes and Colonial History
Britain has arguably been phenomenally successful in its imperialist exploits. It is the opinion of many that Britain has struggled to acknowledge and reconcile its colonial history, both with former colonies and with the ancestors of the colonized who now call the UK their home. One of the most notable figures of British imperialism is Cecil Rhodes. In order to better understand the emotional and heated nature of the debates that have taken place around his commemorative statue at Oxford University, his imperial aspirations are most important. Though born in the England, Rhodes moved to South Africa as a teenager in 1871 and spent the next three decades playing a critical role in the industrial modernization and racial segregation of South Africa.56 As a leader in business and politics, Rhodes had a hand in building the DeBeers Consolidated Mining company, which to this day produces and sells most of the world’s diamonds. Additionally, he developed several gold-mining companies, 56 William Kelleher Storey, “Cecil Rhodes and the Making of a Sociotechnical Imaginary for South Africa,” in
Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, ed. Sheila Jasanoff &
contributed to agricultural modernization, and the extension of railroads and telegraph lines in the country.57 The British South Africa Company, one of Rhode’s businesses, founded the settler colony of Rhodesia, now known as the independent Zimbabwe.58 He was a sitting member of the Cape Colony’s parliament from 1880 until his death in 1902 and served as the Cape’s prime minster from 1890 to 1895, affording him the opportunity to play a significant role in the country’s economic and social development.59 His penchant for “pressing monopoly capitalism and racial discrimination” paved the way for “wrenching social and environmental changes” in the region.60 His legacy in South African industrial production, business and politics was felt until the end of apartheid.61 As a result of his vision for South Africa, “diamonds and gold were gotten out of the ground, processed and sold, by means of increasingly technical methods”, “mines were amalgamated”, Africans were segregated and exploited”, a “new, unified, racist state was created” where “migration, production, and destruction intensified” while “segregation and surveillance became more widespread.”62 Rhodes was not only the visionary behind such projects, but profited immensely, later bequeathing his acquired fortune to the cause of Anglo-Saxon unity.63 It was, in fact, his belief that the Englishman embodied the most superior example of the human specimen and as such his rule would be of benefit to the world.64 He saw it as his God given task to expand the Empire, not merely for the good of the empire, but for the good of the world at large. He articulated his imperial vision at Oxford in 1877 in writing:
“I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimen of human being, what an alteration there would be in them if they
57 Ibid. 34 58 Ibid. 34 59 Ibid. 34 60 Ibid. 34 61 Ibid. 54 62 Ibid. 54 63 Ibid. 54
64 “Cecil John Rhodes,” South African History Online, last updated March 24 2017,
were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence…if there be a God, I think that what he would like me to do is paint as much of the map of Africa British Red as possible…”65
Though he was certainly considered a visionary by many, there were also dissident voices who were appalled by the actions of Rhodes and his British South Africa Company. In 1902 after his death the Guardian painted Rhodes in his obituary as an “unscrupulous” and “evil” man who “did more than any other Englishman of his time to lower the reputation and to compromise the future of empire.”66 Seen by many as the “Father of Apartheid” or the “Hitler of South Africa,”67 his exploits in South Africa are remembered in regards to both the legacy of their perceived success for the British imperial project and the negative traces of such exploits on the South Africans who were made to live in the society he designed.
Why is Rhodes commemorated at Oriel College at Oxford? It is much to do with the profits he acquired in his business and political projects on behalf of the British empire. Rhodes was a student of Oxford and, in his will, left £100,000 to the College.68 The Rhodes Building, built in 1911,69 is where a large statue of Cecil Rhodes is located, looking down upon Oxfords students. Architecturally, the building is “adorned with his statue in pride of place… of immense historical importance” and “part of a listed building as a matter of law”, insinuating the statue of Rhodes is “integral to the design of the building.”70 The choice to remember Rhodes after his financial contributions to the University and his important, though contested, role in British imperial history, and the seeming fixity of his material commemoration have not stopped the bourgeoning Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) movement from making its way from South Africa’s university campus to Oxford.
65 Ibid.
66 Chi Chi Shi, “The statue of Cecil Rhodes, like that of Saddam, must fall,” The Times, December 26 2015,
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-statue-of-cecil-rhodes-like-that-of-saddam-must-fall-sqtptnrrvbl. 67 Kevin Rawlinson, “Cecil Rhodes statue to remain at Oxford after ‘overwhelming support’,” The Guardian, January 29 2016,
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jan/28/cecil-rhodes-statue-will-not-be-removed--oxford-university.
68 Stephanie Jenkins, “Oxford Inscriptions: Cecil Rhodes statue on Rhodes Building,” copywrite 2013, http://www.oxfordhistory.org.uk/streets/inscriptions/central/rhodes_oriel.html.
69 Ibid.
70 Howard Brassford, “Cecil Rhodes’s statue: removal would offend its architectural and historic integrity,”
The Times, January 7 2016, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cecil-rhodess-statue-removal-would-offend-its-architectural-and-historic-integrity-z5jxz95vhqs.
2.2 Rhodes Must Fall
RMFO Protest at Oxford Oriel College
Photo of Rhodes Must Fall protest in Cape Town South Africa Rhodes Must Fall Oxford standing beneath statue of Cecil Rhodes
The Rhodes Must Fall movement began at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Rhodes’ presence in post-apartheid South Africa remained prolific, with “countless statues, highways, buildings, and for a time, even a posh Cape Town nightclub” donning his name.71 In March of 2015 a student led movement to tear down the statue began. The U.C.T students demanded the destruction or removal of his statue as a symbolic means of addressing of a “prevalent feeling and experience of exclusion among many black students in universities across the country, even where they are a numerical majority.”72 Student leader Chumani Maxwele ignited the protest to remove the statue by throwing feces at the statue, initiating a 71 Eusebius McKaiser, “South Africa’s Odious Monument to Cecil John Rhodes,” The New York Times, March 26 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/27/opinion/eusebius-mckaiser-south-africas-odious-monument-cecil-john-rhodes.html.
temporary removal that was followed by protests, sit-ins and meetings.73 The protest was ultimately successful, with the statue being removed in April 2015. Taking inspiration from the movement in South Africa, the student-led Rhodes Must Fall movement, which picked up speed at Oxford in 2015, similarly aimed to engage with Britain’s imperial past more openly and honestly, stating that it is “not only or mainly concerned with statues”, but is rather making a wider point: “that racism and colonialism are deeply embedded in Britain’s history” in so far as British “economic development as a global mercantile power and the manpower that fuelled the industrial revolution were built on the enslavement of Africans, working in Jamaica’s sugar plantations, Virginia’s tobacco fields (a crown colony from 1624, and where there were 300,000 slaves by the 1750s), and the cotton plantations of the Deep South whose raw materials helped make Lancashire wealthy.”74 Despite their focus on Cecil Rhodes as “an appalling individual racist” and his statue, they see the erection of his statue and others like it as saying something about society at large, as emblematic of a much larger and insidious problem. RMF sees the “Magna Carta-based arguments for the expansion of African enslavement” as being deliberately “brushed out of the 17th century story of the ‘glorious revolution’” of Britain’s prominent role in expanding the slave trade, in addition to the occlusion of the continued legality of colour-based racism until the 1960s” as “carefully obscured by a focus instead on the antebellum American South and the 1960s Civil Rights movement”75 as intrinsic to the continued racialization of students in the academy and in Britain at large. To honor and commemorate a figure such as Cecil Rhodes leaves viewers of the statue to assume the “person so represented must have done something worthy, something that distils for posterity values that can stand the test of time.”76 It is this particular aphasiac remembrance of Rhodes as an individual, and of British colonial history at large, that leads the RMF movement to insist “both that racial inequality has deeper historical or structural roots in Britain and that Cecil Rhodes is reasonably viewed (even by defenders of his continued representation in British statuary) as a totemic symbol and apex – or, rather, nadir – of the moral and economic superiority” they see normatively instrumentalized to justify the
73 Jenna Etheridge, “Permanent removal of UCT Rhodes Statue gets green light,” News24, October 31 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/27/opinion/eusebius-mckaiser-south-africas-odious-monument-cecil-john-rhodes.html
74 Lester Holloway, “#RhodesMustFall: A Movement for Historical and Contemporary Recognition of Racial Injustice (part 1),” Runnymede Trust, December 24 2015, https://www.runnymedetrust.org/blog/rhodesmustfall-a-movement-for-historical-and-contemporary-recognition-of-racial-injustice-part-1.
75 Ibid. 76 Ibid.
inequalities such ideologies and projects produced.77 Furthermore, they elucidate that the movement is not just about historical accuracy or reconceptualizing the past, but perhaps more importantly is a movement about understanding histories “on-going effects on Black and minority ethnic people living in Britain today” and the “real harm these statues perpetuate on BME people” in so far as these statues are a “reminder of the personal experience of injustice and the denial of human rights perpetrated by those rulers.”78 In order to better explain the persistent impact of these histories, the RMF movement claims its critics fail to understand the “moral badness of racism: specifically its denial of equal moral worth, or humanity, to all non-white people, and the consequent group-based nature of the harm.”79 They note that the importance of not just understanding history, but “how that history speaks to us for the kind of society and values we seek to affirm today and in the future” is compounded by the lack of black representatives at Oxford College, as well as all of Britain and South Africa’s major institutions, and finds it curious that those embedded in such institutions would object to more accurate representations of history, but perhaps more importantly to making those institutions “less filled with the cultural detritus of empire and so less stifling for non-white students, employees or customers.”80 They see this as being critical not only for the well-being of BME students, but also for white Britons, who “need far better understanding of the diversity of their own country, and also greater ability to navigate a more interconnected world.”81
The Oxford Student Union’s race equality campaign conducted a survey in 2014 that found that 59% of black and minority students felt uncomfortable or unwelcome on account of their race or ethnicity at Oxford, with 81% stating they felt race and ethnicity were not adequately discussed at the university and 51% having experienced a racial incident they felt was unacceptable and alienating. Only 13% said they would feel comfortable discussing an issue of race with their college administration.82
77 Ibid.
78 Lester Holloway, “Part II on #RhodesMustFall: Understanding and responding to the current effects of historic injustice,” Runnymede Trust, December 24 2015, https://www.runnymedetrust.org/blog/part-ii-on-rhodesmustfall-understanding-and-responding-to-the-current-effects-of-historic-injustice.
79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid.
82 Yussef Robinson, “Oxford’s Cecil Rhodes statue must fall – it stands in the way of inclusivity,” The
Guardian, January 19 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/19/rhodes-fall-oxford-university-inclusivity-black-students.
In 2016 a survey of roughly 5% of the student body conducted by Cherwell, Oxford’s independent student newspaper, found that 37% of students expressed a desire for Oriel to remove the statue of Rhodes, with 54% thinking the statue should remain, and 9% who were unsure.83 Among students who identified with a BAME group, 48% said they thought the statue should be removed, with 45% disagreeing and 7% unsure. At 51% a majority of BAME students felt the removal of the statue would not affect their personal experience at the university.84 However, among the RMF students 70% said that BAME people are excluded from the curriculum, 77% said Oxford is not doing enough to “decolonize” the university.85 Of the students who were not part of the RMF movement, 37% felt BAME people were excluded from curriculum and 41% that Oxford is not doing enough to “decolonize” the university.86 While it is clear that among BAME students there is far greater consensus, disagreement about the movement and its grievances are not exclusive to the student body.
2.3 Critiques of the Movement
Perhaps not unsurprisingly, as soon as the RMF movement began at Oxford, a great deal of opinions about Cecil Rhodes, the statue, and history itself were proffered. What follows will be a summation of the most ardently articulated complaints about the movement. The first voices of discontent arose within the University itself. The university’s chancellor, Chris Patten, told students that if they could not embrace freedom of thought, they ought to “think about being educated elsewhere.”87 Classicist Mary Beard told the students: “the battle isn’t won by taking the statue away and pretending those people didn’t exist,”88 and that the protest was silly; the students “were trying to have it both ways”89 and that to “whitewash Rhodes
83 Nadia Khomami, “Over one third of Oxford students want Cecil Rhodes statue removed,” The Guardian, January 15 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jan/15/oxford-students-cecil-rhodes-statue-removed.
84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid.
87 Rawlinson, “Cecil Rhodes statue to remain.” 88 Ibid.
89 David Andress, Cultural Dementia: How the West has Lost its History, and Risks Losing Everything Else (Great Britain: CPI Group, Ltd., 2018): 69
out of history, but go on using his cash” risked starting a “great statue cull” that would prove to be a “self-evident folly.”90 The Rhodes Trust responded to the movement by stating the following: “While it does not excuse his role in history, Cecil Rhodes’s wealth was left in his will to create educational opportunities that have benefited South Africans of all races, as well as those of many other nationalities. The Rhodes Scholarships have had a remarkably positive effect, educating 8,000 scholars at Oxford, a substantial number of whom are occupied at the forefront of human rights work and are key advocates for expanded social justice.”91
In an article for The Times, Howard Brassford chose to focus on the structural integrity of the building, stating that “Rhode’s statue is important to a statutorily protected English asset” and that removing the statue “would affect the architectural, structural and historic importance of an important English building.”92 Despite the “multiple interpretations” of the history glorified by the building and statue, he states plainly that “no one owns the past” and that the Rhodes statue should remain.93
RW Johnson, a historian and author who is an alumni to the university, sees the students who seek to take down the Rhodes statue as having “no respect for history” and compared the students of the RMF movement to Al-Qaeda and ISIS, saying the following to the Daily
Telegraph: “I am comparing what the [RMF] movement are doing with what Al-Qaeda and
ISIS are doing in places like Mali when destroying statues. This is a terrible embolism. They are destroying historical artifacts and defacing them. I think you have got to respect history. In addition, there are many people in history that are far worse than Rhodes.”94 He continued to state that “Oriel College must think hard about asking old boys to help them if they are 90 Ibid., 69.
91 Andre Rhoden-Paul, “Oxford Uni must decolonise its campus and curriculum, say students,” The Guardian, June 18 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/18/oxford-uni-must-decolonise-its-campus-and-curriculum-say-students.
92 Brassford, “removal would offend.” 93 Ibid.
94 Javier Espinoza, “’Rhodesgate’: Campaign to remove Rhodes statue ‘is like Isil’s destruction of antiques’, says Oxford don,” The Telegraph, December 22 2015,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/12064936/Rhodesgate-Campaign-to-remove-Rhodes-statue-is-like-Isils-destruction-of-antiques-says-Oxford-don.html.
then going to disgrace them” and that “this sends the wrong lessons to other potential donors and I would think might discourage them from making donations,” adding that it would be his personal choice to “leave history as it is”, suggesting that perhaps adding a statue of Nelson Mandela might help to “reflect the general plurality of things.”95
Former Prime Minister of Australia Tony Abbott, a Rhodes scholar, voiced his opinion on the issue in an email to The Independent, stating “the students of Oriel should be clear-eyed about Rhodes’s faults and failings but proud of his achievements.”96 He concedes that “racism is a dreadful evil but we all know that now,” and that it is a “pity that Rhodes was, in many respects, a man of his times.” As such, “we can lament that he failed to oppose unjust features of his society while still celebrating the genius that led to the creation of the Rhodes scholarships” as “Rhodes was not a campaigner against racism but many of the scholars who are his legacy have been.” He added that “Oxford would damage its standing as a great university if it were to substitute moral vanity for fair-minded enquiry,” that its “mission is not to reflect fashion but to seek truth and that means striving to understand before rushing to judge.” Furthermore, “the university and its students should prefer improving today’s orthodoxies to imposing them on our forebears.”
Elliot Gerson, the American secretary of the Rhodes Trust who administers the scholarship program, stated that he would be disappointed if the statue were to be removed, and that, “like many historical figures, Rhodes did both good and bad, and things look different when today’s standards are applied.”97 He also added, “our values today are opposed to the views of the world held by Rhodes, and much of his generation, but his bequest is forever deserving of respect.”
In an article writing for The Telegraph, Harry Mount referred to the students of RMF as “little emperors” that are “frozen in a permanent state of supersensitivity,” “overindulged as 95 Ibid.
96 Richard Garner, “Oxford University risks ‘damaging its standing’ if it pulls down Cecil Rhodes statue, warns Tony Abbot,” Independent, December 23 2015, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education- news/oxford-university-risks-damaging-its-standing-if-is-pulls-down-cecil-rhodes-statue-warns-tony-abbott-a6784536.html.
97 Stephen Castle, “Debate Over Cecil Rhodes Statue at Oxford Gains Steam,” The New York Times, December 24 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/25/world/europe/cecil-rhodes-statue-oxford.html.
the result of the child-centered education of past decades.”98 He argued that the university ought not to coddle the sensitive feelings of the students, stating that “every time the authorities are accused of racism, they bend over backwards to soothe the offended egos of the little, tinpot dictators – rather than telling them that they, the teachers, are there to tell the students what to do; and not the other way around.”
Perhaps the most comprehensive critical response to the RMF movement came from Nigel Biggar, a professor of theology at Oxford, in a piece he penned for Standpoint magazine.99 In it, he chose to focus specifically on the student’s grievances with Cecil Rhodes as a historical figure. He sees the primary arguments against publicly commemorating Rhodes as being to do with several distinct points: that Rhodes held black Africans in contempt as racially inferior, that he sought to abolish voting rights in the Cape Colony, that he supported racial segregation and laid the foundations of the policy of apartheid, that he promoted forced labour and reduced miners in his diamond mines to slaves, that he invaded and stole the ancestral lands of the Ndebele, and that he promoted genocide against Africans. He proceeds to argue against each accusation against Rhodes from his historical interpretation. This is mainly done by stating that Rhodes did indeed recognize the humanity of Africans, that he was concerned about their welfare, and that his exploits sought equity despite what would, today, be considered the problematic imperial ideology underpinning such exploits. However, he does not see it as reasonable to hold Cecil Rhodes to task for his imperial ideologies, as they were normative for the time. As has been written above, Biggar is not the only one to state that it is invalid to hold Rhodes as a historical figure to contemporary standards of human decency. He continues that the claims of the RMF fail to have an understanding of the nuanced and complex history of Rhodes’s imperial projects in southern Africa. He takes it a step further by not just defending Rhodes, but defending the British empire at large, stating that “RMF is seriously wrong about Rhodes, and so about the history of the British empire in
98 Harry Mount, “It’s time to say No to our pampered student emperors,” The Telegraph, December 29 2015,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/12073349/Its-time-to-say-No-to-our-pampered-student-emperors.html.
99 Nigel Biggar, “Rhodes, Race, And The Abuse Of History,” Standpoint Magazine, March 2016,
South Africa”, adding that he finds it incorrect to see imperialism and colonialism as “synonymous with racist contempt and the grave violation of human rights”, and equally incorrect to see “Rhodes, being an avowed imperialist” as “guilty of both.” He concludes that “racism is not what some people tell us it is, that empire isn’t invariably ‘imperialist’, and that its ‘victims’ aren’t always – simply – victims.” Biggar’s opinions of the RMF movement and its perspective on colonial histories is consistent with arguments he has made before. Biggar heads the five year interdisciplinary project called Ethics and Empire run through the university’s McDonald Centre.100 The project seeks to “test the ethical critiques of empire against the historical facts of empire” so as to develop a “Christian ethic of empire.”101 The project has been publicly denounced as employing a “balance sheet” approach to empire “rooted in the self-serving justifications of imperial administrators, attempting to balance out the violence committed in the name of empire with its supposed benefits.”102 Biggar bas been considered to be a “long-time apologist for colonialism” who has previously articulated his belief that there is no need to “feel guilty about [Britain’s] colonial history.”103 His views about Britain’s colonial past are certainly reflected in his articulation of the grievances of the students in the RMF movement, though they arguably only address one aspect of their complaints – Cecil Rhodes himself.
Other, less inflammatory concerns about the movement have also been expressed. Will Hutton wrote for the Guardian that “atonement must be made when it is necessary even while the complexities and truths of history are acknowledged, and the substance of the criticism addressed,” but that Rhodes’s statue is “less the issue than ongoing prejudice,” that “black and minority ethnic communities are too under-represented at our universities and in leadership roles more generally; our curricula and culture need to be reconstructed.”104 This leads him to his conclusion that “symbols matter – but the real targets matter more.”105 Jean-100 Richard Adams, “Oxford University accused of backing apologists of British colonialism,” December 22 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/dec/22/oxford-university-accused-of-backing-apologists-of-british-colonialism.
101 Ibid. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid.
104 Will Hutton, “Cecil Rhodes was a racist, but you can’t readily expunge him from history,” December 20 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/20/atonement-for-the-past-not-censorship-of-history.
