Rhodes Statue Beheaded in South African Anti-Colonialism Protest

(Bloomberg) -- A statue of a 19th-century imperialist that stands in a memorial park on the slopes of Cape Town’s iconic Table Mountain has been decapitated, one of a series of attacks that have been mounted across several countries on symbols of colonial-era rule.

The statue of Cecil John Rhodes appeared to have been beheaded using an angle grinder, according to South African National Parks, which has filed a vandalism case with the police.

Rhodes made a fortune exploiting Black laborers in South Africa’s diamond mines and served as prime minister of Britain’s Cape Colony, now known as the Western Cape province. He established the country’s first exclusively Black reserve, and in 1893 remarked that 90% of Black people “will have to spend their lives in manual labor and the sooner that is brought home to them, the better.”

The University of Cape Town removed another statue of Rhodes from its main campus in 2015 after a series of student protests, while several other colonial and apartheid-era symbols were also taken down.

While demonstrations have abated over the past few years, the May 25 killing of African-American George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer has given renewed impetus to a push by activists for Africa to do more to confront racism and the legacy of colonial rule.

African government have shown a lack of political will to pull down monuments commemorating colonial figures and have failed to educate their citizens about their own continent, said Obadele Kambon, a senior research fellow at the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies.

These statues send a message that “your own people haven’t done anything worthy,” he said.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is one nation on the continent where colonial-era leaders remain widely commemorated. Monuments dedicated to Frederick Lugard, the British administrator who created the modern Nigeria, are dotted around the country, and many streets and districts bear the names of pre-independence rulers.

‘Low Priority’

Addressing colonialism’s legacy remains a low priority for many Africans, who remain oppressed and confront a daily struggle to survive, said Obi Nwakanma, a professor of African Studies at Central Florida University in Orlando.

“Africans themselves have been beaten down by the post-colonial condition and are hobbled in their response by a deeply phenomenal existential crisis,” he said in a phone interview. “There is despair, and there is a crisis of values so desperate that a younger generation of Africans are rudderless.”

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